When I was about three pages into the first draft of this review, I had to come to grips with something that was totally blocking me: the fact that, true to the game, the villains all have the word “Black” featured in their names/titles. This doesn’t carry the same racial baggage in Japan as it does in the United States but I honestly couldn’t get past it, if only for the sake of the memory of my African American sister-in-law, Carlos, who passed away in 2011. So, for the duration of this story arc, I hope you can indulge me in a little self-censorship as I refer to the villains simply as Oaks, Assassins, Warriors, and so on.

Sonic Universe #59 (February 2014)

Tracy Austin!/Steve Downer cover: Moving counterclockwise: Shadow glowering, Rouge sideways glancing, Omega acting like Omega, the Comet, and three GUNs being attacked by a Warrior.

I actually had to look up the “Black Comet” on the Internet and discovered that it doesn’t exactly resemble the cover illustration. It tapers toward the tail, with visible structures and giant tendrils sweeping toward the back. These were omitted from the comic cover and the result, unfortunately, looks like what I scoop out of the litter box every morning. I cannot believe that Tracy Yardley! meant to make the Black Comet look like a giant cat turd but that’s the way it turned out. This does not bode well for the Sonic comics now, in what may as well be called the Age of Chaos; I mean, we counted down to Chaos so the comic should own it.

“Shadow Fall Part 1: Into the Unknown”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Jamal Peppers; Ink; Jim Amash; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: J. Morelli; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Dark Side of the Moon Man: Mike Pellerito; Sega Character Building and Licensing Department reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau

“Lock ‘n’ load, Spider Troupe. We go hot in five.”

After consulting my Macho-English Dictionary, I realized that we’re starting out on the verge of the kind of military strike that opened the video game “Hero’s Duty” in “Wreck-It Ralph,” which caused me to remember those inspiring words:

“Why did the hero flush the toilet? Say why.”

“Why?”

“Because it was his doodie!”

Hey, from the look on Shadow, he could use a laugh however cheap. Otherwise, the dialogue is like something right out of Paul Verhoeven’s “Starship Troopers,” about which more later. Omega is as one-dimensional as ever. As for Rouge, identified as a “thief and master spy,” her being in a combat zone isn’t exactly playing to her strengths, particularly because she’s neither armed nor armored. But since this is GUN, making sense is probably too much to ask of them.

They invade the Comet, they start shooting at the occupants, and it appears that Rouge’s primary job is to act like the chum in a shark hunt, attracting the attention of the baddies so they can be picked off by the forces of GUN. Four pages or so later, GUN has fought its way to a doorway of some kind where the GUNners set up a “tactical nuclear warhead” to blow the comet apart and destroy everyone on board. Being military men, they make it sound so easy.

But here Ian goes into flashback mode. It seems that GUN, in addition to trying to deal with a planet coming apart at the seams, now has to deal with another Black Comet on its way. Shadow, as resident part-alien, can’t say much about Doom (the alien, not the video game franchise) but it puts him in a bad position since he means to protect Mobius. One GUNner wonders out loud if this isn’t overkill, and Omega pretty much insists there’s no such thing. Commander Tower then dismisses the troops except for Rouge and Omega.

Back in the belly of the beast, Shadow, Rouge and Omega, known alternatively as “Team Dark” and “Tower’s pet freaks,” take the point while being observed by Doom and Eclipse, who from the design of him looks like a cross between Mephiles and a Knuckles wannabe.

After getting dissed by a GUNner, Shadow tries tapping into the “hive-mind” of the ship to at least get directions to the food court. He then discovers the obvious: Omega has a one-track mind on the subject of killing things. Coming to a room, Shadow decides to travel by what appears to be a gel-filled portal system. He emerges in a room full of Warriors, having taken the ill-fated left turn at Albuquerque.

As for Rouge and the GUNners, they’re being hit by what GLaDOS in Portal 2 called “your old friend, deadly neurotoxin.” Turns out this stuff doesn’t kill you; it only paralyzes you so the Warriors can eat you. In the words of Sgt. Calhoun, this place just got interesting.

Even more interesting is the fact that Shadow discovers he’s lost his Chaos Control so he has to take on the Warriors old school comic book style. After two pages, though, we get Eclipse’s big reveal, and we see he’s got some reptile on his wrist; no doubt Ian didn’t figure a way to work in a parrot during Pirate Plunder Panic and is making up for lost opportunity.

HEAD: I really really tried to be generous with Sega and Team Sonic here because Japan, being a country with pretty much one ethnic identity (except for groups such as the Ainu or Japanese aborigines), aren’t hung up about throwing around the terms “black” and “dark” to evoke negative emotions. One of the major exceptions is Osamu Tezuka’s renegade surgeon, Black Jack. He is as stitched together as Frankenstein’s monster. The left side of his face is darker because after he was in an explosion at the age of 8 he received a skin graft and his half-African friend was the tissue donor. I don’t think Nancy Woods or Chuck Clayton at Riverdale High would go that far for the sake of Archie or Jughead.

In 1960, the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel went to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which followed the career of a futuristic military man during the ongoing war against extraterrestrial “bugs.” Heinlein had been an active duty sailor for 5 years during the 1930s until tuberculosis forced him to leave the service. He made no bones about his pro-military views, sparking some controversy within the sci-fi community when he came out in favor of nuclear testing.

Starship Troopers came out just before the 1960s, and by the middle of the decade, as doubts about our involvement in Vietnam began to multiply, Heinlein’s novel began to seem more in tune with the mentality of the Korean War. It was always a hit with military readers and was practically required reading for Navy and Marine personnel.

By the time the film version was green-lighted, however, it was 1997, Heinlein had been dead for 9 years, and Vietnam and the Cold War were long over. So director Paul (Robocop) Verhoeven turned the novel into what appeared to be an old school war movie with special effect bugs until the last 5 minutes, when he tacked on a sequence in the form of a military propaganda film that essentially turned the story’s morality on its head and equated humanity with the bugs.

When he wrote Starship Troopers Heinlein put aside another work in progress: Stranger In a Strange Land. Another Hugo winner, this 1962 novel was inspired by the thought: What if a feral child, like Mowgli in Kipling’s Jungle Book, was raised by Martians instead of wolves? The book became a huge hit when the counterculture came into being in the mid-60s and earned the ex-sailor a number of hippie admirers who may not have even read Starship Troopers.

I have gone on this lengthy digression because “Shadow Fall” is a shout out not only to Starship Troopers but to old school war comics such as Sgt. Rock and the opening sequences of films such as Aliens and Predator where the machismo and militarism on the screen are so heavy they easily mask the smell of popcorn in the lobby. Of course, Sgt. Rock never had to contend with acid-blooded extraterrestrials.

It’s a simple enough conceit, and I suppose Ian needed something simple to work with after the reset of the comic books. Like Predator, what starts out as a simple military mission goes wrong for the hero, who here is confronted with Eclipse, a character who resembles a Knuckles fan chara. He’s also far too eloquent to be anything but a comic book bad guy. It’s pretty pathetic when the heroes in this story speak in Macho-military patois. As for Omega’s lines such as “I desire more aliens to shoot,” the less said the better.

I know this story is a build on the 2005 Shadow the Hedgehog game. I can fully understand why Team Sonic came out with this one. Shadow was an instant hit when he was introduced in Sonic Adventure 2, with a complexity that belied the superficial marketing of him as “evil Sonic,” and they wanted to cash in on that reception. Unfortunately, Sega gave Shadow the ability to use a motorcycle and firearms in the course of the gameplay, which struck me as something that an Ultimate Lifeform didn’t necessarily need. It reminds me of Captain Kirk’s very good question from Star Trek V: “What does God need with a starship?” It also makes me think of Barbie’s endless supply of accessories. Sega accessorized Shadow; they didn’t improve him.

And it was definitely not an improvement to learn that Shadow has alien blood coursing through his veins to explain his origin and why Doom is able to communicate with him. As for the plot point that Doom wants to use the Earthlings as an energy source, I defy anyone to tell me with a straight face that that fact was not torn, jagged and bleeding, from the Matrix franchise. This is a mediocre (so far) adaptation of a mediocre back story and a lazy way to bring on the chaos. Head Score: 4.

EYE: Jamal Peppers is one of the few artists who can draw both humans and furries without making one or the other look like visual hash (see my review of Sonic #255). Unfortunately, this does not mean that his humans, while well-proportioned and convincing as humans, are interesting visually. Commander Tower and the Gunners are the living embodiment of the plastic army men from the Toy Story franchise. It seems like only Rouge has an expressive face in this story. Eye Score: 7.

HEART: I understand that Ian is here working on what I’ve come to think of as a two-track story. There’s a primary plot (Earth/Mobius/whatever is under attack from dreaded space aliens) with a personal story reflecting or counterpointing the primary plot (in this case, will Shadow go over to the alien side?).

I hope I didn’t have to caution anyone with a Spoiler Alert, because Archie Comics has dumbed this story down so badly that it spoils itself. If nobody got that vibe from reading the story, the one-page ad featuring the cover of the next issue screaming “Shadow Gone Evil?!” leaves the readers with little if any doubt as to the plot here. But here in the Heart section we should be asking: “Why should we care?”

Obviously Shadow is part of a package deal: GUN couldn’t use him without also taking on Omega and Rouge. Omega I could understand, but Rouge? As I mentioned earlier, this mission isn’t a good fit for her skill set of being a jewel thief and spy. Imagine James Bond as a soldier fighting in the Falklands War of 1982, not even as an officer. As the story went on, I got the sense that the real reason Rouge is along for the ride is to state the painfully obvious for the benefit of the reader, something that’s beyond Omega’s even more limited capabilities.

Unlike Shadow who’s an emotional sinkhole and the one-note robot Omega, Rouge seems to appreciate the dangers inherent in the mission and isn’t hiding behind a wall of bravado. Still, I can’t help feeling she’s the wrong operative for this mission, but it’s not like GUN could borrow/draft anyone from the other book. Heart Score: 4.

FAN ART: Liz, Shakira and Beth draw portraits of Shadow. So does Tristan, though the Emohog is pretty much lost in the crowd of this cast drawing.

OFF-PANEL: OK, there’s the Rouge we all know so well!

FAN MAIL: Austin the Aussie gushes about this story arc and Shadow’s possible heel turn. Elijah is more of a Chaotix fan in general and a Vector groupie in particular. Billy gushes and wants to be Rouge’s #1 fan; Bill, you’d stand a better chance if you changed your name to Harry Winston.