Sonic Universe #53 (August 2013)

Spaz/Herms cover: Sonic and Mega do battle against “the Chaos Devil,” aka “Perfect Chaos” as he’s called in the first Sonic Adventure game. The guys might want to rethink their strategy for combatting it, maybe resorting to something involving paper towels. A lot of paper towels.

“When World Collide Part 8: Liberation”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Terry Austin; Color: Thomas Mason and Dustin Evans; Lettering: F. R. Fiegel; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Robotic Dog Walker: Mike Pellerito; Video Game Drones: Anthony Gaccioni, Cindy Chau, and Brian Oliveira.

PREVIOUSLY: OK, no more fooling around here. I haven’t been able to use a media reader to look at back issues of Mega Man, but it turns out that I don’t have to. Major thanks go to Silverknight9000 for putting the Mega Man comics up on YouTube as slide shows. About the only problem is hitting the Pause button over and over so I can study developments closer, and it’s not really that big of a deal. So, here’s MM26:

Mega, Sonic, Tails and Rush make their way through the Skull Egg Zone, with the Bluesome Twosome quipping as they go. They then walk into a trap by encountering Shadow Man and Mecha Shadow (hey, I don’t complicate anything), the former throwing shuriken the size of garbage can lids. Sonic gets tagged in the back by Mecha Shadow so Mega uploads Espio’s mojo for a little ninja fun of his own, then slips into Tails mojo mode to restore Shadow. Humiliated by having to be rescued by non-ultimate lifeforms, Shadow destroys Shadow Man himself. As he Chaos Controls out of this comic from sheer embarrassment, our heroes suffer varying degrees of déjà vu. This leads to an extended exposition masquerading as a discussion of messing with time before Mega gets things back on-mission. Dr. Light, meanwhile, has a visitor in the form of Rouge the Bat who helps him reenact the Finding The Weakness in The Death Star scene from “Star Wars.” Our heroes, meanwhile, are ambushed by the Mechas of Blaze and Silver, but they’re easily dealt with. Blues and the Chaotix, meanwhile, are almost attacked by Mechas Amy Rose and Knuckles until they get the order to stand down for the time being.

We open at Bad Guy Central where the dastardly duo try their best to lift each other’s spirits in the face of losing most of their Roboticized Masters, “master” being a courtesy title at this point since they haven’t demonstrated much of a mastery of anything. It also gives Ian an excuse to engage in exposition in the form of internal monologues by the villains. So what else is new?

As for our heroes, they engage in honest out-loud exposition as they continue to make their way through the Skull Egg Zone. They don’t have much of a chance before Mechas Amy Rose and Knuckles show up. Mecha Amy proves to be pretty adept at using her piko hammer to block shots, with Mecha Knuckles preferring to swat them away. An impossible situation? Hey, whose comic book is this, anyway? While Tails, Rush and Sonic keep Knuckles busy, Amy gets restored by Mega, then the gang gangs up on Knuckles and restores him, too. Amy’s first response, of course, is to drape herself all over Sonic.

Blues then reports in from where the Docs have indulged their respective megalomania with a pair of really tacky giant statues of themselves. They’re not exactly preoccupied with themselves at the moment, however, since not only have they now lost all the Roboticized Masters but Metal Sonic and Bass, whom I’m renaming “Badass” just because, are chasing after Rouge who’s been leaving windows open while the air conditioner’s running and otherwise wasting Chaos energy. Rouge decides to fight back by releasing the Chaos Devil, which looks nothing like the Perfect Chaos from the cover of this issue, but this is an alt-world, so all bets are off. The CD manages to engulf Rouge and Metal Sonic until Eggman says “Bad monster!” and they get spit out. Badass is ordered to escort Rouge to the roboticizer while it looks like a bunch of Wily bots are ready to stop warming up in the bullpen and come out on deck.

And back at Mega Man’s home base, Roll is venting her frustration/exposition at her robo-brother’s being MIA and Light being kidnapped when Duo crashes through the wall asking uselessly “Where shall justice be served?” You’d think he would have come equipped with a GPS and been programmed to knock on a door.

HEAD: Last things first: the good news is, Duo shows up. The bad news is, he forgot to check MapQuest and defaults to Dr. Light’s lab. I’m still not even clear on how Light got in touch with Duo the Robocop in the first place, let alone what Duo’s back story is. There’s no mention of him in Mega Man 24 and only an off-hand reference to him as a “powerful friend” in MM25. A check of the Mega Man Knowledge Base wiki tells me more than I want to know about his left fist and his being able to deal with “Evil Energy” but nothing about telepathic communication with Dr. Light. His abrupt appearance on the last page and at the wrong location makes me think either he’s a couple of circuits short of a motherboard or else he’s an established MM character who was brought in as filler in this crossover.

Then there’s the Chaos Devil. Trust me, you do not want to be in the same time zone with the Perfect Chaos of Sonic Adventure, and yet here’s what I can only call a Perfect Chaos knockoff as part of this story. Contrast this with the attempts to revive one of the “God Warriors” in Hayao Miyazaki’s “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.” Everybody knew it was a demon and downright dangerous, much like the atom bomb, which added something to the plot. The Chaos Devil is more plot device than anything else. Once again we find a character reduced to being a prop or scenery when not actually doing something that contributes to the story.

For the rest, this story adheres to the formula of alternating exposition and ass-kicking. There are really no new plot developments, and the Chaos Devil is little better than a floor lamp in this story, something to turn on as needed. There are several character developments that are better covered in the Heart section but no real game changers in terms of the story. Head Score: 3.

EYE: Again, I have to say that Tracy Yardley!’s Sonic style doesn’t quite work with the Mega Man characters; not as well as Ben Bates’s artwork, anyway. The Egg-Wily Machine X looks like a LEGO project gone horribly wrong, and the Chaos Devil looks far from devilish. I had thought Tracy would bring some measure of danger/menace to either of these; personally, I figured the Robot Masters on loan from the Mega Man franchise were a lost cause in the threat department. They’re about as far from Steven Butler’s Drago as you can get. Eye Score: 5.

HEART: Well, the bloom is definitely off the bromance. Wily and Eggman make with the exposition while trading insincerities and secretly planning to plant something sharp and pointy between the other guy’s shoulder blades.

Inter-service rivalry, the pitting of various branches of the military against each other, is not something limited to the Army-Navy football game. The rivalry between the Army and the Navy in Imperial Japan during World War 2 was so intense at times that cooperation between the two branches pretty much broke down. If the Army needed a 3/8 inch screw to manufacture and maintain ordnance, for instance, the Navy would stock screws with a reverse thread just to spite the Army.

Clearly the Wily-Eggman team hasn’t sunk to that level of irreconcilable differences. When the Roboticized Masters have all failed and Rouge lets the Chaos Devil out of its water cooler, the two mad scientists are still able to pull together and send the Robot Masters into the game to try to pull it out in the third quarter. The division between the two was actually interesting; it left the readers (this reader, anyway) with the question of whether they won’t so much be overcome by Sonic and Mega Man as by their own stupidity. That would be more interesting than a by-the-numbers ass-kicking.

The latter, I fear, is how this arc will ultimately play out. Both comics are stuck in the Heroes/Villains mode, Mega Man moreso than Sonic. At least in Sonic there have been characters who have switched allegiance from time to time, Fiona being the most obvious example. In Mega Man, on the contrary, everybot is programmed to follow the script and play out their assigned role. That’s what made the robo-crush Ice Man had on Roll potentially interesting; it was a deviation from his programming. The conclusion of this arc, ultimately, is foregone.

This, unfortunately, is as far from “character development” in the narrative sense as you can get. I don’t know how the sales of Mega Man comics have trajectoried since Archie launched the series, but any comic about robots is going to get bogged down with a “You’ve read one, you’ve read them all” feeling at some point. Osamu Tezuka kept this from happening to Astro Boy because Astro wasn’t merely a robot; he was a robot who also had human emotions which sometimes bordered on the melodramatic. The 1996 Tails miniseries started out with Tails running away from home, resenting the way everybody treated him like a kid. Back in 1959, Astro Boy also ran away from home in one story, pretty much for the same reason. Unless the Mega Man bots have that kind of emotional flexibility, this crossover leaves the impression that the robots don’t bring a lot to the party. Small wonder Ian Flynn has concocted an anti-robot militia, the Emerald Spears, which sounds like something Ken Penders would have used to oppose the Dark Legion. Robots in themselves aren’t that entertaining … unless they’re named C-3PO and R2-D2 and even then they have to have good writers, writers not available to Orbot and Cubot and their warmed-over Sonic X Boco/Deco shtick. Heart Score: 4.

OFF-PANEL: Wily and Egman discover the reality of soft power in the person of Tikal. I’ve mentioned the Sonic-Rainbow Dash fan base; this strip makes a great argument for pairing up Tikal and Fluttershy.

FAN MAIL: Avie asks about Blaze appearing in the comic; I have a feeling she didn’t mean as an extra in this arc or as a character in the impending Pirates of the Caribbean meets Treasure Team Tango arc. Hunter wants to know when Uncle Chuck got deroboticized, when Shadow will show up again (as Shadow, presumably, and not as a walk-on as in this arc), and wants to see more Ben Bates artwork (that makes two of us).

FAN ART: James draws Sonic, Chris draws Amy Rose, Carolina draws Silver, and Bryan draws a Mega Man-Sonic cover.