Sonic Universe #60 (March 2014)

Yardley!/Amash/Herms cover: “Shadow Gone Evil?” the wording asks. Probably not. To paraphrase Jessica Rabbit: “He’s not evil, he’s just marketed that way.” It’s a good-looking cover but I’ve seen too many of these covers that turned out to be outright lies to take the content seriously.

“Shadow Fall Part 2: A Shadow In the Dark”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Jamal Peppers; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: Jack Morelli; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Shadow Warrior: Mike Pellerito; Sega Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau.

Black Death (not the bubonic plague but the Sega character) has gone into full-blown villain monologue mode which can be just as deadly. The GUN troops are keeping company with their atomic device while Deadly Neurotoxin is crashing the party. As for Shadow, B.D. has way too much faith in Eclipse; the only thing worse than a blabbermouth villain is one suffering from overconfidence.

Back with the GUNners, they’re flipping down their visors and activating their “rebreathers.” I like to think the full name of the device is “Respiration Apparatus for Breathing In Emergency Situations” or RABIES because when they’re on it looks like the wearers are foaming at the mouth. Rouge bad-mouths GUN while Omega bad-speakers humanity in general. BD wants Sauron … excuse me, Death’s Eye … to keep an eye on this while he checks in with Eclipse.

Eclipse is still doing an F2F with Shadow, who rediscovers that his Chaos Control isn’t getting any bars on the inside of the comet. GUN, meanwhile, thinks that staying in a sealed room filling up with Deadly Neurotoxin is preferable to shooting up the door and experiencing the unknown. Then a bunch of serpentine something-or-others crash the party and GUN is like “As you were.” Omega suggests moving down a few floors. Rouge is opposed to the withdrawal since Shadow hasn’t returned from recon, and GUN and Omega are all “SRSLY?” so everybody bugs out.

Once out of immediate danger, Rouge and “Capt. Andrews” get in each other’s face over who’s calling the shots here. Rouge reminds him that GUN is supposed to support Team Dark, and Andrews is all “OK, which way do we go?” Omega is all for dropping further down since the Comet appears to be a superficial structure with a hollow center; I hope we can’t say the same about this story when it’s over.

Meanwhile, Eclipse demonstrates his superiority over Shadow by putting him in a choke hold. And, since he missed out on all the psychic fun and games of the Countdown to Chaos arc, it’s Eclipse’s turn to blows Shadow’s mind:

It seems that after Super Shadow defeated Doom, he didn’t know that Doom had “left a lesser-mind behind.” Lesser-mind? Let’s just call it a “horcrux,” OK? Since BD knew he had to up his game against Shadow, he then created Eclipse who, unlike the rest of Doom’s minions, is not hard-wired into the hive-mind and basically has free will. Eclipse then gives Shadow the old “Join us!” speech which doesn’t go over very well, so Eclipse has to up his game by calling in both BD and Sauron. “Death’s Eye,” my … eye!

With a psychedelic flashback slide show going on in the background, the three of them gang up on Shadow’s psyche, such as it is, until he screams “GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” That actually works here, which tells you the relative strength of the bad guys’ minds. Eclipse asks BD for “Best two out of three?” but Shadow prefers to try strangling Eclipse instead. It’s obvious Shadow’s not about to turn on his own so BD gives him the old Vulcan mind meld and we get what appears (to comic book villains who don’t know any better) to be a heel turn by Shadow. He’s talking the talk but the question is how far he will walk the walk. With Eclipse and Shadow leading the way, the Arms go off after the GUNs.

The GUNS, meanwhile are at a literal crossroad with no ideas where they’re going. Andrews and Rouge engage in the kind of action movie dialogue which hints that if this mission is a success they’ll be exchanging witticisms and swapping spit just before the final credits roll. But Omega must have done something right because Shadow and Eclipse and the Arms emerge from one of the tunnels facing them. After some confusing artwork, Eclipse and the troops go after the retreating GUNs while Shadow takes on his Team Darkmates, which is a sure sign that the heel turn simply wasn’t.

HEAD: If this story hadn’t already been called “A Shadow In The Dark,” it could have had another name; I’d like to suggest “Cliches On Parade.” We have the Macho Military, the Space Aliens who are also the Blabbing Villains, the Military Versus Heroes, the Angry Pre-combat Cross-Gender Banter, the Enemy Attempt to Recruit the Hero with accompanying special effects, and the Probably Phony Heel Turn. It seems to me that the change in continuity affected Ian Flynn at least as much as it has the rest of the cast.

Speaking of whom, I’d like to amend something from my review of the previous issue. I stated that Omega comes off as one-dimensional. I was being too restricted; everybody in this story is one-dimensional! The GUNs are nothing but clichéd soldiers, the aliens are one-note bad guys, Eclipse monologues with the best of them. Shadow pretty much becomes a blank slate and does whatever the story needs him to do, whether it’s resist Eclipse’s offer or appear to turn against Team Dark.

And no, I didn’t buy it for a second. If the fake defection fooled you in the beginning, the end of the story was the tip-off when Shadow just happened to be left alone with his team. If that isn’t a set-up for undoing the heel turn, I don’t know what is. Except the cover art for the next issue.

And I still think Rouge is all wrong in this story. All she does is fret about Shadow and argue with whomever GUN can spare. She could just as easily have been snarky and cynical about GUN’s involvement, but then they did bring the nuclear device to the party. Still, Rouge should never have been on this mission; her skills set and her personality both argue against it.

Shadow’s alleged heel turn isn’t even new to the comic! In “Welcome to the Dark Side” (S100), Knuckles appeared to make a deal to join up with Dimitri. Even if you’re old enough to remember something that happened in the comic in the same year as 9/11, it was during Ken Penders’ Green Knuckles period so you can be forgiven for forgetting.

Given the age of the clichés, it’s surprising that the story has anything close to decent pacing. That’s a compliment considering how tired the story elements are. Either the reset left Ian groping for a halfway decent story, or he thought that a cliché grab bag was as much as the readers deserved, or the pressure of writing for four Archie comics (Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Universe, Mega Man and New Crusaders) is starting to take its toll. Head Score: 3.

EYE: Jamal Peppers does as good a job as possible with the material; the center–page spread is impressive. But that can’t make up for the lame character design for the aliens. Even if Death’s Eye was a Sega invention, it pales in comparison to the eye of Sauron, and deservedly so. Death looks particularly stupid, like an action figure your kid brother pulled apart and then discarded because he lost the legs. The breathing apparatus was a direct ripoff of the Benzite breathing apparatus from the “Memory Alpha” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation; with those bubbles Jamal Peppers couldn’t make it look convincing, only ridiculous. I’ve always believed that even great art in a comic can’t rescue a weak story, and in this story, neither element can carry its own weight. Eye Score: 3.

HEART: The one Heart factor, aside from Rouge’s unconvincing mother-hen fretting about Shadow routine, is wrapped up in the question of whether Shadow indeed had gone over to the other side. Since it wasn’t all that convincing, except to absolute comic book noobs, whatever Heart potential this story had drained away by the end of the issue. Heart Score: 2.

FAN ART: Omega by Vicktoria, Rouge and Shadow by Daisy and Lily, a gathering of hedgehogs by Brendon, and Benjamin draws Shadow either going super or flashing back to the Green Knuckles era.

OFF-PANEL: A pretty weak Death’s Eye joke. But considering what they have to work with, I’m not surprised.

FAN MAIL: Lucas wants to know if Capt. Metal will return and why Marine talks like a pirate. Seems to me she talks more like a slango than a sailor. I wouldn’t bet on Capt. Metal coming back if what Blaze says (endlessly) about the Sol Emeralds is really true. Tanner wants to know if this arc is based on the Shadow the Hedgehog game; you want to tell him, Capt. Obvious? Nat asks what he needs to do if he’s a bad drawer but wants to work for Archie Comics someday. His art can’t be any worse than some of the fan art I’ve seen on the Internet.

Next Month: “When Strikes Eclipse.” “When Eclipse Strikes” works just as well, but they jazzed the word order so that it sounds more dramatic and portentous. Personally, I think it sounds like someone too much to Yoda listening has been.