Sonic Universe #55 (October 2013)

Tracy Yardley!/Jim Amash/Steve Downer cover: “Arrr you ready?” Arrr you serious? Sonic dressed up as Capt. Jack Sparrow, even though he doesn’t appear in this comic. The actual cast, however, gets squished to the side. And don’t worry about Sonic’s eye patch; according to ep. 71 of “Mythbusters,” pirates wore eye patches to induce night vision so they could have at least one eye capable of seeing in the low light levels of the lower decks of a ship. That one rated a “Plausible.” I don’t know what kind of rating this story would get.

“Pirate Plunder Panic: Part 1”

Story: Tracy Yardley!; Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Thomas Mason; Lettering: X Fiegal; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Pirate of the Caribbean: Mike Pellerito: Game drones: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau.

The first three pages feature narrative boxes by Blaze before the gimmick is dropped. Seems she’s back to doing the same thing that kept her busy during “Treasure Team Tango” (SU21-24): looking for a Sol Emerald before its absence destroys her world. Instead she finds herself on a ship of fools along with Amy Rose, Cream, Cheese, Marine as Captain and Master (or would that be “Mistress?”) and a crew of koalas who say nothing at all and who abandon ship at the first opportunity. It beats being a red shirt on board the Enterprise.

Blaze is searching for the last missing Sol Emerald which she has to retrieve or her home world is doomed. Anyone who read “Tango” will remember when this point was dinned into us during that story arc. But now Blaze is not so much controlling fire as under fire in the midst of a storm. In her exposition, she mentions being whisked away to join in the World Collide story arc. “You didn’t miss [it], did you?” an editorial text box asks. Dude, I don’t miss it a bit. Anyway, for all of Marine’s barking of orders, Cream still has to get her out of harm’s way. Blaze wants to go solo rather than jeopardize anyone else on her mission. Amy Rose reluctantly agrees but before Blaze can leave, the other ship starts using a Gatling gun. Seriously. One that shoots cartoon bombs.

Amy disposes of one of them by doing her Tiger Woods impersonation. Blaze takes advantage of a lull in the firing to head on over to the other ship. Amy and Cream are supposed to stay with Marine, but don’t show a lot of confidence in her.

Blaze makes it to the ship where she finds a welcoming reception consisting of … Bean, the “demented dynamite duck.” I always thought he was 100% cuckoo myself. And yes, he quotes a line from Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles” which the pre-ado boys aren’t supposed to get. Between the two of them, they mention that Nack and the Babylon Rogues aren’t in this story … yet.

Back on Marine’s ship, Marine has the brilliant idea to shoot fireworks at the pirates. Her not-so-brilliant idea is to shoot them from her cannons.

Now let’s plunge even deeper into this pirate nonsense as we encounter Swash and Buckle, robot pirates who look like they failed to make the cut and land parts in the 2005 movie “Robots.” The Captain gets on the intercom to tell Blaze to give herself up or else he’ll blow Marine’s ship out of the water. Bean lets drop the fact that the Sol Emerald must be what the captain keeps on his person at all times. Before Blaze can come up with a plan, Bean gives her away using a second line from “Blazing Saddles.”

Back on Marine’s ship, where she could use some Marines right about now, they’ve been hit and are taking on water. Cream suggests using the ship to ram the bad guys; she’s been reading too many Sonic comics. That’s when the koala krew abandons ship.

Blaze surrenders to Captain Metal only to have him deploy a laser cannon to fire on Marine’s ship. Blaze does a slow burn, which is effective on a ship made of metal, but her dramatic speech is interrupted when Buckle konks her on the head.

HEAD: It’s a pretty safe bet that there have been pirates about as long as there have been sailors. There are nuances and shades of difference between privateers who act on behalf of a state and merely criminal pirates, between sea-going criminals and commerce raiders acting on behalf of a government in time of war. The kind of pirates most familiar to popular culture owe their existence to two men: Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Newton. The former was the novelist who wrote “Treasure Island” in 1883. In the book, Long John Silver serves not as a captain but as the quartermaster of the ship Hispaniola. As such, he exercises at least as much authority as the ship’s captain, Capt. Flint. In fact, he’s named his parrot “Capt. Flint” and taught him to mimic the captain’s typical phrases. Imagine Data naming his cat “Picard” instead of “Spot” and you get an idea of Silver’s attitude. In motion pictures he was played by a number of actors in the early days of the medium, but when Disney Studios made a version of “Treasure Island” in 1950, they cast British actor Robert Newton as Silver.

Newton set the tone for the character from then on. Anyone who has read the Stevenson novel knows that Silver didn’t speak in the eccentric style we now associate with pirates. Newton simply took the Cornish accent of England’s West Country (where a number of British pirates were born), exaggerated it and thus made it immortal. Actor Robbie Coltrane did the same by taking the Yorkshire accent and using it in his portrayal of Hagrid in the Harry Potter films. Newton, who died in 1956, became the stereotypical pirate, reprised the role of Long John Silver several times, and became, as one source put it, the patron saint of Talk Like A Pirate Day.

The situation remained the same until 2003 when Disney, looking to squeeze another doubloon from the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride, released a film of the same name featuring a pirate character who broke the mold: Captain Jack Sparrow, played by Johnny Depp. His eccentric mannerisms transcended the Long John Silver stereotype and led to three sequels. Still, original the pirate character has proven to have legs, even though Silver only had one leg.

Pirates, like cowboys and Indians, are a major attraction for small boys who want to indulge in anti-social play. Thus we find author James Barrie trying to out-Silver Silver by claiming that his own pirate character, Captain James Hook, is the only man whom Silver ever feared, according to the stage play “Peter Pan.” The play has been good to Disney, inspiring several full-length animated films. Here’s a bit of Sonic trivia: the 2002 film “Return to Neverland” reunited two voice actors from the SatAM “Sonic the Hedgehog”: Brad Pierce (“Tails”) voiced one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, and Kath Soucie (“Sally”) played an all-grown-up Wendy.

As for Hook, he’s still laboring in the Disney dungeon. He’s the recurring antagonist on the TV series “Jake and the Neverland Pirates,” which is the Disney version of “Dora the Explorer” in terms of format and target audience. It’s doubloons to donuts that in any given episode Jake will lead the audience in some physical bit of business such as stretching or hopping, Cubby will consult a map (which, unlike Dora’s, does not have a speaking part), and Izzy will use the pixie dust she carries “for emergencies only,” with Hook and crew out to foil their efforts. With every accomplishment the crew of kid pirates, with their parrot named Skully, earns doubloons which they deposit at the end of each episode into a treasure chest, but not before counting them. They’ve accumulated so many by now that they should think about getting out of the pirate business and going into offshore banking, which is actually another form of the pirate business.

Piracy lives on, but I don’t think Disney is planning on opening a theme park ride called Pirates of the Somali Coast. These 21^st century pirates, as depicted in the recent motion picture “Captain Phillips,” don’t stand a chance of ending up like Hook in “Neverland Pirates,” as cute comic relief.

Neither, I suppose, is Captain Metal, one of the most transparent attempts to glom onto the Metal Sonic character this book has ever witnessed. He’s got the peg leg and patched eye thing down, but other parts of him (especially his epaulets) look like an explosion at the hardware store. Even though he’s supposed to be the point of the story, we don’t know exactly how he came into possession of a Sol Emerald. For that matter, we haven’t learned where Blaze is keeping the rest of them. But since this is only the first of four parts, we can afford to be patient as well as cynical.

This is Tracy Yardley!’s second attempt at writing for the comic, the first being the dreadful “Babylon Rising” arc (SU33-36). At least we’re spared another appearance by the Battle Bird Armada, though we still have to put up with Bean sounding as if he’s wandered into the wrong comic. In fact, we’re not sure why anybody is here. The set-up is transparently disposable, anyway, since all Tracy had to do was assemble the cast and lay out the trajectory of the plot; “Why?” is too much of a bother.

The characters are all stripped of nuance. Blaze is pretty much all business except when she threatens to turn up the heat. Cream is insufferable, as usual. Amy Rose has to play the mini-mother and keep Cream in line, when the three of them aren’t keeping Marine in line. She speaks with an alleged Australian accent and her over-the-top characterization is starting to get annoying. Bean was hatched annoying.

The oft-repeated threat to Blaze’s home world should she fail to wrangle the Sol Emeralds is supposed to lend some urgency to the story, but it’s too easily lost in all the pirate business. I do not have high hopes for this arc. Head Score: 6.

EYE: I can usually count on Tracy Yardley!’s artwork being coherent with interesting layouts during the action sequences. Here, because the action is more or less cover to cover, the page layouts are as tempestuous as the foul weather. Only a few of the pages have anything like a conventional layout that allows the reader to catch his/her breath, as it were. The effect is like a visual sugar rush. This approach squeezes Blaze’s reaction to the sinking of Marine’s ship into corners of panels whereas a splash page of the explosion would have been more appropriate. Maybe Tracy was just trying to cram too much into the page budget, I don’t know. Eye Score: 6.

HEART: As mentioned earlier, the need for Blaze to retrieve the Sol Emeralds has come up before. On that occasion, unfortunately, it was also beaten to a pulp. By now, it’s become worse than a mere McGuffin. It’s a zombie, a plot point of the living dead. Honestly, Blaze needs more of a reason to show up in this comic.

The destruction of Marine’s ship (If it was ever named I missed it) should have been a major emotional moment, implying the loss of Cream and Marine (yeah, like Editorial would let that happen!). In fact, Marketing gives the game away by unveiling the next issue’s cover with all hands on deck. So that drains any concern Tracy sought to generate from the sinking of Marine’s ship. That is not how you score Heart points. Heart Score: 5.

FAN ART: Jean from Belgium sends in a drawing that could be titles “Road Trip.” Ylenia from Italy submits a drawing of Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, whose tails are so fluffy it makes me think he’s using a conditioner. Representing cyberspace, Dominic gives us Super Sonic and his emerald collection, and Annabelle draws Sonic in motion.

OFF-PANEL: The boys step aside for this one: Aleah Baker does story and color, Jennifer Hernandez does art, and Phyllis Novin does the inking. Marine turns the plot of this story into cheesy fanfic, and her costars don’t appreciate her efforts.

FAN MAIL: Anton is told that Archie gets A LOT of fan mail, that Archie will be doing a stand-alone Lost World game flog story in the Sonic magazine, and that Sonic has always appeared in the book which bears his name. Marian wants to know how to handle getting ragged for her Sonic fandom. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, girlfriend; Rule No. 1 is: look for other Sonic fans on the Internet. And the preferred response to being called “Miss Sonic” is “Cool!”