Sonic Universe #37 (April 2012)

Jamal Peppers/Jim Amash/Matt Herms cover: a rather impressive cover design based NOT on a well-known comic book but on a well-known painting by Norman Rockwell. It’s one of a series of four, in fact, illustrating Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. “Freedom From Want,” in this case, though you wouldn’t know it from this cover. Paul Kaminski actually drops this spoiler in his Sonic Spin column. Here’s the real deal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_from_Want_%28painting%29 . The only turkey on the comic cover, however, is Robotnik himself. For the rest, it’s totally bogus WRT the story inside. Sonic, Tails and Bunnie don’t even appear in this issue, and nobody’s going after Snively except the fat man himself.

“Scrambled Part 1: The Man In Charge”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Jamal Peppers; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Steve Downer; Lettering: Jack Morelli; Assistant Editor: Vince Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; The Droid You’re Looking For: Mike Pellerito; SEGA Licensing Reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

The Death Egg goes on high alert. Unfortunately, the Main Egg is the last to hear about it. So what’s the first thing he does when he finds himself locked out of the command system? He sends out for two comic minions: a pair of droids named Orbot and Cubot. The former is a sphere with what I take to be a British accent a la C-3PO or Wheatley from Portal 2. The latter is a cube whose speech is more down home right down to the Hank Hill “I tell you whut” phrase he drops later on. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about those two.

We then get a page of Snively the Blabbing Villain declaiming his bald head off for the benefit of the readers and to give himself something to say out loud other than the voice override commands he uses to get past the security lock-down. Villains; they love to hear themselves talk.

Meanwhile, Eggman is watching the cc: of a video where Snively laments the demise of the Doc at the hands of Sonic and the disbanding of the Dark Legion units. That’s not going to be good for business. So he gets the Egg-SWATs scrambling to look for Snively. He’s apprehended in the docking bay, but in the process of being delivered to the Doc he does that “Get ready for the surprise!” number from “Total Recall” and goes to pieces. So do a number of other decoy Sniveleys around the ship. “Well played, little man,” the Doc concedes. The next order of business is to get his evil ducks back in a row by calling a meeting of the Legion Grand Masters.

We then get 4 pages of the assembling of the Injustice Friends. Have your pencils and scorecards handy:

Beauregard Rabbot (Great Desert) gets his calling while drafting a speech to the rest of his people.

Drago Wolf and Razorclaw (Great Rainforest) are getting along about as well as you’d expect from a canine and a feline.

Lord Hood (Mercia) wants to celebrate Eggman’s demise by torturing some of the locals.

Diesel (Efrikan Plains) is riding his efrickin’ cycle and planning on sacking a village.

Bill Playtpus (Downunda) is drafting an emancipation proclamation for the troops and looking forward to coming out of the closet as a Freedom Fighter.

Raiju Clan Bride Conquering Storm (Dragon Kingdom) is busy kicking the bat butt of a Yagyu ninja so she may not have even gotten the memo Snively sent.

Akhlut (Frozen North Sea) is rousing his rabble but unlike Diesel doesn’t seem to have any objective in mind.

Hugo Brass (Eurish) just sits at a desk and looks badass.

The Foreman (somewhere underground) works on his imitation of The Underminer from the last scene of “The Incredibles.” You know your leadership skills need improving if you disappear and your team doesn’t even notice.

And so, at the Legion of Doom … sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Lien-Da (Egg HQ) wonders what kind of chicken outfit the Eggman is running when the Big Guy shows up on cue. When Drago asks what’s going on here, Fatso starts by reminding them that he can blow any one of them to kibble thanks to the explosive implants they all have. To quote Kagome: “Sit, boy!”

As Orb and Cube serve tea and cakes, Eggman seems to think that the Grand Masters shouldn’t have simply taken Snively’s word for it concerning the big guy’s demise. Akhlut raises the point that Snively’s going rogue calls Eggy’s own executive skills into question; Eggman’s response is basically “I can hurt you.”

Remember the comic cover art? Well, the truth is that Eggman summoned the Grand Masters to tell them to be on the lookout for that Chaos Emerald that went missing after he screwed up the cosmic continuity. He also chooses the moment to roll out his line of Metals: Mecha Sally paired with Metal Sonic, plus Metal Tails and Metal Knuckles. Eggy then dismisses the Grand Masters, puts Lien-Da in charge, and takes off after Snively in … the WORST gimmick I’ve ever seen in this comic, bar none!

HEAD: Hey, kids! Here’s a neat science experiment you can try at home. You’ll need:

1 cardboard tube from a roll of paper towels

1 12-inch ruler, either wooden or plastic

1 roll of duct tape

Using the duct tape, tape the ruler to one end of the cardboard tube. Make sure the ruler is flat against the opening of the cardboard tube. Now try flying it like a model airplane. Pretty pathetic, right?

Remember from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where the Ministry of Magic suggested that magical folk come up with security questions so they can’t be impersonated by Death Eaters? Arthur Weasley’s question was: How do Muggle aircraft stay up in the air? The really short answer to that one is: lift and acceleration.

The Egg’stache Flyer may have solved the acceleration side of the problem using whatever power source it’s using. But it’s what up front that counts against the Flyer. The front end is basically a huge flat metal wall. I’m not an engineer, but I think the technical term for this is “wind resistance.” Add to that the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any way to maneuver the craft: no wings, no tail, not even any steering thrusters that I can see. What you have here is a tricked-out bottle rocket with all the aerodynamics of a pair of eyeglasses falling into a toilet bowl. At least when you watch a Hayao Miyazaki movie with a lot of fantastic aircraft (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rossa, Laputa: Castle in the Sky), those things at least LOOK like they can fly! The Egg’stache Flyer might look impressive in the emptiness of outer space, but in any kind of atmosphere it just looks ridiculous.

OK, let’s talk about something else. Since this is a comic book, it’s no surprise that the story adheres to one of the pillars of popular culture: the necessity of having two comedy sidekicks. From Star Wars’s C-3PO and R2-D2 to Lumiere and Cogsworth in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” to BeBop and Rock Steady in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you almost can’t tell a story without a pair of minions. In the Sonic continuity alone we’ve had Scratch and Grounder and Beko and Deko and now Orbot and Cubot have joined the fraternity. Their comedic skills are about what you’d expect, though it’s the chicken-fried Cubot who does more heavy lifting than Orbot. It’s pretty obvious who’s the straight man here. And once again we learn that in writing comic books the quickest way to give someone character development is to endow them with a cheesy accent, in this case processed American.

It’s surprising how many villains this continuity has spawned over the years, especially when you get them all in the same room. They’re a pretty mixed bag; I didn’t expect some of them, like Akhlut and The Foreman, to show up again. And they really serve no purpose here except to be ordered to appear, sit in on an Eggman rant, and then get summarily dismissed. If it weren’t for Snively’s already having sent them an e-mail stating that Robotnik had bit the big one he could have done this electronically as well.

Which brings us to Snively. This has been a long time coming. Unfortunately, it’s also been done. It wasn’t that long ago (about 3 years real time) since Snively greased the way for the Iron Dominion to waltz in and take things over during Eggy’s episode. And after that fell through, Snively was back in the fold, if only because Robotnik believes in keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. But Snively can only take so much abuse until the cycle repeats.

OK, Snively makes a good foil, the eternal second-in-command who’ll never get a shot. But really, there has to be a limit as to how many heel/face turns a character can do before Editorial says “Enough, already!” and kills off the character because he’s simply run out of gas. I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen to Fiona. She’s turned more than once, and if Editorial is determined to dial up Scourge’s badness, putting Fiona in Scourge’s crosshairs works just fine.

I seem to have gone off on a Scourge tangent there. It’s understandable, since none of the villains who showed up in THIS story are anywhere near as interesting. Where a villain DOES have a somewhat interesting back story (Baron Beauregard and his relations with Bunnie, Conquering Storm and whatever’s happening in the Dragon Kingdom), it’s not on Ian’s agenda so they’re swept offstage after serving as an audience. Actually they serve more as props in an Eggman story than villains in their own right.

This story padded its page budget. As noted above, we got 4 pages of re-introductions to the secondary villains in this book, and the introduction of the Metals was little more than a tease. The space could just have easily been devoted to Snively blabbing less and using more pages to make good his escape while cutting back on the exposition. It could have been a more exciting sequence though Jamal would have had to do most of the heavy lifting. What we’re left with is a set-up that lives up to the series title; Eggman and the minor villains scramble to fill the pages with the set-up for this arc. Head Score: 6.

EYE: Great work by Jamal Peppers, especially when staging the scene in the conference room where Eggman is moving among his “guests” and the comedy relief bots are doing their thing. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: I know that in the comic book industry villains have become, if not beloved, then at least major players in their own realms. But this gathering of the baddies made me realize that I simply don’t give a damn about ANY of them. I even found myself wondering more about Matilda Armadillo and her chances of reuniting with her brother Mighty than about the Baron.

Part of it may be the fact that in the Marvel and DC books the villains have more personality. There, I said it. Even Conquering Storm, the only villain aside from Lien-Da to get anything like major ink in this book in the past few years, doesn’t exactly stand off the page. They’re bad guys who look like bad guys and have maybe one or two character traits to their name and that’s all. There’s really nobody here with any kind of breakout potential on the order of, say, a Harley Quinn or a Solomon Grundy. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not like we care about any of these people. And it’s the job of the writer to MAKE us care, not to simply move characters onto and off of the page and hope for the best. Heart Score: 3.

SONIC SPIN: In addition to mentioning the Norman Rockwell connection to the cover design, we also get design templates for the EGGSWATs and Hood of Mercia.

FAN ART: It’s a villain fest with Eggman by Blair, Robotnik by Sean (there IS a difference) and a villain assembly by Omar.

FAN FUNNIES: Brendan demonstrates that while Sonic is fast, he’s not always very swift.

OFF PANEL: There’s a lot to love here: I especially like the use of basic shapes as frames, and the Cubot sound effects, which reminds me of the Square Wheel experiment on “Mythbusters.”

FAN MAIL: Colton wonders about the anti-Geoff as Editorial goes for a cheap laugh; he also wants to see a Zonic arc. Emily in New Zealand is being raised on Sonic comics, and guess what she remembers about S47? Sally’s death cheat. Mallory admits to being a Shadow fangirl. And Drew mostly lists the comics in her possession.