Sonic #84 [July 2K]

Spaz/Harvo/Ray2K cover: Super Sonic, Unleaded Knuckles, and the reflection of Perfect Chaos. The sun is just breaking through the clouds in the background, symbolizing the impending end of this story arc. Which is about the most hopeful thing I could come up with.

"Perfect Chaos"

Story: Ken Penders; Art: Steve Butler; Ink: Pam Eklund; Color: Frank Gagliardo; Lettering: Jeff Powell; Editorial: G-Force.

Credits page: Super Sonic truckin' his blues away. I still have to wonder, given the new character design, why R. Crumb hasn't sued yet.

We start off in Mysterious Cat Country where last time (you'll remember) Locke crashed the party acting like a total butthead. Not much has changed since then, apparently, as he prepares for some one-on-one with the buff and well-rendered tabby named Razorklaw. "You can stop this," Locke informs Queen Whatsername. Ken never did get around to bestowing a name on the queen queen, and given the lameness of the name "Razorklaw" perhaps it's just as well. Naming him something like "Bootsie" or "Fluffy" would at least have been good for a laugh. Locke goes on to say: "We can sit down and discuss our differences in a rational manner."

Exsqueeze me? THIS from the guy whose last line in "Door To The Past" (S82) was, and I quote, "The Knuckles Clan is prepared to refight the war your kind started years ago!" "Rational"? Sorry, Lunkhead, but you passed THAT point a couple panels back.

So Locke resorts to a tried-and-true staple of American comic plotting which has also served this title so well in the past. Translation: we get a page of mindless ass-kicking.

From here we cut to the two-page title spread where Sonic and Perfect Chaos are going head to big wet ugly head. While they engage in a little mindless ass-kicking of their own, Antoine is wounded in the line of duty while working crowd control. The hammy Antoine's hamstring isn't the only casualty: Bunnie's Southern accent suffers a minor hit. I'd have gone with "yore" instead of "yoah" on page 7 panel 1. And as for "shoah" on page 5, I thought we went through all that in my review of S47's "Taking The Fall."

After getting Antoine out of the way of the plot, Knuckles has to dash. "Tical [sic] said we'd need a lot of juice to short-circuit Perfect Chaos!" Wait a minute...uh...let's see...maybe it's in...no...sorry, aside from Tikal's mentioning that Chaos is still connected to the "power siphon" on page 17 of "Menace to Society" (S83), she hasn't said word one about overcoming him. Not only is this yet one more plot hole dropping out of the sky onto the readers, it manages to undercut the whole "our hearts together form an awesome power" speech which is how Perfect Chaos is overcome in the FREAKIN' GAME OF WHICH THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE FREAKIN' ADAPTATION!! Sorry for shouting, but I just wanted to remind you of that fact.

While page 8 is given over to yet more mindless ass-kicking, Locke and Queen Whatsername are engaged in conversation as if the mindless ass-kicking on page [2] never happened. "I didn't come here to make war, Your Highness," he says, effectively putting the lie to his statement from "Door To The Past." No use getting upset over it, though. The plot continuity has become so loose at this point that you'd need a year's supply of Pepto-Bismol(tm) to fix it. "More often than not, my family has contributed to the common good of all," Locke continues. Since when does staying out of sight unless absolutely necessary while letting one's marriage deteriorate constitute contributing to the common good? It DOES keep Locke out of circulation, so I suppose that's a plus. Anyway, Queen Whatsername reveals a key plot point that mercifully shuts Locke's cake hole.

The mutated fruit of Locke's loins, meanwhile, has arrived at the power station only to find it flooded. "Me and water don't exactly mix," he says with trepidation. I really don't feel like going through all 32 issues of Knuckles The Echidna, but aside from an oblique reference at the beginning of K32's "To The Death" I don't believe that the subject of Knuckles having a water phobia has ever come up. Ken, I'd appreciate some enlightenment here if I've missed something. Then again, the creatives have forgotten about Sonic's non-swimmer status so many times that it doesn't make any difference any more.

We get two more pages of action as Sally hands off the baton to Super Sonic and Tails gets her out of the way of Perfect Chaos. Knuckles does his Ariel-breaking-the-surface-of-the-water impression, then gets in touch with his Inner Emerald to render Perfect Chaos imperfect by reducing him to Zero Chaos in the company of seven Chao babies. OK, THIS is a gimmie for the comic creatives since the game didn't do a very good job of explaining the presence of the Chao in Station Square either. As the once-more-blue blur pulls Knuckles out of the drink, they bestow the final humiliation on Tikal by referring to her and Chaos as "one less headache to worry about." And as the fake sun breaks through the fake clouds in the fake sky, we wish we could say a fond farewell to this story arc but Ken Penders discovers that he's got six more pages to write.

"Bridge Over Troubled Waters"

Story: Ken Penders; Art: Ken Penders (I think); Ink: I Dunno; Color: I Dunno; Lettering: I Dunno; Editorial: G-Force (THAT I know!).

Knuckles takes a short-cut to Haven using a plot device first seen in "Journey's End" (K12). Knuckles then discovers that the Brotherhood have redecorated the Emerald Chamber to look like the Master Emerald altar from the game. At this point Knuckles would like nothing better than to be left alone to do his monologue about destiny and guarding the Emerald, but as the Floating Island begins to float again he ends up looking for Locke.

You want to know how much of a royal pain this comic adaptation has gotten to be? Julie-Su runs up and embraces Knuckles upon his arrival AND I DIDN'T EVEN CARE! But what attracts Knuckles's attention is the same thing that caught Locke's eye: the original Master Emerald altar (I think) with a rather pedestrian statue of Chief Pachamac or Pachacamac or Packamatches or whatever the heck his name is, using a dead kitty as a footstool. We then get a page of by-now-pointless exposition which understandably ignores the perfectly good plot line established in the game [the echidnas of the tribe were imperialist war-mongers whose destruction by Chaos was a well-deserved bit of karmic justice] while at the same time rewriting the comic continuity by effectively contradicting what was established about Knuckles in "Childhood's End" (K25). Make that a TWO year's supply of Pepto-Bismol(tm).

OVERALL SCORES:

HEAD: You'd think that a comic book adaptation of a video game would be a simple enough task, though I've had some fans tell me that the Archie creatives have dropped the ball with earlier, more basic Point-A-to-Point-B game adaptations. But "Sonic Adventure" actually gave the creatives something to work with: motivation, emotional involvement, plenty of action sequences, solid characterizations. And yet here we are, six issues of Sonic and one Special later, and it's clear that Archie simply punted and got very short yardage. Who's responsible? There's an eating establishment around here with a sign that reads something like: "If the service was good, tell a friend. If the service was bad, tell the Manager." When it comes to the question of who's responsible for screwing up the SA adaptation I want to be absolutely clear: THE MANAGEMENT!

Not that the creatives aren't at fault. They tried manfully to integrate the comic continuity with that of the game. Big mistake! Instead of sacrificing certain comic continuity elements that would have gotten in the way of the game continuity by leaving Sally and the non-game characters at home in Knothole, and dropping the whole Mysterious Cat Country plot, they forged ahead piling one confusing plot point upon another. As bad as this was, though, Ken and Karl can probably rely on the Nuremberg Defense: They were just following orders.

Archie management committed several blunders. One of which was the untimely euthanasia of the Knuckles the Echidna comic. The Knuckles portion of the story, after all, was supposed to have run as Knuckles issues #33 and 34. Instead, what might have been coherent installments had to be sliced and diced and made to fit in several Sonic issues. Any narrative rhythm Ken Penders might have worked into the installments was fatally compromised. Apparently, Archie Management learned nothing from the Endgame quagmire.

This impression is only deepened by another Archie blunder: The Return of The Creative Dogpile. This story claimed two writers (Ken Penders and Karl Bollers) and EIGHT artists (Jim Fry, Steve Butler, Ken Penders, Jim Valentino, Nelson Ribiero, Chris Allan, Pat Spaziante and Ron Lim), with Justin Gabrie taking credit as story editor. And while the end result may not have been as headache-inducing as Endgame, there was still a lack of artistic control at the center.

And for THAT, we can ultimately thank the management at Sega, who committed such a fundamental blunder that anything done by the boys at Mamaroneck pales by comparison.

I refer, of course, to their entirely unaccountable decision NOT to supply the creatives at Archie with a copy of the game script. How on God's green footstool did they expect the writers to come up with a coherent, faithful game adaptation without one? All that the writers had to go on were Pat Spaziante's notes from playing the Japanese version. OK, so Spaz may be a heckuva game player. But WHAT was Sega thinking? I can come up with only two possible explanations, neither of which say very much for Sega:

1. Sega was so anxious to become a major player in the video game market again (where they'd languished in the single digit market share doldrums for so long) and had so much riding on the rollout of the Dreamcast that they succumbed to one of the worst cases of Galloping Corporate Paranoia in the history of capitalism. That meant that they weren't letting anyone know anything in order to prevent leaks. You'd think after almost SEVEN YEARS of doing Sonic Comics that Archie would have earned Sega's trust. Apparently, that wasn't the case.

2. Archie may have sabotaged things by assuring Sega that Pat Spaziante's video game prowess would enable the creatives to faithfully reconstruct the story based on playing the Japanese game alone. At this point, Sega might well have said "You don't know what all we've got here story-wise" and volunteered a copy of the script anyway. Or (more likely) they could have thought "OK, so these arrogant hot shot gaijin think they know what they're doing. Fine! Let them screw it up! Gives us a chance to say 'We told you so!' later on!"

Either way, it set in motion a train of developments which resulted in a story arc that could NEVER, with a straight face, be called an "adaptation" of the video game. Never mind that numerous action sequences had to be left out: Sonic in the casino, Twinkle Park, the Chao nursery on one floor of the Station Square hotel, and my personal favorite, Amy Rose exploring the toilet stalls on board the Egg Carrier. The heart of the plot, Tikal versus her father and the fate of the ancient echidna civilization, was mishandled simply because the necessary plot points were NOT part of the Point A To Point B action of the game. And being conversant in Japanese would have been of far greater help than the ability to manipulate a game controller. The bottom line: Sega set itself up for failure and Archie came along for the ride, and a perfectly good story went to waste. I'd like to take a crack at a novelization of the story, having seen the American game from start to finish. As for the comic adaptation, it wasn't as spectacular a train wreck as Endgame but don't kid yourselves: it was still a train wreck. Head Score: 3.

EYE: There was actually little to complain about here artistically. While Archie avoided the Endgame mistake of changing artists every three pages or so, the decision to shoehorn the Knuckles installments into the Sonic books resulted in issues where three different artists worked on the same material. At least they were separated into different stories. Could one artist have done it all? Possibly, if given enough lead time in order to avoid deadline pressures. My nomination: Jim Fry, who's demonstrated a mastery of the main Sonic characters. Steve Butler did a great job with the Mysterious Country Cats, don't get me wrong, but ultimately what did THEY contribute to the story? Absolutely nothing. Eye Score: 7.

HEART: I had a feeling, in my very bones, that the creatives would screw up the ending. Sadly, I wasn't disappointed. After all, they had no access to the key narrative elements that makes sense of the last, the final, image of the game. Every game segment in SA ends with a screen shot featuring the word "Fin" ("The End" in French). Sonic's segment ends with him chillin' on the beach, Tails's segment ends with a picture of him and the plane, etc. So what's the image of the last segment of the game? Super Sonic in combat with Perfect Chaos? No. Sonic watching Robotnic getting away? No. The last image actually found its way into the comic but none of the creatives seemed to know what to do with it, for the last image is a picture of Tikal, Chaos and the Chao babies.

This image is meaningless unless you have access to that which Ken and Karl didn't: Tikal's ditty that includes the line "Chaos is power/Power enriched by the heart." And THAT's what happened to Tikal and Chaos at the end. Tikal's people might have been destroyed, but Tikal's fate is far more cosmic and far more satisfying. She becomes united with Chaos. Her compassion, as evidenced by her making friends of the Chao babies and her taming of Zero Chaos and her opposition to the greed and militarism of her father, become united with Chaos. She becomes the counterpart of Chaos, supplying the yin to Chaos's yang and thus guaranteeing cosmic stability. In this light the final game image makes perfect sense. It's nothing less than a family portrait!

But preadolescent Western minds aren't necessarily programmed to receive such concepts, especially if the comic writers are clueless themselves. It was a satisfying, even touching, ending. And it got screwed up big time. Heart Score: 3.

Off-Panel: Do yourself a favor, Justin: book Eggman on Sally Jessie and get him out of what's left of your hair.

Sonic-Grams: "How did we do?" See above. "We're practically right around the corner from the big 100!" Yeah, well it's beginning to look like you've got a year and a half left before you celebrate the killing off the book if you keep printing THIS kind of stuff.

Find Your Name page: Is it me, or are they using a larger typeface in order to fill up the page with fewer names? Not a good sign.

No Fan or Pro art, nor blurbs about S85, but I can tell you what S85 and 86 will feature: Sonic doing battle with a metal version of himself, seen briefly inside the Egg Carrier. Translation: two more months of mindless ass-kicking.