Sonic Universe #63 (June 2014)

Tracy Yardley cover: portrait of the Chaotix, with Vector fooling with a magnifying glass, Charmy piping in accordance with Archie house standards, Espio being all ninja, and Knuckles posing.

“The Great Chaos Caper Part 1: On The Hunt”

Story: Ian Flynn; Art: Tracy Yardley, Ink: Jim Amash; Color: Matt Herms; Lettering: Jack Morelli; Assistant Editor: Vincent Lovallo; Editor: Paul Kaminski; Editor-in-Chief: Victor Gorelick; Suits: Mike Pellerito and Jon Goldwater; Sega Licensing rep: Anthony Gaccione.

Just a friendly reminder: the world is in the middle of a cosmic upheaval. That’s supposedly what’s driving the plot in the Sonic comics. Now back to the story.

After the display of apocalyptic special effects, Ian is really having trouble getting traction. The sequence involving the Master Emerald was a ball of confusion; was the planet hosing down the Emerald or was the Emerald getting squirted or what? Then Knuckles has a conversation with an unknown person by unknown means. Is it being done by telepathy or an unseen sound system or what? Ian isn’t saying and Tracy is no help, either.

But they then dish up two pages where things are even worse. We’re introduced to Relic, a pica who’s also supposed to be an archaeologist but who spends the first page of her 2-page introduction auditioning to be a mascot for the Geek Squad. She finally shuts up at the bottom of the page because Knuckles needs her to babysit the Master Emerald while he gets on with the plot.

Knuckles then relocates to Pumpkin Hill in search of “the spirit tied to the world’s health.” Anybody who played “Sonic Unleashed” knows that refers to [Spoiler Alert] Light Gaia, aka Chip, or rather the interplay between Light and Dark Gaia; in the game it’s a yin-yang thing. So we’re miles ahead of Knuckles when it comes to the basic story line; everything else is filler.

Anyway, upon arriving at an abandoned church, he discovers not only that there’s a serious monster infestation happening but that Matt Herms has discovered the Lisa Frank color palette. Long and tedious segment short: after fighting them off on his own for a page, the Chaotix show up and make the nightmare beasties disappear. Literally.

After a page of exposition, Knuckles admits that he left the Master Emerald in the care of Relic, which leads to a panel of ribbing by Vector. The croc also announces that the Chaotix are hunting down Chaos Emeralds for Princess Sally, though given their tendency to clown around I have to wonder whether Sally didn’t just give them busywork to keep them out of everybody else’s fur. Still, Espio says that Sally thinks that an emerald might be in the zone, which is enough for Knuckles to throw in.

The good news is Knuckles is able to track the emerald; the not-so-good news is that it seems to be on the move. Espio then informs Knuckles and us that Eggman has hired “a band of mercenaries” to track down emeralds as well; he knows this because of their own “intelligence,” and I am so trying not to make any jokes about such an easy target. As if to prove my point, or at least to pad out this story, we get a page of Charmy doing his Shaggy Rogers impersonation and disrupting the mission. We then get a page of Knuckles, Vector and Espio climbing up the side of a hill. At the top, they find Charmy hiding inside a jack-o-lantern out of either fear or shame until Knuckles gives him a pep talk. But Vector tells Knuckles to start hustling the plot, so he gets a bead on the Emerald and declares that it’s still on the move in the abandoned mines at the bottom of the zone. Before they can move down, though, they almost get blown up by the aforementioned mercenaries and AC/DC cover band: Bean, Bark and Nack dba The Hooligans.

HEAD: Why Ian decided to make Relic an archaeologist I have no idea, unless he meant to connect her and Prof. Pickle further down the road. Too bad she doesn’t act like an archaeologist.

The closest many people get to archaeology is to sit through an Indiana Jones marathon. But I’ve met working archaeologists as well as having taken a graduate-level course in Middle Eastern archaeology and I can say that this story’s depiction of Relic isn’t even archaeology lite: it’s archaeology free.

Ian is aided and abetted in this by Tracy Yardley, who seems to have dropped the “!” from his professional name. It’s always struck me as an affectation to distinguish him from any other Tracy Yardleys in the funny book industry, but I digress.

Archaeology is defined as “the study of human activity in the past, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts (also known as eco-facts) and cultural landscapes (the archaeological record).” And Tracy Yardley has studiously avoided showing any of that in connection with Relic. If there’s one way to tell an archaeologist it’s by their surroundings. If those surroundings don’t include bits of parchment with writing, bits of pottery, coins, clay jars and so forth, someone’s in the wrong line of work. Even though Ian states that Relic is just passing through, her preoccupation with the laptop computer is the worst possible introduction. I kept waiting for Knuckles to ask “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

She’s also been fitted out with two of the cheapest character traits possible: a collection of snooty quasi-British mannerisms with an implied accent, and a mechanical sidekick. The mannerisms made her seem too much like Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers in “Saving Mr. Banks.” That in itself wouldn’t have been so bad but Ian ruined her rollout by having her spend two pages vomiting up great doughy lumps of raw, undigested exposition. It’s hard to believe that this is the same writer who introduced us to Coral the Priestess of the Eusebes Shrine simply by showing her playing the glowstick for Aurora Chao. That one panel set the stage in a perfect and perfectly charming way; too bad she’s proving to be a weapons-grade whiner. Here, it feels like Relic is reading her resume out loud to us at the top of her voice. We want to like this character, we don’t want to hire her!

And the less said about Fixit the better. Having invoked Indiana Jones earlier, I’m reminded of how well having a sidekick worked out for him: it didn’t. First there was Sallah in “Raiders of the Lost Arc,” then Short Round in “Temple of Doom,” followed by Dr. Marcus Brody in “Last Crusade” who actually appeared in the first film but for the third film was the recipient of a bumbling comic relief transplant, and finally Mutt Williams in “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” as a dollar store James Dean. Making the sidekick into a droid only heightens my distaste, and is too reminiscent of Bubo the mechanical owl/R2-D2 ripoff from the “Clash of the Titans” movies. Consign him to the scrap heap and do it quickly!

Overall, Ian is very leisurely in his pacing here, possibly because the soup is so thin in the first place. Knuckles reacts to the world crisis, hires an emerald sitter, runs into the Chaotix while fighting DayGlo monsters, then they run into Team Hooligan. That’s pretty much it for Part 1; everything else is filler, including the battle scene and Charmy’s freak-out over the G-g-g-g-GHOSTS! This didn’t need to go 20 pages but Ian found the way. Things happen but there are really no surprises. I kept wishing that, after Knuckles took his leave of Relic, we’d get a page of Relic Skyping someone on the laptop that’s suddenly working just fine, saying: “No, no, he doesn’t suspect a thing, poor lamb. He thinks I’m hopeless with computers. Typical male! Anyway, the path to the Master Emerald is wide open. I’ll keep you posted. Be seeing you, Rouge dear.” And you’ve got an entirely different comic. It’s been a long time since I allowed myself the freedom to rewrite a Sonic comic story; sad to say, this story goaded me into it. Head Score: 6.

EYE: I have nothing against the design of Tracy Yardley’s Relic who, like the undersea creatures drawn by Jennifer Hernandez (or chibi-jen-hen to use her deviantArt handle) brings some much-needed cute to the Knuckles/Chaotix story. But she does need a serious rewrite at some point; I just can’t get past that.

Beyond that, the artwork for the Pumpkin Hill zone is pretty much foreordained by Sonic Adventure 2 and Tracy plays along. Visually, the Pumpkin Hill monsters are something of a revelation since typically the Archie colorists don’t go in for electric colors. Of course, back in the day when the comic first came out there was a heavy reliance on what amounted to primary color with no nuances of shading so it’s useful to remember how far the book has come. Eye Score: 10.

HEART: In the same way that Relic totally undercut her archaeologist’s cred by her obsessing about the laptop, Knuckles has a moment that brings the story to a screeching halt because it’s just wrong.

I’m referring to the scene in Pumpkin Hill where Charmy, after freaking out about Knuckles’s ghost rap, gets his self-esteem re-inflated by Knuckles. I had no idea that the reset of the comic continuity meant character changes at this profound of a level.

Let’s remember who Knuckles was and where he came from. As far as Sega was concerned, he was the Last Echidna; no family, no friends, not even Sonic at first. His original romantic interest was Rouge in Sonic Adventure 2. Then Archie (well, Archie writer Ken Penders, really) invented an echidna civilization and created a hot girlfriend, Julie-Su, for Knuckles. Sega never really caught up to the idea, and they only tried one time with “Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood” to work another echidna into the mix, a female named Shade. But Knuckles started out as the consummate Lone Wolf and thus he has remained.

Until this issue. Then all of a sudden it’s left to Knuckles to snap Charmy out of his attack of cowardice which resulted in pretty much dropping the Chaotix into a canyon. OK, someone had to assure Charmy there was no harm and no foul. It’s a valid development and elevates Charmy above his comic relief status within the Chaotix.

Watching Knuckles go Care Bear all of a sudden, however, throws the balance off. Granted I have a hard time seeing Espio or especially Vector as alternatives, but this is carrying the reset to extremes. I’m prepared to put up with the merely cosmetic changes that have happened (Antoine and Sally’s wardrobe) and will happen (the use of Ace bandages as fashion accessories in the impending Sonic Boom game and comic story). This, however, reminds me why I dislike retcons so much: it’s an admission that there are no rules or at least that those we’ve been following can just get tossed out the window. Heart Score: 6.

FAN ART: Tan and Rokes draw Knuckles, Nathan draws lots of Knuckles, and Dennis does a 3D diarama of figures whom I really can’t recognize aside from Tails and Bunnie(?). He gets points for trying something other than a 2D drawing but needed to anticipate that the word balloons would be unreadable when Archie was finished reducing the photo.

OFF-PANEL: Charmy acting like a little kid and Knuckles acting like a hothead. This is old school Chaotix.

LETTERS: Lyris comes out as a Silver-Blaze shipper but Editorial has no plans to accommodate her or the rest of us. Patrick wants to know if Sonic Rivals will be adapted to the comic (a head-to-head race game? I have my doubts), and if Honey the Cat will show up. Editorial admits they’d be glad to throw Honey into the mix but they haven’t worked out a story for her. Heather wants to know how Sally went from botic to biological which leads to yet another plug for getting caught up with the continuity via an app. I don’t know; I like the feel of a paper comic book. That’s how I roll old school.