Sonic Universe #57 (December 2013)

Yardley!/Amash/Downer cover: Everybody into the pool! The girls, Bean, Bark, Capt. Metal, the Kraken, and a plot point named Johnny Speedy (about whom more later) all try to get their hands, paws, claws or whatever on the Sol Emerald. At least this cover makes more sense than that of S214’s “Reigning Cats and Dogs: Part 2” where everybody is similarly focused on a Chaos Emerald but the action takes place on land. Since everyone here is free-floating, literally, the staging is way better. But it’s more fun diving for a watermelon greased up with shortening, which was a feature of Boy Scout summer camp when I was the age of this comic’s alleged core readership.

“Pirate Plunder Panic: Part 3”

Story and Art: Tracy Yardley; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Steve Downer; Lettering: Jack Morelli; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Yo No Soy Marinero Soy Capitan: Mike Pellerito; Sega Character Business and Licensing Reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau.

So let’s recap how hopelessly crazy Bean and Bark’s escape plan from last time was: they’re still inside the giant silo walking on a gangway between a gallery full of pirate bots and, far below on the other side, the kraken. But just as our heroines join the party, a robot who looks like a reject from the Sonic and Mega Man crossover arc shows up and yoinks the Emerald for “Captain Whiskers.” Speaking of whiskers, Blaze has been softening up the bars of her cage so that when she asks Amy Rose to tap them, she finally gets loose and powers up as a way of discouraging the kraken. MeOUCH!

With Amy Rose in tow, Blaze takes off after Johnny Speedy with Cream and Marine bringing up the rear. Metal tries to shoot them down but his aim is spoiled by some of the Sprocket robo-natives. While this is going on, Bean and Bark blow a hole in a wall and escapes, though how they handled the drop to the ocean or the island isn’t covered; man, all the good stuff happens off-panel. Having got word of this development, Capt. Metal beheads the messenger, but since he’s a robot this isn’t exactly life-threatening. He then tells his minions to warm up the sub, thus leaving the ship available in the service of the plot. He also orders that the kraken go out for a swim.

Blaze and the crew can’t keep up with Johnny S. so they engage in exposition. Blaze explains that the planet is mostly water which accounts for the abundance of pirates. Actually, Earth is 70 percent covered by water itself, so there has to be another explanation but nobody in Editorial wants to think too hard about it so we move on. But since the Metal Marauder is still docked and Capt. Metal is conveniently taking the submarine we didn’t know he had until a page or two ago, Marine is all for hijacking the ship as payback for losing her ship in Part 1. We then learn that Blaze is sort of scared of heights for no good reason except that Tracy needs to fill half a page. Anyway, the girls board ship and with a little persuasion from Amy Rose and Blaze, the mutiny of the bots left guarding the ship is over by page’s end.

Johnny presents the Sol Emerald to Capt. Whiskers and his metal minions, Mini and Mum. Why does every villain have to have a pair of minions hanging around like salt and pepper shakers? He also makes use of loose continuity by an allusion to “Nega” which never goes anywhere in this story. Anyway, they sight the approach of the Marauder so that means it’s time to get back on the plot and put it in gear.

But when Marine starts taking her master and commander role seriously, she’s challenged by … Bean, who with Bark has been lurking below deck waiting for their entrance. Again, how they got from inside the silo to the hold of the ship isn’t spelled out in anything like detail. Because this is a clothing-optional continuity where wardrobe defines one’s social role, Bean seems to think that he gets to be captain just because he’s wearing an admiral’s hat that would be more appropriate for a community theater production of the “H. M. S. Pinafore.” He also demonstrates his bona fides in a rambling speech asserting that he was there first. Mercifully, Blaze torches the hat and ends the discussion. Good thing, too, because Marine and Whiskers are just getting ready to settle their differences with cannonballs when who should intervene but the kraken.

Since it’s about time Cream did something useful, she begs Bean, who’s more interested in leaving with whatever bling he can pull together, to start producing bombs to tame this comic book calamari. First time he tries, though, he gets crushed by his own effort. Bark, however, feeds the bomb to the kraken, thus putting an end to that plot point. However, the resulting explosion is enough to knock Whickers overboard and the Sol Emerald into the waiting claw of Metal, who emerges from his submarine to reveal that he is now part-crab for no real reason so that he now resembles King Candy when he was assimilated by one of the killer bugs in “Wreck-It Ralph.”

HEAD: This past year saw the death of film critic Roger Ebert. I believe he’s had a great influence on my approaching the Archie Sonic comics, especially if you’ve read some of his collections of two-star-or-fewer reviews such as “I Hater Hated Hated This Movie” or “Your Movie Sucks.” Among other things, Ebert also collected various bits of movie wisdom that apply to this comic as well. These include the Fallacy of the Predictable Tree.

In the movie “First Blood,” which introduced the character of John Rambo, he gets the drop on a deputy sheriff when he’s walking by a tree where Rambo’s waiting overhead on a branch. Ebert logically asked: How did Rambo know the deputy would be walking past that particular tree? That’s the Fallacy of the Predictable Tree.

This story ends with what could be called the Fallacy of the Predictable Drop In The Ocean. Even if Capt. Metal had tailed the kraken while keeping a respectable difference, how did he know that the explosion that blew up the kraken would happen, or that it would knock the Sol Emerald out of Whiskers’s hand so he could be there to make the catch? In any plausible story, he couldn’t, that’s all there is to it.

That, and the business with how Bean and Bark made their unseen exit from the pirate base and Metal’s morphing into a crab-bot, bring the writing down considerably in this story. Some of the weak habits from the previous installment were repeated, such as the Bean monologue which is never entertaining enough to keep the story from grinding to a halt. The kraken received a decent build-up but didn’t even make it to Part 4. Some bits of business, such as the Blaze Is Scared of Heights plot point, were pure filler which owe their existence to loose continuity more than anything else.

Even though he managed to put it off, Tracy Yardley! is coming dangerously close to recreating the Treasure Team Tango dynamic because we now have two pirate gangs, Blaze’s girl group, and Bean all in pursuit of the Sol Emerald. Well, Bean kind of wanders in and out of pursuit like his attention span. Still, that’s an awful lot of moving parts for a story line this simple. Head Score: 5.

EYE: The artwork is great even if some of it, such as the crab-bot design, makes no sense. Eye Score: 9.

HEART: This story falls into the Action and More Action mold built by Ian Flynn, and as usual this is done at the expense of any Heart factor. It’s tough to whip up any sympathy for the pirates involved. The big problem here is that we end up being asked to care more about the Sol Emerald than the characters. This is true even as Blaze explains for the umpteenth time that her world is in danger if she isn’t in possession of all seven Sol Emeralds.

This is perilously close to the Ken Penders story arc “Mobius: 25 Years Later” (S131-144). In that arc, there were regular predictions that the weather was becoming so unstable it would, I don’t know, destroy the planet. Unfortunately, Ken talked about the weather but he never did anything about it. I was waiting for hailstones the size of volleyballs, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, something, but there was no payoff. Just cloudy skies, kind of like what we have here.

Someday, the readers are going to want to call this comic’s bluff as to Blaze’s dire prophecies and want to actually see Blaze’s world losing control, not because they hate the comic and want to see destruction but because hype will no longer be enough to satisfy them. It’s called Put Up or Shut Up. Heart Score: 3.

FAN ART: Josh draws the Green Hill Zone, Billy draws Robotnik as a pirate (with a very Snively-looking parrot on his shoulder), Kyle draws Capt. Metal and crew, and in keeping with the Whose Comic Is This Anyway? Rule, Charlie draws Sonic.

OFF-PANEL: And the world comes to an end due to Marine-Bean overload.

FAN MAIL: Nic seems to think that Capt. Metal should be acting more like Eggman, in keeping with the comic book rule that the villains are way interesting, and wonders how many languages Bean speaks badly, thereby indicating he didn’t get the joke. Kyle appreciates the girl power on display in this arc, while over in the other comic “Countdown To Chaos” turns into a major sausage fest. A. H. asks if Super Sonic will ever fight Metal Sonic, if Blaze will defeat Capt. Metal, what happened to Sally, what is Silver’s future, and how Wiley and Eggman got together. I still think that the answer to that last one was that they hooked up in an Evil Genius Chat Room on the Internet.