Sonic Universe #52 (July 2013)

Spaziante/Herms cover: It’s “Change partners” as Mega Man takes on some Robians (I thought for a moment he was going up again your Friendly Neighborhood You Know Who but it’s only Robo-Knuckles) while Sonic faces off against some characters from third-rate Chinese opera. Seriously.

“When Worlds Collide Part 5: The Advance Guard”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Thomas Mason; Lettering: A. Teuthis; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Surreal Landscape Gardener: Mike Pellerito; Game Licensing Drones: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau (Sega) and Brian Oliveira (Capcom).

Previously: Well, my luck with media readers remains consistent: consistently bad. Sonic fan JESmith recommended that, in order to really stay up to speed with this story arc since I don’t have access to a decent comic book store, I should use the Comical comic book viewer, and he supplied not only a link to download the viewer but also one to look at Mega Man back issues. He also suggested that I look at Mega Man #22 where, from what I could tell of the tease for the back story, Ice Man develops a crush on Roll to the point where he wants the two of them to interface, settle down, and raise some Ice Ice Babies.

That was the theory, anyway. In practice, I was only able to give MM24 a quick glance and determine that, indeed, most of the story concerned the Eggman/Wiley bromance. The second time I tried using Comical my efforts to look at other issues ran up against the dreaded 404 message. And when I tried to access MM22 every single page recorded as an error of some kind and I had to abandon the effort.

So, I’m left with a very unhelpful “Previously” page that tells me that Sonic and Mega somehow transcended the Idiot Plot in which they were stuck, and rescued Tails from being one of the “Roboticized Masters” engaged in sniffing out Chaos Emeralds. Meanwhile, Dr. Light has been kidnapped by Bass and Metal Sonic.

We pick up the action with Sonic, Mega, Tails, Blues, and Rush the dog overlooking a version of the Green Hill Zone designed by a committee of two (Guess who). “Weird” and “trippy” are the best descriptors that the blue brothers can come up with, so Tails has to step in with a dose of cute science. The seminar gets interrupted by Kinko (my name for Copy Bot) who’s got back-up in the form of the Genesis Unit: three refugees from Asian folklore.

As pointed out in the Mega Man Knowledge Base wiki, all three of the bots are based on characters from “Journey to the West,” one of the classics of Chinese literature. It’s the story of a pilgrimage undertaken by a Buddhist monk to India in search of sacred scrolls and it’s known all over Asia, and we’ve already met one of the three beings who accompany him on the quest in the Sonic comic: there’s a pig, a demon, and the monkey king. That’s right, Monkey Khan and Buster Rod G are both based on Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. So is Son Goku from Akira Toriyama’s “Dragonball” franchise, but that’s another story. Literally.

Meanwhile, in a one-page digression, Dr. Light uses the Force to communicate with Optimus Prime. Well, that’s what it looks like. Now let’s see how long it takes O.P., aka Duo the intergalactic cop, to arrive at the scene of the crime. If Duo takes his sweet time, it will only deepen my suspicion that this was all done just to fill up one page.

We get a page of ass-kicking which is interrupted by Blaze Bot and Silver Bot showing up with the final Chaos Emerald. But instead of installing it right away, in which case we’d have a whole different comic, Wiley gets all snippy that Genesis isn’t getting their props. And it looks like we have trouble in paradise.

Back at the ass-kicking, it’s Sonic vs. Monkey Bot, Tails against Pig Bot whose one talent is that he really sucks, and Blues versus the Demon Bot. Not to be left out, Kinko goes up against Mega until Mega utilizes Tails’s mojo to get the best of the Genesis bots, except for the Demon Bot who gets a case of the Blues.

Only then do we learn that the Genesis reunion wasn’t even supposed to happen, which gives us a clue as to how freaky-deaky this zone is. But after a dose of exposition the group makes their way across the zone only to encounter a horde of Mobian bots, the so-called Roboticized Masters, with a gloating audience of two.

HEAD: A foolish consistency may indeed be the hobgoblin of little minds, as Emerson put it, but it kind of helps when you’re telling a story.

OK, so the Genesis bots and Kinko get defeated by Sonic and Mega. So what? That was going to happen anyway. My question is, what happened to the bodies? We do get to see the Demon Bot just lying there in a pool of ambiguity once Blues dispatches him. Kinko gets laid out on page [13] appropriately enough, but then what? Do they just lay where they’ve fallen? Do they derez as in the Disney Tron continuity? I don’t know how it works in the Mega Man games or in the comic, but Ian is in no hurry to clarify something as crucial as the fate of the fallen.

And in any event, he has a fallback position: the entire zone is an anomaly where presumably the rules don’t apply. Well I’m sorry but to me that’s bad story-telling. You can’t cheat on stuff like this because you’re afraid the little bitty pre-ado boys will be all upset. I mean, it used to be anything was fair game when it came to blowing up bots. It’s not like they were going to leak blood and robo-guts.

So I went back to the fanbase. Jammerlee’s response is, well, tentative: “The robot master keeps his or her own ability. As for the ability Rock acquires, I don't think that's ever been explained? I always assumed he hung onto the data for as long as he needed it on hand and then discarded it for the sake of harddrive space.” Which is as good a reason as any to perform maintenance on your computer.

Gojira007 speaks with more authority, at least when it comes to the games: “In the games, it's pretty straight-forward: Rock blows up the Robot Master in question, they turn into energy that he then absorbs, presto!  Mega Man gets that Robot Master's mojo.  In the Ruby Spears cartoon, and most Manga and Anime adaptations I've seen, he touches the Robot Master and acquires their ability, but whether or not the Robot Master in question keeps it seems to vary from situation to situation.  I don't know how they've been doing it in the Archie Comics, but I imagine it'd be something similar.”

So it looks like Capcom doesn’t seem to have laid down any hard and fast rules for how Mega Man is supposed to work outside the games. Which explains, in a cynical way, why Sonic and Mega Man could snap Tails out of his robo state without killing him and still leave Mega with Tails’s ability to do … whatever he did as a robot.

As for the one-page digression where Dr. Light uses the Force to contact Duo: honestly, can anyone come up with a better explanation because I’d sure like to hear it.

The rest of the story falls back into the groove of exposition and ass-kicking. That may be enough for the pre-ados but the hardcore fans deserve better, especially when the exposition doesn’t even cover the questions fans may really have, like about Mega’s mojo and Dr. Light’s bout of telepathy. Head Score: 3.

EYE: I never thought I’d say this, but there’s something about Tracy Yardley!’s Mega Man art that falls short when compared to that of Jamal Peppers. I really feel like Peppers has the right look for Mega, his sister, and the rest of the robo crew. Yardley!’s style is missing something; Peppers style is, well, cuter. If he’s not the primo artist for the Mega Man books, he should be.

Not that Tracy is a total slouch here; the surreal Green Hill Zone is nothing to sneeze at, and he does have a signature way of making the page layout add to the story vibe. Still, I think Tracy should really concentrate on Sonic. Eye Score: 8.

HEART: Sonic’s snarking around in this issue gets old pretty fast. I know that Sonic started out with speed and attitude and nothing else; this looks like a return to those days of yesteryear.

But there’s one beacon shining through the dark, one other person in this cosmos that gives Sonic’s existence meaning. She’s Sonic’s true soul-mate who shares that necessary quality: a need for speed. I’m talking, of course, about Rainbow Dash.

That, at least, was the impetus for creating the #Sonic-Rainboom group on devianArt two years ago. As of this writing, it has 765 members and 981 watchers, among whom I count myself. I’ll have to admit that the notion of creating a Sonic the Hedgehog-My Little Pony crossover group doesn’t make that much sense at first glance; mainly I have trouble reconciling how Mobian bipeds can relate to Equestrian quadrupeds and vice versa. But the group isn’t just about the duo of Sonic and Rainbow Dash; other shippings include Sally and Twilight Sparkle, Bunnie and Applejack (a natural if there ever was one), Rouge and Rarity, Shadow and Twilight Sparkle, and Tails and Fluttershy among others. But the blue Pegasus and the Blue Blur are the star attraction and it isn’t just a stunt pairing: the fans like both characters and really think they belong together. Me, I’m a diehard Sonic/Sally shipper but unless they bring her back to the comic pretty soon I may find myself writing Princess Sally/Princess Celestia fanfics.

I know, I know, Sega and Archie probably think Sonic needed a break from Sally, first by turning her into a bot in Sonic #230’s “Two Steps Back” and then by sending Sonic into the Mega Man continuity. Despite all the best evidence embodied in the scads of Sonic/Sally fan art they’ve received at Archie HQ, not to mention the fanart they can’t admit to having seen and fanfics they can’t admit to having read, the Archie party line is that Sally is officially off-topic for the duration.

For myself, I think it’s interesting that both Sonic/Sally endures among the fanbase and Sonic/Rainbow Dash was embraced by a sizable number of fans at deviantArt. When I tried to think of an Archie Sonic plot point that’s been as widely accepted, however, I come up short. Maybe there are Scourge/Fiona fanboys out there but I’m having trouble finding them. And speaking of Sonic comic plots I’ve recently received Sonic Universe #55 which features the beginning of a 4-issue story arc about … pirates.

Seriously, Archie, pirates?

That might have meant something a few years ago when there was still an edge on the concept and Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow was fresher than it is now. At this point, the pirate concept is so safe that Disney uses it as the basis for a “Dora the Explorer” knockoff, “Jake and the Neverland Pirates.”

The problem I keep having with the comic is its crashing lack of imagination on most occasions. Even in those stories when you’d think something should take root, as in the “Inside Job” story arc set in a floating prison, it’s totally botched. “Worlds Collide” is no exception. Melding the Mega Man and Sonic universes could have been more interesting, but nobody asked the hard questions about how Mega Man gets the mojo from other robots and what then happens to the donor robots, or why the comic has to repeat the turning-Sonic’s-friends-into-robots gimmick, which is getting to be as tired as Uncle Ben telling Peter Parker that “With great power comes great responsibility” for the umpteenth time. And the bromance between Wiley and Eggman has also gotten prematurely old; I hope Editorial isn’t expecting it to keep fan interest going but I’m afraid they are. Heart Score: 4.

ATTENTION READERS is yet another exercise in trying to pump up interest in what’s become aging material, and exhibits all the false bravado of an amateur comedian on open mike night.

OFF-PANEL: Sonic has a post-traumatic flashback to the console wars. Of course nowadays the older games are available in a number of formats, including the same X-Box 360 where you can play Sonic 2006 if you’re feeling masochistic.

FAN MAIL: Ian (it better be no relation) asks why Shard has an arm cannon when he can shape shift (Shard can shape shift? Why haven’t the writers mined that yet?), asks and answers the question of why Shard got a vocabulary tune-up, gets blown off for asking whether the info in Shard’s Gem can be downloaded to another piece of hardware (a question, Editorial implies, that other fans have been asking and which Editorial won’t touch), and wants to know if he’ll be upgraded in the future. Saad is blown off for asking if the Babylonian Rogues will become bit players/Roboticized Masters in this epic. And Editorial tries to make things better with a “Christmas Story” joke.

FAT ART: Jeremy draws a happy Sonic; Mohammed draws Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Eggman; Tina draws Rad Red; and Vishal draws Sonic and Tails, but would it have killed Archie to have colored them in? It’s not like they have to guess at the colors.