Sonic Universe #66 (September 2014)

Yardley/Amash/Herms cover: Knuckles going glove to club with a Gaia monster in a watery venue. Knickles’s pose is clear and dynamic; that of the beastie, not so much. Could’ve been worse; Yardley could have worked Bean into the fight.

“The Great Chaos Caper Finale: Water Way To Go”

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

As the Hooligans make good their getaway with Chip and the Emerald, Nack does his Dishonest John imitation for the benefit of us oldsters. Bean meanwhile is all pouty about the absence of zaniness and schadenfreude for the benefit of nobody in particular. Nack counters by saying “we had one job … and did it right for once.”

As for the heroes, they’re still otherwise engaged with the Gaia Titan. Charmy announces that there’s no way out and Espio locates a waterlogged tunnel. This allows Vector to put his reptilian brain to good use and have Espio use one of his throwing daggers to open a switch which flushes the room right into the path of the fleeing Hooligans. What are the odds?

Nack doesn’t take it very well but his handgun forgot to take its Lasix this morning and is too waterlogged to perform. Then just as the Titan shows up Chip reunites with Knuckles demonstrating a serious inability to read the situation.

Cut to a one-page digression where Relic suggests that the plant she was investigating last time might be an extraterrestrial.

Cut to a one-page digression where Eclipse (remember him?) plans his revenge against Knuckles while working at a day care center for infant Arms.

Back where the action is, Vector’s come up with a plan but needs a diversion. Charmy supplies one by criticizing Bean’s bomb-making skills and blaming the Titan. While Bean freaks out at the Titan the others huddle up over the plan. I hope they know sign language because with a lot of bombs going off in an enclosed space I’d be surprised if they could hear much of anything. Once Espio has finished sabotaging the Hooligans’s scooter, they tackle Knuckles and demand the Emerald. Knuckles protests that Chip must’ve taken it with him, a story confirmed by the scanner on the scooter. Nack then decides that he’ll leave the heroes to the Titan, who seems to be able to function despite all the WMDs Bean has been throwing around, and he splits with Bean and Bark. And it only takes one page of Knuckles wailing on the Titan to make it go away in a cloud of Dark Gaia, so maybe there’s some truth to what Charmy said about Bean’s bomb-making abilities.

So how did the trick work? Espio sabotaged the scooter’s scanner while everyone was distracted by Bean’s abuse of the Titan. Chip was tucked between Vector’s cheek and gum for the duration while Charmy took the Emerald and “hid it real good.” Thus the Hooligans were sent off on a wild Emerald chase. Knuckles then offers to take the Emerald with him back to Angel Island in case the Hooligans aren’t as stupid as they look.

Back on the island, Knuckles debriefs for the benefit of Tikal, who flew in from her appearance in the Waves of Change story arc to be available when Relic shows up to help interrupt Knuckles’s attempt to take a nap. When Relic realizes who and what Tikal is she suffers an immediate fangasm. Oh and she also alerts Knuckles to the possibility of a space alien invasion, in case his echidna sense couldn’t pick up on the presence of Eclipse’s spaceship/nursery in the mountains of his own island. He really needs that nap!

And finally we cut to Eggman dressing down the Hooligans who apparently aren’t as stupid as they look and have caught on to being duped. But Eggy has a plan to sustain the comic book: something called a Chaos Emerald Championship is being held in the Casino Park Arena. Maybe that’s another name for the half-time show at the Super Sonic Bowl, I don’t know.

HEAD: The story line here is straightforward and works pretty well in a crazy comic book sort of way, but Ian shoehorns in too many unnecessary digressions in the form of story teases.

First there’s Relic and the business of the space alien invasion. This is the culmination of a digression from archaeology to technology to botany to astrobotany. It’s only at the tail end of the story arc that Ian remembers that Relic was supposed to have majored in archaeology, just in time for the meet-up with Tikal.

Then there’s Eclipse, last seen being sorely misused in the Shadowfall arc where as the only bad guy not plugged into the hive mind he sure didn’t act like it. Here he’s been reduced to working in the field of space alien daycare and lulling his charges to sleep with exposition. He’s also been reduced to that most tired of comic book motivations, revenge. I mean, wake me when that’s over!

I expected to see Eggman setting the table for the next story arc, but the prospect of some kind of sporting event, the Chaos Emerald Championship or whatever it is, fills me with dread. If it had been called Lame-O-Rama it would have had the same effect. You have to wonder who would stage an event like the Championship while the planet is still on the verge of coming apart. I guess it’s true that people really can get used to anything.

That just leaves the escape from the mines. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when taken together even if its component parts do. For instance, Charmy incites Bean to throw his trademark bombs at the Titan. This is done with the following unstated assumptions: that Bean would take the bait and attack the Titan, that Bean won’t kill the Titan, and that there won’t be any collateral damage among the heroes.

Then there’s the fact that Charmy hid the Chaos Emerald “real good.” I kind of wondered how he managed to do that, but Ian’s dialogue is the equivalent of “No comment.”

Then there’s the business with the scanner, which is supposed to be logical but the logic decays the longer you think about it. Espio, after all, is the resident ninja. He’s not a science geek like old school Rotor or new school Tails. I don’t remember his ever being portrayed as one in the comic. Yet here he is successfully messing with the scanner. I guess he must have learned ninjutsu at DeVry Tech.

And the less said about Vector treating Chip like a wad of chewing tobacco, the better.

Put it all together, the defeat of the Titan, the fooling of the Hooligans, and the rescue of Chip and the Emerald, and you get a story that’s appropriate for a comic book and not many other media. It’s well-done given the modest goal it set for itself, but you wonder if this is as good as the post-retcon comic will be. Head Score: 5.

EYE: Tracy Yardley is at the top of his game here. There are a lot of neat moments, from the page layout of the flush to the soggy SPLORT panel of Nack’s gun to Relic’s fangasm, it’s all good. EYE: 10.

HEART: Ironically, there doesn’t seem to be any real room for Heart in this story. The good guys escape the danger and foil the bad guys, but that’s pretty much a given. Relic veers from botanist back to archaeologist only because the story needs her to do so. Eclipse plays a vengeful villain on one note. There’s nothing challenging, or interesting, about most of the characters.

Relic is the only one that comes close to being more than interesting but ends up veering all over the highway. She starts out as an archaeologist, then a computer tech, then a botanist, and just when you think the old archaeologist will re-enter the story she becomes a parapsychologist instead.

An archaeologist, I’ve heard it said, is someone who studies dead societies and dead people. The only way they can do that is by whatever was left behind: inscriptions no matter how mundane, everyday artifacts, houses and their contents. Unlike the amateur smash-and-grab portrayals of archaeology in the films of the early 20^th century (and even later, such as the 1980 film “The Awakening” where Charlton Heston opens an old tomb by breaking down the door with a sledgehammer), the field has become methodical and scientific.

The meeting between Relic and Tikal is as unscientific as you can get by comparison. As scientists, archaeologists are not known for a belief in ghosts, which is what Tikal is. If the field were as simple as that, archaeologists would forego the background learning of the people and geography of an area, and trade in their tools for a Ouija board.

And with that, Ian takes the character of Relic irredeemably around the bend. She’s veered from one setting to another like a freshman changing majors for the 5^th or 6^th time. Like Espio getting outside his ninja skill set, the character’s definition is arbitrarily compromised for the sake of the story. Relic should take a break until Ian has a better idea of whom and what she is exactly. Heart Score: 2.

FAN ART: Kate draws the two noobs Relic and Sticks, Jackie draws Team Dark meeting Team … well, Knuckles is apparently on hiatus from Team Sonic so being teamed with Relic and Fixit makes them Team Angel (has a nice ring to it), Nicholas draws Sonic, Shadow, and two unidentifiables with the Master Emerald, and Avril draws Super Sonic and Burning Blaze.

OFF-PANEL: Mighty and Ray engage in labor-management negotiations at Archie HQ.

FAN MAIL: Jen, who has been reading the comic for 20 years (I can relate), wants to see Eclipse do more fighting and wants to know why the Chaotix are getting on each other’s nerves (Editorial doesn’t mention the possibility of Dark Gaia poisoning). Austin gushes about the impending story arc; again, Editorial prints this in the interest of flogging the upcoming.