S82 [May2K]

Spaz/Harvo/Ray cover: Very reminiscent in several respects of the cover of S70. Only this one doesn't have Elias. Or Snively. Or Kodos. Or Arachnis. I like the way the composition has been reduced to its essential elements. Sonic's mouth is a little weird; reminds me of the scene from Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" where the ghost of Jacob Marley undoes the cloth bandage wrapped around his head and his jaw drops down to his breast. And the large circular thing in the background reminds me of that giant tire off the highway in Akron or wherever it is. Still, a nicely done cover.

Lack-Of-Credit Page: For whatever reason, only the team that did the front story gets credits this time around. Everybody who did the back two stories either wish to remain anonymous, or else they got royally ripped off. Anyway, Spaz and Ribiero contribute a drawing of half of the SA playables.

"Night of Chaos!"

Story: Karl Bollers; Art: Breakdowns by Pat Spaziante and James Fry, pencils by Nelson Ribiero; Ink: Andrew Pepoy; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Color: Frank Gagliardo; Editorial: G-Force.

It's nighttime in the Big City and Knothole's legend in his own mind, Sonic the Hedgehog, is doing some game-based calisthenics. How come I can never get him to behave like that when I'm playing him, or anyone else? They always insist on dying on me!

Sonic then notices some police action and we FINALLY get to the start of the game action as The Man realizes that they're in trouble as they go up against The Monster: Zero Chaos, looking like some kind of Squid Man From Outer Space. Sonic tries his luck after the cops retreat, but Chaos, true to his elemental nature, lets himself drain away as both Sonic and Robotnik spout game-based dialogue. I know this is kind of short, but after having seen the game fights once I've taken to fast-forwarding through them.

HEAD: It's a good set-up, at least for Sonic, and a mere 7 pages worth of action this time around. It's still pretty true to the game, especially the dialogue. It's official: the train has finally left Station Square. Head Score: 8.

EYE: Ribiero's task isn't easy: to match the game's ability to display the fluid motion of Chaos in two dimensions, but he gets an able assist from Spaz and Fry who plotted things out and then let him and Pepoy finish the job. Sonic's pose in front of the lightning bolt and the layout on pages [5-6] are particularly impressive. And the posing of Sonic is certainly more dynamic than in the game, where between battles and dashes from here to there he bounces up and down bending at the knees like a character in an early 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon. I'll pretend I didn't see the product placement on page 4. Eye Score: 8.

HEART: Not this time. With any luck, they'll save the payoff for story's end.

"Door To The Past"

Even though this story went uncredited on the credits page, it's safe to assume that this too is the work of Penders, Butler, Eklund, Gagliardo and Williams.

Knuckles gets a private showing of some artifact in the Ancient Ruins. "This looks sweet, whatever it is!", he says. "Kind of some weapon, I guess!" [sic] Seems he got so carried away admiring it, whatever it is, he forgot his syntax. The truth, however, is very revealing.

Any Trekker worth his/her com badge can look at the pieces on display and realize that Knuckles is in fact holding a Klingon bat'tleh. This is the kind of little in-joke that Ken Penders dearly loves. Unfortunately for Ken, this is also the kind of little in-joke that gives the boys in Archie Comics' Legal Department hot and cold running diarrhea. No doubt this is why one of The Powers That Be ordered that the title logo cover the weapon itself rather than Knuckles's tail and legs. It may also explain why Knuckles's syntax got mangled: in moving the word balloon, some of the dialogue must have gotten sliced and diced.

Anyway, Knuckles then conveniently drops the bat'tleh out of camera range and starts tripping. Enter: Tikal!

I have been waiting for this moment ever since the Sonic Adventure adaptation began. I can see why Ken chose to have her introduce the back story this way; in the game itself, it's done in a series of disjointed flashbacks which the player has to piece together on the fly and which finally come together toward the denouement. And that's even trickier than all those one-page teases Bollers did of Space Station Pokemon (S67-74) because there's some actual narrative happening!

Unfortunately, the story not only drags in the Mysterious Country Cats (who have nothing to do with SA), but also ignores a key element to the game story and glosses over...OK, I'm assuming you've read the 2 pages of flashback, which are mostly on-target. So make yourselves comfortable and somebody ring the bell: school's back in.

One thing you have to understand about this story, one thing that's so obvious it can escape easy notice, is that this is a Japanese story line. And there are notable Japanese sensibilities that unfortunately have been blurred in this adaptation.

We're not told in the game, for one thing, where the ancient echidna civilization came from, but Ken's explanation is good enough to suffice. Unfortunately, Ken leaves the impression that the migrant echidnas were benign, which is a flagrant contradiction of a key point of the subplot. I'll grant you it's not an easy thing to find: on the game tape I received, only if you bump into one of the echidnas wandering around the ancient civilization (during Amy Rose's flashback, I think), will you receive this pivotal bit of information:

"Our tribe has lived with war for a long time. Wars have made us rich, but the Chief's daughter doesn't agree with us."

And there you have it. Without that tidbit, Tikal's line "Greed is our enemy" makes no sense. If I were writing this, I'd have said that the founding echidnas were exiled from Albion for being too militant. And like Khan Singh or Satan from Milton's "Paradise Lost" they'd have willingly sailed to the "New Territories," as they would have preferred reigning in Hell to serving in Heaven. And Ken wouldn't have had to shoehorn in the alleged split between the scientific and warrior castes as some kind of motivation. The Chief was a war-monger. End of explanation.

To any student of 20^th Century history, it's painfully obvious what's going on here: the Chief and his society are a symbol of Japan in the 1930s and 1940s as it was run by the militarists who put the entire country on a war footing and just about wrecked the whole place.

World War II is a period of history with which Japan is still coming to terms. Even in amine, an art form that usually features historical minutiae and digressions, very few have covered events of the war years. In fact, only two anime of note do so.

Grave of the Fireflies is an animated adaptation of Nosaka Akiyuki's best-selling book. Akiyuki was a child back then and the book chronicles, among other things, the death of his little sister from malnutrition (which was pandemic in the country toward the end of the war). "Grave of the Fireflies" was his way of coming to terms with his sister's death as well as his own survival. Antonia Levi, in her book about anime, "Samurai From Outer Space," unfairly dismisses the film as a "tear-jerker."

Then there is Keiji Nakazawa's Hadashi no Gen or Barefoot Gen, also a semi-autobiographical work. Nakazawa, like his young hero Gen Nakaoka, was a young boy who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time on August 6, 1945: he was standing by a solid wall when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He survived the blast, which killed his father, older sister and one brother. His mother also survived by a stroke of luck but suffered from radiation sickness for the rest of her days; a baby girl she gave birth to just after the blast died at age four months.

Clearly, the Japanese have a LOT to deal with, even more that the United States in the years immediately following our experience in Vietnam (until we basically wished the whole thing away thanks to the Reagan presidency and a spate of Sylvester Stallone "Rambo" and Chuck Norris "Missing In Action" movies). And one of the biggest issues for Japan has been the atom. For a society that has put a high value on being at one with Nature, it was a jolt to have Nature turn so violently destructive. Even for people living on a string of volcanic islands.

The same kind of psychic trauma happened in the West, actually, when the Titanic went down. At that time, people honestly believed that Man had conquered Nature. Progress was a one-way street, mankind was always moving up and improving (something Darwin himself never believed about evolution, BTW), and science and technology were the keys to the gates of the New Jerusalem. Thus people easily bought the hype that the state-of-the-art Titanic was unsinkable, setting themselves up for the shock of their lives. Something to think about next time you want to dismiss the movie as a chick flick with kickin' special effects.

OK, Chaos is a symbol of the atom bomb: a force of nature answerable to nobody but which can exact a terrible vengeance. If Chaos is the bomb, and the Chief (dubbed "Pachamac" by Ken) represents Tojo and the other militarists who incited the war, what about Tikal? And the Chao?

Tikal is the spiritual center of the story: a good Buddhist at one with all things. One of her key lines, "Attacking other countries, stealing and killing, can't be the right path to peace," was unfortunately left on the cutting-room floor but it's absolutely essential in understanding her character and her being out of step with the rest of the echidna tribe. She is a pacifist. She's able to commune with the Chao. And even with Chaos. She admitted to E-102 Gamma during its flashback that she was "surprised the first time" she saw Chaos, but goes on to describe him as a "very loving and gentle creature" who has extended his protection over the Chao babies as well as the master emerald. Obviously the SS [Station Square] Police don't know Chaos as well as she does.

At this point, let me say a word about the Chao: ghoti. It's pronounced "fish."

George Bernard Shaw dreamed up this word to demonstrate some of the absurdities of the English language. The GH is pronounced like the "gh" in "enough," the O is pronounced like the "o" in "women," and the TI is pronounced like the "ti" in "nation." We run into similar anomalies at this point in the story. Do we pronounce "Chao" to rhyme with "chow" or with "K-O?" Or do we start pronouncing "Chaos" as if it rhymed with "Chows?" Personally, I go with the pronunciation "chow." It's either that or call them "those little onion heads."

Remember the Tamagotchi craze from a while back? Sega obviously did, because even though the Chao can be found in several inessential places in the game (such as the second floor of the Station Square Hotel), if you have the DreamCast VMU (Video Memory Unit) you can hatch, adopt and raise one of the little critters. Suneet Shah's Sonic Zone Web site has a separate page with instructions for taking care of your Chao.

The game does not cover the origin of the Chao, unless there's something in the documentation I don't know about. Given Japanese history during the war, though, I can come up with a fitting scenario. On one of the echidna tribe's military excursions to a neighboring country, they slaughtered a people who let themselves get cut down to the last man defending a particular site. Inside that site, however, were not gold or other valuables but...eggs. These were taken away as booty to the echidna city and when they hatched into the Chao the Chief must have reasoned: "Maybe they'll make good slaves when they get bigger." This would track with the experience of Korean and Chinese prisoners who were treated as slave labor by the Japanese after their countries were overrun. Korean women didn't fare much better, being forced to serve as prostitutes for the benefit of Japanese soldiers in conquered territories.

All this leads up to Archie's soft-sell of the fateful night when the Chief attempted to appropriate the seven Chaos Emeralds. Tikal realized too late that her father wanted them because "the seven emeralds can change our thoughts into power" - the "Total Power" the Chief spoke of. Yet Ken and Steve downplay what happened next: on the Chief's command, the soldiers not only ran toward the master emerald, but right over Tikal and the Chao babies. Whereas the act is relegated to one rather muddled panel in the comic, in the game the incident is depicted in a couple of slo-mo close-ups complete with Chao crying out on the soundtrack so that we might be properly shocked and appalled by this atrocity. Chaos woke up, and saw the fallen bodies of his friend Tikal and of the Chao. This put Chaos into a full-blown rage; he appropriated the power of the emeralds himself, became Perfect Chaos, and destroyed the echidna civilization in a fit of karmic justice.

This reminds me of one of my favorite sci-fi films: 1959's "Forbidden Planet." In that film, Professor Morbeus discovers an ancient civilization belonging to the Krell, who appeared to have been on the verge of evolving past the need of physical bodies when, for some unknown reason, the Krell were mysteriously wiped out. Only at the film's climax does the Captain (played with Kirk-like straight-arrow earnestness by Leslie Nielsen) realize what killed the Krell. They killed each other. Empowered beyond imagining, all the evil impulses they thought they had conquered but which had merely been suppressed, came roaring back to life. Infinite power can thus create an infinite Hell, another favorite anime theme.

You can see why I don't buy the "Chaos eventually became corrupt himself" line for a minute. The creature just isn't that complex! He was overcome by "anger and sadness" (as Sonic himself puts it toward the end of the game) at the injustice done to Tikal and the Chao and simply lashed out. OK, it was MAJOR lashing out, but there was nothing "corrupt" about it. And it was to prevent global destruction that Tikal mystically sealed herself and Chaos in the...well, it's the Black Emerald in the comic and the Master Emerald in the game. In the comic continuity, of course, Mammoth Mogul had already called dibs on the Master Emerald.

As Knuckles and Tikerbell...er, Tikal...leave the stage, we get to hear one of the juiciest game lines that Robotnik has: "Dummies! Dummies! Dummies! Dummies!" They don't write 'em like that any more. The objects of his wrath are Huey, Dewey, Louie and Gamma who have returned to the Egg Carrier after having gone frog hunting. There's a break in the flow of the narrative (to be picked up in the next story) as Robotnik does that "The Fly" thing with Chaos and Froggy's newly-acquired tail, thus creating Zero Chaos.

Back in Cat Country, the business with the Queen never gets straightened out but the actions of the felines become more understandable: they see that they've got new neighbors and don't want them acting like the old ones. You know, the imperialist war-monger fascist echidnas. Sorry; had a 60s hippie flashback for a second there. Vector tries his hand at diplomacy and ends up sounding like he's auditioning to be made into a pair of shoes and matching belt. Dancing around the edges of profanity: another tell-tale sign that cobbling this story together was no picnic. And as if the situation weren't already flammable enough, who should barge in uninvited but...Locke, reeking of gasoline and asking if anybody's got a match!

Locke's untimely appearance and his threats to rekindle a long-ago war point out one more key difference between the SA story and the comic continuity to date. Knuckles has always guarded the Master Emerald against a standard cast of stock villains: Robotnik, the Dark Legion, Mammoth Mogul, Enerjak. In other words, pure villains. It'll be interesting to see whether Knuckles will have to guard it against misuse by his own father. Right now, the Cats appear to be the ones behaving cautiously but rationally while Locke (who as a former Guardian should know better) is the one doing the war-mongering. No wonder Lara-Le dumped him, the swine!

HEAD: On the plus side, Ken Penders (presuming that this is Ken's handiwork) has done a good job of telling the Tikal back story in one go and bringing the reader up to speed. This is offset, however, by Ken's (or whomever's) decision that the echidnas CAN'T be the bad guys in this scenario. Thus their past imperialism and militarism have been given such a generous coat of whitewash that we're not sure WHAT to make of Locke's sudden appearance at the end going on about refighting the old war. I've seen several posts by people who've wanted to believe that Locke's reputation was in the process of being rehabilitated. Here's a tip: dropping in the way he did and acting like an idiot is NOT helpful. Head Score: 5 (mainly for apologizing for the echidnas).

EYE: Regrettably, space considerations had to cut down Tikal's flashback, which should have gone 8 pages easy so that Steve Butler could give some moments (communing with the Chao, the first meeting with Chaos, and the futile attempt to stop the Chief's soldiers) the treatment they deserved. Eye Score: 7.

HEART: "The servers are the seven Chaos/Chaos is power/Power enriched by the heart/The controller is the one who unifies the Chaos." Tikal is heard speaking this ancient poem when she's encountered in Tails's flashback in the game. Archie has chosen to ignore it. At least for the time being; they have one last chance, at the climax of the story. But considering their willingness to turn a blind editorial eye to the echidna way of life (Make War, Not Love), I'm not too hopeful that the end of the story will be as emotionally satisfying as the end of the game. I hope I'm wrong. Heart Score: 4.

"Double-Crossed Circuits"

HELP!! I have NO idea who did this one! The writing style may be Ken's but the artwork is unrecognizable. It's not Chris Allan, because here Amy Rose looks different from "A Rose Plucked." And I don't just mean her sudden flat-chestedness. But I'm getting ahead of myself. And it looks like this story saw the Return of the Phantom Letterer as well. The only thing I AM sure of is that The Usual Suspects edited it.

The story begins with the E-102 Gamma going online. This is a great improvement over the game where E-102 had no discernable interior life for most of the game. First Robotnik puts him through his paces by having him zap some Freedom Fighter models. After a quick recap of the "Get Froggy" sequence from the previous story, Robotnik dismisses the other bots. Permanently, in this case, according to the comic. In the game, they're scattered and have to be liberated by Gamma.

Gamma is then told to get the bird from Amy Rose, and once AGAIN Archie drops the emotional ball! Amy Rose has a perfectly good speaking part in this segment of the game, including where she tells Gamma "I feel sorry for you" because he apparently wasn't programmed to have any feelings. Yet even THIS appears to have been more than the forces of Archie could stomach because Amy Rose gets NO LINES AT ALL!! One of the points of her being in the game is that by the end of her segment she's vowing to be more self-reliant rather than depending on Sonic to rescue her butt all the time. Here, she's just another pretty little victim. Besides, there's a logical fallacy in that there's no way that Gamma could know about the roboticization of Mobians as is implied on page 5. In the game it's enough that Robotnik treated his "brother" robots so callously, which IS included in here at any rate. Amy Rose and Birdy are still sprung from their cell at the end, though once more Amy Rose's acknowledging Gamma as a fiend has suffered the Death of a Thousand Cuts. "Now that you're capable of feeling loss and regret," the Omnipotent Narrator asks "how does it feel to be sentient?" Ask Peter Beagel's title character from "The Last Unicorn." It happened to her. Then again, she also knew what love was, and what are the chances of THAT happening to ANYONE in an Archie comic?

HEAD: Mercifully abbreviated, because of all the characters in SA Gamma's role is mostly point-and-shoot, and who needs THAT! Head Score: 7.

EYE: Looks like Amy Rose's sudden aging is starting to wear off under the influence of...who DID draw this? Doesn't look like anyone's style I recognize. It doesn't even look like the work of new kid Ron Lim, whose work is on display in Special #13. In any event, Amy Rose is looking younger, and everybody else looks like they're supposed to. Eye Score: 6.5.

HEART: I still can't believe that the writer has engineered the story so that the relationship between Gamma and Amy Rose has been sacrificed! If there's one thing that both anime and manga are noted for it's the integration of some emotional content in a story. Archie, however, is still holding the line against that sort of thing. I just KNOW they're going to screw up the ending! Heart Score: 4.

Off-Panel: OK, first we had Sally flashing her tail at Sonic and Knuckles, then we had Tails watching as the Death Egg had sex with the grotto. So what happens when Knuckles meets Marisa Noce, one of the employees in editorial? At first I thought the "big-time animal lover" was just doing her Elmira Duff impression. Then I noticed that her hand is perilously close to Knuckles's groin as she says "Let me rub it!" And there it is: Mike Gallagher has just scored the Sexual Innuendo Hat Trick!

Sonic-Grams: Justin explains why they went the hidden city plot route (short answer: it was the least stale of the available options). Letters: Jennifer Flores was surprised at King Acorn's about-face in S77; sounds like the change caught Justin (or whoever answered these letters) by surprise as well. NOT a good sign when that happens to the editor! Nor does Editorial know what will happen WRT Uncle Chuck. Also not a good sign. Find Your Name, Fan Art (you sure Brandon Ozuna doesn't live in "Indio"?) And Sonic by Sam Maxwell. I've always said Maxwell goes in for minimalist backgrounds in his drawings but this is ridiculous!