Sonic Universe 56 (November 2013)

Yardley/Amash/Downer cover: artistically, there’s no faulting the cover. I really like the color scheme. Trouble is, that’s about the only thing to like about the cover. When it comes to the content, there are about 3 or 4 kinds of wrong here.

First off there’s the clichéd cannibal crock pot. You used to see that a lot in magazine cartoons and jungle movies from the 1930s where African American extras and occasional white actors in blackface wearing animal skin couture and bones through their noses cooked up Great White Hunter Stew with a side order of Missionary Tartare. But the political incorrectness is the least of it. The worst thing about it is it’s a cliché and a totally inappropriate one. Why couldn’t Tracy have drawn Blaze or one of the other girls being forced to walk the plank? OK, that’s as much of a cliche as the cannibal crock pot, but it’s a piratical cliché!

Why is there even a reference to cannibalism on this cover since, as far as I know, pirates didn’t practice cannibalism? Pirates have bad enough image problems already. Back in the day when the Internet was text-based and not trying to be like television, I was part of a Disney-related fan group. I remember someone posting the following parody of the song associated with the Pirates of the Caribbean theme park ride:

We plunder and kill and we rape and we loot

Drink up me hearties, yo ho

We loot and we rape and we plunder and kill

Drink up me hearties, yo ho

This actually set off a small flame war because some people in the group didn’t think that pirates should have their reputations sullied by being linked with registered sex offenders. They probably wouldn’t be too thrilled by their being associated with the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, either.

For that matter, since when do robots eat anything? If a robot is feeling weak, pop another battery in him and he’s good to go. Why cook the hostages?

Finally, there the “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” headline in a typeface more appropriate for a Frankenstein or Mummy movie poster from the 1940s. This cover actually makes my life a little easier; it just vaulted to the front of the line of contenders for Worst Cover Art on my annual Best/Worst List.

“Pirate Plunder Panic: Part 2”

Story and Art: Tracy Yardley!; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Steve Downer; Lettering: Jack Morelli; Assistant Editor: Vince Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; I’ll Bet I Have More of a Beard Than: Mike Pellerito; SEGA Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

Captain Metal has brought his crew ashore, along with the caged Blaze who’s text boxing like crazy in order to bring the readers up to speed. She’s under the watchful eye (singular) of a tiny robot with a leaf in its head; using old movie mathematic conversion tables, that makes it to be one of the local robo natives. Once he’s dismissed, Tracy has Bean engage in some of what the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board would refer to as “rude humor,” otherwise known as toilet jokes. For this the CCA put itself out of business?

We mercifully cut away to some flotsam which turns out to be an ammo box carrying Marine, Amy Rose, Cream and Cheese. How they all fit in there and how Amy Rose was able to swing her pico hammer in such close quarters I’ll never know. Amy tries, and fails, to get Marine to please shut up, but she can’t help herself when she spots a group of dorsal fins slicing through the water. Amy Rose’s first instinct is to attack but the threat turns out to be a school of dolphins. Marine tries to save face by claiming to be able to tell the difference between dolphins and sharks a mile away; the punch line for that joke, of course, is that it’s too bad she couldn’t tell the difference any closer.

While the seaborne cavalry rides to the rescue, we cut back to Blaze who’s getting an earful of exposition from the robopirates along with some snippets of dialogue from the Black Knight scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” while the reference to “tungsten carbide” comes from the “Working Class Playwrite” sketch from the Monty Python TV show. An extended bit of text is followed by Bean serving Blaze a tropical smoothie which, if I were Blaze, Bean would be wearing.

The girls make landfall, whereupon Marine gets kidnapped by the robo-natives. Their intentions are revealed in a nice little bit of linguistic ambiguity: they keep saying “Fire cat” and “Help” which translates as a call to “Help Fire Cat!”

Back in the pirate lair, which looks like a giant silo, Metal announces his intention to use all seven Sol Emeralds to power up his (Cliché Alert) wonder weapon, and Blaze is all “Nuh-UH!” and Metal is all “Uh-HUH!”

Outside the silo the chief of the Sprocket robo-native tribe offers in Tarzan English to help the girls fight the pirates. The good news is, the Sprockets form a robo-ladder to scale the height of the silo. The bad news is, the girls should have majored in rope-climbing in phys ed, so this is going to take a while.

Metal is still nattering on about his wonder weapon while Bean gets all horny for the Sol Emerald. As the girls finally reach the top of the silo, we get the big reveal: the clichéd wonder weapon, the Egg O’ War, looks very much like a modified Egg Wiley Machine X with skull and crossbones overtones. While Amy and Cream land on Blaze’s cage, Marine feels she has to get in Capt. Metal’s face about losing her ship. Cream makes the save but Metal plans to feed these unwanted guests to the Kraken, about which more later. But the dinner show will have to wait because Bean has boosted the Sol Emerald himself and between his motor-mouthing about it and the fact that he’s riding Bark-back he manages to put like 5 or 6 yards between himself and Metal. Worst. Getaway. Ever.

HEAD: It used to be that pirate stories, in print and on film, were more “secular,” if you know what I mean. Pirates were pirates and they shot at each other and swung their swords a lot. It didn’t need to be goosed up with the supernatural.

That changed with the Pirates of the Caribbean motion picture franchise which, like the theme park ride that inspired it and which featured at the beginning a talking skull warning “Dead men tell no tales!”, had one foot in the supernatural camp. It started with the very first picture in the series, “Curse of the Black Pearl” and its undead pirate crew. The second film in the series, “Dead Man’s Chest,” featured the kraken as a creature doing the bidding of an undead Davey Jones.

The origin of the kraken is about as far from the Caribbean as you can get: it’s Icelandic, to be exact, and is identified with a giant squid or octopus. Before “Dead Man’s Chest,” the kraken was known, if at all, either from a poem by Tennyson or from the 1981 motion picture “Clash of the Titans” where it was an admirable stop-motion monster with 4 human arms and a fish tail animated by the late great Ray Harryhausen. One of the film’s deathless stupid bits of dialogue, “Release the Kraken!,” became something of a meme.

So does the presence of the kraken justify the comic cover’s threat to turn the girls into chum? No, because this kraken is also a robot, and we’re right back to the “robots don’t eat” plot point.

The Sprocket tribe is just as clichéd as anything else in this story, but it manages to work here. Or maybe it’s because I happen to like it when the heroes catch a break in these comics, I don’t know. It doesn’t happen all that often.

The good news about this story is that it broke the mold of “Treasure Team Tango,” the story it most resembles, in that there aren’t four separate groups scrambling around to get their paws on the Sol Emerald. That was just too much and Tracy wisely is keeping things simpler here with the girls vs. pirates dynamic. Bean, as demonstrated at the end of the story, is the walking definition of “wild card.” Head Score: 8.

EYE: The advantage of being both writer and illustrator is that Tracy Yardley! knows how he wants this to look. It’s not always easy to get there, though. The story of Doc Ratcheturn isn’t helped by committing it to a parchment background; it is a lethally large bit of text that throws off the pacing. And as implied above, the final splash page gives us the most unconvincing-looking escape attempt I’ve seen since the “Inside Job” story arc (Sonic Universe 29-32). Eye Score: 8.

HEART: In “Treasure Team Tango,” Marine was not part of the fun and games. Her only contribution was to look at the unsettled skies and say “Crook weather we’re havin’, ain’t it?” or slang to that effect. That, in fact, paralleled her introduction in the games, as a non-playable in Sonic Rush Adventure.

Here, Marine is very much in the thick of things. Unfortunately, there’s a sense that things are a little too thick with her around. Ordinarily, Amy Rose would be the alpha female of the group, swinging the hammer first and asking questions later. Marine has pretty much the same personality but ramped up to the next level. This keeps the group from functioning as a unit, especially with the usually phlegmatic Blaze in a cage and out of commission for the time being.

And if that weren’t enough, there’s Bean. I’ve never been a fan of how the comic handles crazy; Rosy, an alt-Amy Rose, left a very bad taste in my mouth as she bounced from comic book psychopath to love-struck fangirl without a break. Dr. Fin is a mad scientist with a capital MAD which makes it a wonder how he succeeds at anything. Bean, however, seems more random than the other characters, closer to being the comic’s class clown than anything else. But then you get his freakout over the emerald and such linguistic bits as his calling Blaze “cutie-mootie-wootie-tootie” which should have earned him a punchie-wunchie in the beakie-meekie.

With Blaze sidelined for the present, this story gives the impression of having Amy Rose, Bean and Marine shouldering each other out of the spotlight. Of the three, Amy at least has more of a leadership aura about her. Marine is probably used to being master of her own ship, so maybe old habits die hard. Still, given how simple this story arc is at heart (who ends up with the Sol Emerald, which was the same story as Treasure Team Tango), Tracy can’t keep things simple, especially when he has to stretch it out over 4 issues. This pretty amply demonstrates the story’s basic poverty. I don’t expect the kraken to be more than a diversion, something to keep the readers and actors awake when things start to flag. I may be wrong but somehow I doubt it. Heart Score: 5.

FAN ART: Blaze by Avalon, Blaze again by Tatum (I like the drop shadow effect), Cream and Cheese at the beach by Becky, and Cheese by Justice.

OFF-PANEL: The disadvantage of holding Blaze in a wooden cage on a wooden ship.

FAN MAIL: Jake asks about the arc in progress and busts his sister for being a Tails-Marine shipper. Editorial doesn’t mention their age difference and falls back on the excuse that they’re from two different worlds, literally. James comments on the arc in progress and comments on the cover of the next issue where Amy Rose ends up underwater fully clothed. So are the other girls, actually. Dealing with falling into the water fully clothed was a survival skill I learned in the process of getting several different merit badges in Boy Scouts. There are some experiences for which playing video games does not prepare one.