Sonic Universe #61 (April 2014)

Yardley!/Amash/Herms cover: Extreme close-up of Rouge; too bad the bar code covers up the girls. We also get Shadow and Omega waiting for Eclipse to pounce on them. Like we didn’t know that was going to happen.

“Shadowfall Part 3: A Matter of Trust”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Jamal Peppers; Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: Jack Morelli; Assiatant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Piano Man: Mike Pellerito; Suit: Jon Goldwater; Sega Character Business and Licensing reps: Anthony Gaccione and Cindy Chau.

Under the watchful eye of … Eye, Shadow squares off against Rouge and Omega, who’d better hope his surge protector is the latest model. Eye and Omega, unfortunately, are on the same page of this comic book in terms of advocating destruction. Yeah, like that’s going to happen with two issues to go.

As for bubonic plague, aka Black Death, he notes that the Force is strong with Shadow. In a rambling monologue for his own benefit (and, incidentally, ours), he says he had hoped to invade Earth/Mobius/wherever “quickly and quietly;” guess he realized how well Shock and Awe worked in Iraq. But he’s ready to be flexible depending on how the fight works out.

Eclipse, meanwhile, phones it in from the battle between the GUNs and the aliens, making the rounds by FWASHing from one GUN to another and apparently administering choke holds from behind; Jamal Peppers is understandably vague on this point. Still, we’re treated to Eclipse and Death talking shop in the midst of the fighting, with Death reminding Eclipse he’s in no mood to have him violating food safety standards. Long and tedious scene short: Eclipse orders Capt. Andrews, who has been shelled like an oyster, and the nuclear device be brought along to a new location: the nursery. Just like the fast food chains: a meal AND a toy for the kids.

Ian must have figured that boredom with the story would be setting in at this point, so we get one page of fighting before we get treated to a flashback. Remember two issues back with the briefing that ended with Rouge and Omega being asked to stay after class? Here’s what they talked about: turns out Commander Tower isn’t too comfortable with Shadow’s alien status so he tells the two to be ready to “neutralize” the hedgehog if necessary. He tries to sound noble and conflicted about this and fails.

So now, back to the brawl. Rouge tells Omega to let Shadow up easy, then launches into her own monologue and tries tough-talking Shadow out of going over to the bad guys. His response is to whip out a Chaos spear which he aims at Eye while Omega starts throwing the kitchen sink at it, all to no avail. The Eye blinks and leaves while Shadow comes down with a migraine before the “I’m OK” scene kicks in. Ian goes for a warm and fuzzy reconciliation but given the raw material he has to work with doesn’t quite pull it off. It doesn’t help that he uses “comradery” in place of “camaraderie” when neither word really works in context. Like I said, consider what Ian has to work with in terms of characters. Even Omega is like “May we resume the violent conquest now?” They do, but Shadow insists on taking the point and tackling Death himself. So he ends up sending Rouge and Omega into an apparently empty chamber while he mixes it up with the Arms. Show-off!

We cut back to Rouge and Omega making their way into the nursery where Capt. Andrews brings them up to speed. Seems like the aliens still have the nuke, and Shadow tells Rouge to avoid Eclipse. We then get a splash page of Death and Shadow shuffling their people around. Eye then gets a page where he tries talking Shadow out of fighting and gets nowhere. Which brings Shadow in contact with Death: welcome to the boss level.

HEAD: Again, the story offers way more conversation and monologueing than is helpful. We also get a delayed addendum to a flashback from Part 1. This may have worked in terms of spreading the story across the page allotment but in practice becomes a major speed bump.

Eclipse comes off as the worst character in this story because the dialogue he’s given to say undercuts his character. It’s one thing to have a consciousness that isn’t plugged into the hive, but did he have to demonstrate it by using horribly breezy phrases such as “FYI” and “coming up aces”? Anybody who tries to speak in this way will soon make a mistake in usage because it’s not the sort of thing you grew up saying. That’s part of Antoine’s linguistic shtick; it’s not just a matter of garbled syntax and unfamiliarity with foreign grammar but also not having the cultural experience of growing up within a milieu to get a feel for the language from that perspective. Here Eclipse tries to sound with it but can’t avoid sounding phony.

On that subject, Rouge comes off no better when she lectures Shadow about being brainwashed by the Arms. I realize that even Sega had a hard time writing for Rouge. Her line when she was giving back the Master Emerald shards to Knuckles because “They stink like echidnas do” always struck me as being gratuitously racist, but not nearly as bad in the dialogue department as when she actually says “Better stay frosty” in Sonic Heroes.

I know that writing for space aliens isn’t easy; writers tend to go overly-formal so they end up sounding like something out of a Hollywood Bible epic. One example of this is the ludicrous Ro-Man from the celebrated bad sci-fi film “Robot Monster.” Or they sound too hip and they end up like cartoon characters or like, well, like Eclipse. They mixed it up in the Men In Black film franchise and Ian seems to have settled on ponderous for the Arms and slango for Eclipse. That would underscore the characters’ personalities … if they had any.

I’ve received an e-mail from a dissatisfied Sonic customer complaining that the rebooted comic seems to have forgotten all about the personalities of the characters. I can totally relate. When I was writing Sonic fanfiction, it was a priority for me as a writer to be able to see the world of the story through the eyes and from inside the skin of the characters. Once I could do that, the stories wrote themselves. But once you reduce the characters to broadly-typed labels as Ian did on the very first page of this issue, with Shadow as “alien hybrid” and Rouge as “GUN spy” and Omega as “walking arsenal,” you’ve just kissed any kind of effective characterization goodbye.

What I really fear is that Sega is perfectly content to have it this way. They would be, since the only writing they engage in is having someone else come up with premises to plug into video games. The best they’ve done in this regard has been in “Sonic and the Black Knight” and the “Sonic Adventure” games. Still, it’s too soon to tell whether the heavy-handed direction of Sega will allow Ian to do any kind of real storytelling here or whether the characters will continue to be reduced to ciphers and stereotypes.

Shadow’s bout of villainy, of course, does come undone here though I don’t think Rouge’s hectoring of him should get any credit. And of course he doesn’t inflict any damage on the GUNs, since he’s kept in check by the rest of Team Dark. This was the point that was supposed to hold our interest coming off the previous installment and which, true to the nature of writing for comic books, promptly evaporates in this installment. The nuclear device continues to function as the McGuffin of this story and the neurotoxin is a convenient way to threaten the GUN troops without inflicting any real peril or posing any real threat. About the only prediction I can make at this point is that none of the key characters will die in the final installment because Ian needs to bring them back into the comic as circumstances and plotlines demand. And some of these characters need to die, very very much. But Archie Comics have their standards and serious writing isn’t one of them. Head Score: 3.

EYE: Jamal Peppers does good work with the character modeling, especially in the fight scenes. In fact, his modeling for the characters in the non-fighting scenes such as the Cmdr. Tower flashback, feels like he doesn’t know what the characters are supposed to do, either. He also has to fight against the tendency to skip doing backgrounds in some places, a fight he loses more often than not. Eye Score: 7.

HEART: The Heart moment in this story was supposed to be Shadow struggle to break the Arms’s hold on his mind. But there was no struggle. He chucks a Chaos spear at Eye and tells Omega to blast it, and that’s pretty much the extent of the struggle. He spends the rest of the sequence looking like he’s trying to shake off a headache. The attempt at re-establishing camaraderie is a weak one.

This sequence may have been meant to justify Rouge’s coming along on a mission where her skill set didn’t justify it; Team Dark becomes a package deal. But it really didn’t help, in part because it’s almost all about Shadow. Rouge is along to lecture Shadow and Omega is there to shoot things up and that’s about the extent of it.

Rouge was never in danger of taking a bullet meant for Shadow, which (Spoiler alert) is what Anna did for Elsa in “Frozen.” OK, it was a sword instead of a bullet, but Anna still saved her sister with her last breath, literally. The words and the looks between the members of Team Dark just weren’t in the same league.

Having invoked “Frozen,” I have to renew my conviction that if Archie is still laboring under the illusion that there is a pre-adolescent boy demographic that’s the prime audience for the comics, they’re hopelessly lost. That may have been true when the kids from Riverdale were still freshmen but it’s a different century in a different world. This is an age where “Frozen” has become the top grossing animated film of all time, and where the latest incarnation of “My Little Pony” is gearing up for its 5^th season with an audience including viewers beyond the little girl demographic in terms of age and gender. It would be the supreme irony if Archie Comics, having been forced to reset the continuity, persists in their short-sighted view of the audience for whom they produce the books. Heart Score: 4.

FAN MAIL: Patrick wants to know if Nicole will be getting her own arc and if Honey the Cat is going to put in an appearance. Well, if Honey can inspire fan fiction and fan art and at least one fan group at deviantArt, anything is possible. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though. Thomas just gushes.

FAN ART: Dylan draws Shadow, William draws Shadow and Rouge, Danny draws Mephiles, and Kyle draws Eclipse and his boyz.

OFF-PANEL: Aleah Baker tries to account for Eclipse’s outlook. Could’ve been worse; he could have been exposed to Sonic Babies. And I suppose if you were created with the intent of interplanetary conquest, it would subvert that goal if you’d grown up learning about the magic of friendship.