Megathread Archie Sonic Main Discussion

[Mangoaxe5]

 

Went on the wayback machine, and checked out Ian's old Bumbleking forum, and found this old Ian quote from the issue 257 topic.

Quote

And I sympathize with that whole-heartedly - believe me. But this is how it has to be.

Case in point: all of Sally's growth revolving around her dealing (or not dealing) with her father, with regaining her mother, discovering she had a brother and all that those plotlines entailed. I am now in a position where I can't reference:
- Alicia
- Elias
- anything Max did during his reign

That's not just something to can write around. Folks are getting riled that I'm using general nouns for the planet instead of saying "Mobius." Imagine how hollow it would sound if Sally were fighting for the "loved ones she's lost." Which loved ones? Can't say. How were the lost? Can't say. How were they important to her? Can't say. And it's not something you can lampshade, because losing most of her family is going to affect her as a character.

Maybe some folks would've been alright with dancing around the issue in vague terms. Maybe they'd be okay with Sonic moving on from his erased parents, or Knuckles just rolling with the genocide of his people (neither of which could be specifically referenced or talked about). But not me. I think that's a disservice to the story, to the characters, and to the fans. I'm not going to lie to you for years with a false promise of a return to the old canon. I was told to make them remember during "Countdown to Chaos," and now I'm making it clear the new status quo is sticking so you all aren't left wondering.

I have no doubt folks will be saying "they should've done it this way!" from now until the end of time. And I completely understand them being disappointed and a bit hurt that we had to change things so abruptly. But please believe me when I say there were many, many long, heated discussions on how to best proceed. This was not something we did lightly, and a lot of thought and effort has been put into this.

It's not the ArchieSonic of old - but I hope the veteran fans can still feel a little comfortable with the SatAM crew still together, still doing the Freedom Fighter thing.

So keep this in mind when you get to the reset universe comics.

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

Which is something I commend him for even tho it wasn’t what I wanted.

It was rather anti-climatic and hollow, but how he had the characters remember and then tiptoe away stealthily allowed a lot of us to move on. I understood that when I realized over time we weren’t going back, so they managed to salvage what they could.

Plus I still got Conquering Storm, so as long as she’s still owned by Sega, I’m mostly content.

Still want the old ‘verse back tho. Will never deny that.

[Mangoaxe5]

3 hours ago, CrownSlayer’s Shadow said:

 

Plus I still got Conquering Storm, so as long as she’s still owned by Sega, I’m mostly content.

 

Conquering Storm was cool. I actally liked her reset universe design a little bit more than her original universe outfit.

[Dr. Detective]

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog - Issue #249: When Worlds Collide - Part Six of Twelve: Friends or Foes

It’s a cute cover of the heroes from each world being given a chance to take flight with the sidekicks of the other hero’s world. I like the image a lot, though, something about the coloring feels like it’s clashing a bit with them. It took a while for me to understand why but I think it’s because the white outline around them all makes them look like they’re not there on the scene. They kind of look like stickers actually.

Spoiler

16-Bit Variant

It’s pixel art for those who are into that sort of thing. It’s the kind of thing I can look at and say “that’s nice” and move on from rather quickly. If these are all pre-existing sprites then I can see why this one might come off as a bit thrown together. It certainly looks a bit off to me. The credit for this one goes to SEGA and Capcom so that wouldn’t surprise me.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Tracy Yardley!
Inks: Terry Austin
Colors: ThomasMason
Letters: F.R. Fiegel
Cover: Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante
Game Sprite Variant Cover Art by SEGA & Capcom

We cut in back where we left off, with the Eight new Roboticized Masters showing up to face down our five heroes. The two doctors are excited and are having such a wonderful time, it’s astounding.

They start to get really excited as they show off in front of them. Remember those flashes of bitterness they were showing before? Yeah, that’s gone here. There’s a whole page dedicated to the two of them just praising the shit out of the other one. It makes Sonic want to vomit, of course.

The doctors also helpfully explain that these Masters were being utilized to gather the Chaos Emeralds but they’ve got them all now so they’re new mission is to destroy them. It’s quite a thing to just spring on them like that.

Mega Man, of course, has to be given a small de-briefing on what Chaos Emeralds are to understand the danger they pose. Now it’s time for the doctors to have some fun with a little friendly competition. Whoever’s world’s heroes survive the longest wins their bet.

Proto Man NOPES the fuck out of there, basically saying their bet and their games are stupid. He’s instead going to try and divide and conquer by scouting ahead and also try to locate Dr. Light. Mega Man wishes him well in a really well drawn set of panels.

Rolling around at the speed of sound.

This is the best Tracy’s Mega Man has looked so far. Granted, everything looks better a little up close than far away. Naturally.

I still think the bigger issue with this section of the crossover is just how Thomas Mason’s colors are. The colors just aren’t as interesting or dynamic as Matt Herms. Plus, the colors being used are way too bright. This looks more like a coloring book than a comic at the moment.

Eggman gets a bit spooked when Proto Man leaves for Dr. Light so he sends FIVE of the Roboticized Masters after him, leaving just the Chaotix ones to stay behind and handle Sonic, Tails, Mega Man, and Rush.

It’s kind of amazing how, now that they’re robots, Eggman doesn’t even refer to them by their names. He just calls them “EWN–006 through 008”. It’d probably be a lot less elegant to say “the Chaotix ones” but there’s no need to view them as such any more.

I also like how Wily is surprised by Eggman’s fortitude here. Albert said that Dr. Light was serious business so he isn’t taking any chances.

So anyway, Tails asks how they fixed him when he was Tails Man and Mega Man mentions his charged shot stunning them and doing a data transfer. Only Sonic’s spin-dash thing did something different that made that possible. What that something is still isn’t fully elaborated on but to be honest it doesn’t really matter.

We get that shot of Tails flying with Mega Man and Sonic riding Rush after they get blasted back by the Chaotix Men. Sonic takes charge again and tells Tails to rewire Mega Man’s lemon shooter so that he can fire a charged spin-dash shot without him needing to be there. Mega Man’s objection to this is that he doesn’t shoot out lemons. His second comment is to remark about how impressive the thing he’s asking Tails to do is.

The two doctors decide to leave to oversee the failure of Proto Man's mission instead of staying to watch this. Eggman is the one confused now but Wily just remarks that he’s the kind of guy who shows up to ruin plans at the last minute. Eggman’s response is a delightful, “Ahh. He’s one of THOSE types” before going on about this one lackey he used to have.

Since this is a game centric crossover the decision to not say his name was most likely intentional, for sure. Thankfully, not a legal snafu.

Tails is tasked with reworking Mega Man’s arm blaster on the spot. He has to outfit Mega Man with the ability to shoot a spin-dash laser and conquer tech that he’s literally never seen before in a matter of seconds. He really is quite the genius. 

Meanwhile, Sonic’s about to die.

But of course they made the Vectorman joke. This spiel about Sonic trying to make up new names for them probably started for the sake of eventually making that joke. Well done. You did it.

Anyway, Tails finishes in time before Vector Man squeezes Sonic until he pops. He fires right into him and out comes a croc.

The shade of green on Vector in this issue is really not my thing either. 

Sonic grabs the green orb and tosses it towards Mega Man, saying that he can use it for something.

Mega Man grabs it and powers himself up with the Acoustic Blaster!

Tails throws some shade at Vector right before Mega Man uses his power to do something really cool. 

All Mega Man needs is the right gun to do what Doctor Strange does.

Also, I like the flavor text about how the Roboticized Masters work like the normal Robot Masters. They each have a weakness that one of the other ones can defeat them with. Why does Wily continue to do it this way? I guess Mega Man has to be right. Force of habit.

Anyway, Charmy’s back.

Ah geez Vector, when you say it like that…

This is one of my favorite scenes in the book. You just SAY what’s happening and it’s like… yeah. I guess that is what’s happening huh?

So now that Mega Man has Rapid Stinger there’s only one more to go.

Espio Man is a ninja and can turn invisible. Mega Man tells Rush to sniff him out and gets surprised when he wheels around to face HIM!

Mega Man was Espio Man all along?! What a twist!

No, of course, Espio Man appears right behind Mega Man and is ready to shank him with his kunai. Sonic jumps in to grab him and Mega Man fires into him, returning our chameleon to normal. 

Mega Man has Chroma Camo now. 

Espio is great as usual. I always recall the scenes where the Chaotix recover their true selves here often. Vector has a great set of lines, Charmy’s got a tummy ache probably, and Espio handing the core to Mega Man like a gentleman just set the mood for who they are in three panels.

I’m also happy they got restored second after Tails. It allows for them to be in the book a bit longer than some of the others which, you know, benefits me specifically because I’m their biggest fan. So says me.

Sonic is jealous of Mega Man’s wholesome nature and Tails calls him out on it.

This is a wonderful scene from top to bottom. I continue to really like seeing Tails just call Sonic out like this. The fact that Sonic can dish it out but seems to have a bit of trouble taking it is fun. He’s definitely still Pre-Reboot Sonic at the moment but in this context he’s working a little better than usual for me.

Something about him recognizing how kind Mega Man is through the act of witnessing him get such a huge power-up and instead of saying anything to pump himself up just talks about how he can save the friends of some guy he just met feels nice. 

There’s no way Sonic would ever admit to it but perhaps there is a bit of something under the surface about Sonic here where he kind of admires the fact that Mega Man can just be cool and not talk about how cool he is all the time to sell you on it. Sonic doesn’t really need to do that either, is the funny thing. I thought he was cool when I was a kid just fine.

We get that scene contrasted nicely with Mega Man being just a wonderful young lad with the Chaotix there. He says “Wow, thanks!” when Vector offers him something for free that he openly admits to not knowing anything about nor does he have any context that would help him figure it out. He’s just… really grateful anyway. 

Of course, Vector explains that the Chaotix are detectives and Mega Man says that they can help find Proto Man in that case. Sonic adds that while they’re doing that, the four of them can continue the hunt for the other Roboticized Masters.

So after Vector realizes that there’s a floating egg machine in the sky, the heroes set off.

To be fair, he totally would have figured it out. 

Anyway, we cut back to the doctors who are monitoring the situation. Eggman is a bit frazzled since things seem to be unraveling at the eleventh hour. He decides to send Shadow Man to intercept them and we get a wonderful double Shadow Man joke.

They’re kind of cute together, aren’t they?

Eggman continues to mull over the operation, saying that he should keep Blaze Woman and Silver Man on stand-by. Wily has to put his arm around the guy and tell him to relax! They’re already building to the final stage of their plan. Everything is going great.

Of course, they can’t be too careful so they decide they need to build an oversized metal monstrosity to be the final boss in case it doesn’t pan out well. Fair enough.

Eggman asks Albert why he’s suddenly so calm when he was pegged by Eggman as being the worry wart between the two of them. Wily says it’s because they’ve got the one guy who helps Mega Man succeed at his missions locked away.

That’s right. They’ve got Albert’s arch nemesis locked away. The powerful and charismatic Sniv.

There’s nothing Sniv can do to stop him now. No way! 

We continue the fun with Part Six here. We’re half-way through the crossover at this point and it feels nice. I do remember this part in particular being pretty fun as a lot of the moments from it live in my head pretty succinctly. I guess the issue where they fought and rescued the Chaotix would naturally lead to me remembering it the most though so what else is new? We’ve got a whole ‘nother leg of the adventure to get to though so let’s get to it.

Mega Man - Issue #26: When Worlds Collide - Part Seven of Twelve: Evening the Odds

Now this is a cover. I got some major Tron vibes from this one. Feels good witnessing Mega Man be so awesome here. Time to get into what I assume is going to be a showdown in the Skull Egg Zone based on the words on the cover here.

Spoiler

16-Bit Variant

Here is another 16-bit variant with some pretty good sprites being mashed together to create a coherent image. I like the look of this one better if only because the Sonic environments from the old 2-D classics knew how to make a place look dark, gritty, and scary. More of that in the games please.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Tracy Yardley!
Inks: Terry Austin
Colors: Thomas Mason
LettersL F.R. Fiegel
Cover: Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante
Variant Cover Art compiled by Ryan Jampole and Vincent Lovallo
Art provided by CAPCOM and SEGA

The issue begins with about two pages of Sonic and Mega Man traversing through the random environments of the Skull Egg Zone while bragging as hard as they can to each other about how much cooler and better at this the other is.

Granted, this feels like something Mega Man is only doing because Sonic keeps insisting on playfully insulting him. He goes after Mega Man’s big boots and calls his armor Mega-Undies. When Mega Man kills one of the robo snakes that attacks him he asks if Sonic is impressed and Sonic brings out the Egg Viper destruction cred to combat it. Mega Man tries to go for the numbers argument which leaves Sonic to go for the “Quality over quantity” argument which ironically means he’s complimenting Eggman here for the sake of looking better than him.

Mega Man is going along with it fine though. I think he was genuinely bothered by the Mega-Undies comment but this playful ego measuring contest hasn’t wiped the smile off his face any. Plus, Sonic makes it clear he’s only kidding when he finally gets serious and properly thanks Mega Man for journeying with him to save his friends. 

Mega Man says he’s happy to help and he goes back to proclaiming that Tails is a genius. Modest Tails just says “I’m alright” and instead tries to look forward to comparing notes with Dr. Light.

Then the two of them get attacked by both Shadow Men. 

Sonic knows the naming convention now and Mega Man has fought this guy before so they both talk over each other when they say the exact same name of the person they’re fighting. 

This causes confusion.

Shadow Man kicks the dog.

Anyway, The Mega Man-Shadow Man starts throwing ninja stars and Sonic starts to talk shit about them before the Sonic-Shadow Man blasts him from behind into an electric looking Chaos Control bubble to shut him up. So now it’s Mega Man’s time to save the day once again.

He uses to Chroma Camo to turn invisible, races past the action going on with Tails and Rush fighting the Mega Man-Shadow Man and charges at the Sonic-Shadow Man who is taken off guard by him. Mega Man then turns into the Tail Wind equip version of himself blasts the Sonic-Shadow Man down, releasing Sonic from his Chaos Control bubble prison.

When Mega Man-Shadow Man kicks Tails and Rush away from him, Sonic gets a single kick in so he can actually contribute before Mega Man shoots the spin dash beam and returns Sonic-Shadow Man back into Shadow the Hedgehog. 

Mega Man then grabs his core thingy and gets a new weapon, the Chaos Cannon, which I guess is a cannon that shoots Chaos out of it.

He does that and it traps the Mega Man-Shadow Man in a bubble. 

Then Shadow gets helped up by Mega Man who then, for seemingly no reason shouts VENGENCE and than demolishes the fuck out of the remaining Shadow Man.

I was kind of surprised by how cold Shadow was here. Though, to be completely honest, I can tolerate Shadow being colder than usual in this sense. It just feels a bit more appropriate when he does it even though one should remember not to take it too far. We all know where that leads you.

No time to dwell on how mean or not mean Shadow should be though. When he induced Chaos Control he made all the others feel weird and they started remembering things that don’t add up.

Sonic stops to explain about how he’s dealt with this before. Luckily, he remembers dealing with Genesis Waves before just not the specifics of what’s been changed sometimes which… is a whole layer of confusion that I don’t even want to try and comprehend at the moment.

The doctors rewrote their worlds and made some things that happened in the future to the present and vice-versa. It’s all very wonky but the clear and obvious intention for the sake of this crossover is to put things into a familiar zone for fans of both series so the minutiae of what’s happening in their books doesn’t bog everything down. That’s why when Tails asks “Who’s Mecha Sally?” it's the first time an Archie and SatAM character has been referenced directly by name. 

Make no mistake. The reboot has not happened yet. These are all still the same Pre-Reboot Archie Sonic characters, just in a different setting with their memories slightly altered. 

Mega Man just decides it doesn’t matter and that stopping the doctors from doing bad things is the important bit. Sonic agrees and throws in a compliment about how much he likes Mega Man for being simple and direct. It’s nice.

We cut to the two evil doctors who are in the middle of mocking Dr. Light in his cage for looking like Santa Claus and choosing a beard over a mustache, which is clearly the facial hair of a true genius. 

Orbot swings by and informs the doctors of the bad news that they’ve lost Shadow Man and when Shadow did Chaos Control there was a slight destabilization in the zone.

Eggman asks “Which Shadow Man?” and Orbot decides to be a freakin’ smartass.

My son, the planet, or me?

There’s a fun little background gag here. When Orbot gets scared into turning into his ball form, he falls into the little pocket of the robot he’s in and gets launched like a cannonball out of it on the next page as the two doctors go stomping off all pissed off. They keep insisting that they’re fine because they have other things to complete that’ll make losing the Roboticized Masters worth it. 

Dr. Light is mostly just down in the dumps but then a knocking on his glass case alerts him to the arrival of a visitor.

It’s my favorite super spy, Rouge the Bat. She’s here ladies and gentlemen, being the ultimate sneaky agent. So allusive that she avoided having a figure of her for well over a decade and a half since Sonic X was a thing.

Of course, she puts being practical above being a hero. She’s only really here to get revenge for her fallen teammate, Shadow (whom she’s unaware is free now, of course) and wishes to muck up the plans of the doctors by utilizing Dr. Light.

Dr. Light is all too happy to help and takes no offense to being told he’s a liability to her. Classy guy.

Dr. Light and Rouge the Bat, working together as God intended.

Anyway, we cut back to Sonic and the others, traversing a level in a game. Only it’s a showcase of Sonic’s ego coming to bite him in the ass again… that is, until a pillar of fire snags Mega Man in the butt and gets the others to fall back down the waterfall which ends with Tails smashing and breaking his face against one of the floating cubes.

Holy shit. Somebody check on Tails. I think he might be dead or is currently dying.

Anyway, they’re ambushed by Blaze Woman and Silver Man.

There’s not much to recap here. The two of them get taken care of in a matter of two pages. First Mega Man beam struggles with Silver Man and they both get taken down. Fortunately, Silver returns to normal and is able to offer assistance.

As for Blaze Woman, she just kind of loses.

Granted, it’s not because Sonic and Tails were able to actually do anything to her. They’ve kind of not been too useful in these fights honestly.

But hey, Blaze is back so that’s good.

The time and space pair sit back and are in need of a recharge. Blaze talks about having her one day off get interrupted while Silver is sad that his coming to warn Sonic about the disruption in space time essentially led to nothing. When Sonic replies with a sarcastic thanks for the warning Silver just kind of curls up and says that hurtful sarcasm doesn’t help us. Ah. My poor boy. He tries so hard.

Sonic is just glad they’re safe though. They stay behind and come up with a meeting place to ensure they’ll be able to come together again soon. They then wonder how the Chaotix and Blues are doing. Mega Man notes that Blues isn’t exactly a team player, though, the team he was left with also doesn’t seem to be that good a fit for him.

I’m actually not sure what Vector is talking about when he says they found Pogo Man here. 

Either way, I am also starting to wonder if any of the Mega Man fans who were reading this were seeing any of the Sonic characters in any positive light. I’ve noticed that this crossover isn’t portraying them as the most helpful of sorts. 

The issue ends with Knuckles Man and Rose Woman overlooking the Chaotix and Proto Man, saying that they’re the targets they wish to go after but the doctors belay that order and inform them that they’re the last remaining Roboticized Masters. So they think it’s best they go after the two heroes that defeated and returned to normal the other Roboticized Masters rather then ambush the people who can’t while they’re on a thin, dangerous walkway in the mountains.

Yeah sure. Okay geniuses. 

Although, Rose Woman does say that her self-destruct option has been granted so… that could be a way to circumvent things. Just have her explode in front of Sonic. 

God, that would fuck him up so much wouldn’t it?

I’m continuing to have fun with this crossover for certain though I will admit there does seem to be a bit of that minor annoyance with how some of the Sonic characters are being written coming into play here. Sonic is starting to grate on my nerves again, just a tad. Shadow seemed a bit off but that’s mostly fine. Vector seemed a little too aloof there at the end. Everyone’s just slightly off to me here. Not enough for it to be a problem but just enough that I noticed it. My brain was kind of like “I’m not sure if they’d say or do that QUITE like that here” a couple of times. Plus, it is kind of amazing how Mega Man is dominating these battles for Sonic. If I were Sonic I’d probably feel like my ego was being threatened too.

 

Sonic Universe - Issue #53: When Worlds Collide - Part Eight of Twelve: Liberation

Whoa! Look at that. A literal crossover between monsters. You ever wonder what’ll happen if Godzilla and Kong fuse? I haven’t but that’s not relevant to this anyway. This motherfucker is the Chaos Devil, a fusion of Chaos and the Yellow Devil. This is an inspired idea of unholy freakishness that stands as a prime example of why man should not play God.

I’m kidding of course. God’s got nothing on Eggman and Wily. 

Spoiler

E.F.F (Evil Friends Forever) Variant

These Evil Friends Forever variants remain the best variants in the series so far. Again, we’ve got very slim pickings as far as what they’ve offered us up to this point but it still works. Look at all the details there. Men as smart as them get to be little kids well into their old age. It looks like a proper sleepover going on here. I wanna play a Sonic Vs. Mega Man fighting game on my Eggsbox just like I did when I was a kid too. Goddammit.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Tracy Yardley!
Inks: Terry Austin
Colors: Thomas Mason and Dustin Evans
Letters: F.R Fiegel
Cover By: Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante and Matt Herms
Evil Friends Forever Variant Cover by Tracy Yardley!, Phyllis Novin and Thomas Mason

Shit’s going south for our best evil friends forever guys.

This was quite the variant cover to have for this issue in particular since it resonates something nostalgic at the moment. As in, it’s an image indicating a relationship they had in the past.

Now that things are going south, in their most dire moment and most explicit need for comradery yet, they’re breaking apart.

They’re such obvious birds of a feather that they’re thinking similar things too, of course. They each plan on taking the Wily Egg back to their own zones and trapping the other person here to deal with the fallout of their plan failing.

Of course, they both can’t say that so they’re both doing the same laughing over the fear tactic and on top of that neither of them see through the other doing it. It’s great.

They’ve got a nifty looking machine there though. I’m not sure if the blending of the two series works quite as well with it though. The all white and silver nature of Wily’s stuff is clashing a bit with the more colorful nature of the things Eggman usually builds. It’s also got a terrible name too. The Egg-Wily Machine X. Yeesh.

Nice of this story to sneak in a good Big, Cream, and Cheese cameo. Big’s time isn’t done here though. Cream, I believe this is it for. Just showing up in Eggman’s imagined scenario while she runs from the looming danger in his head. 

Anyway, our heroes are stuck on a half-pipe, moving slow as molasses in an attempt to find Amy and Knuckles. Sonic says he’d rather dive into the Mega “Muck” than go any slower.

Ahem. Actually, it’s Mega Mack. Thank you very much. 

Mega Man reiterates for Sonic that this is the way it has to be since they can’t find the battle station and look for his friends in this warped out zone so it’s best they have Rush scout ahead and track things down nice and easy while the Chaotix find the station with Proto Man.

Tails says that the Chaotix have definitely found SOME things while looking off to the side in worriment.

It’s interesting because he says this like he’s had an extremely rich history with them but before Generations they were always sort of a gang of misfits doing their own thing in the background of the stories. Still important but never directly involving themselves with Sonic and Tails. I do find myself still preferring that point in time. It made watching their antics as a third party feel more special. Especially in Sonic X Season 3 where they were basically their own faction in space. Between Sonic’s crew, Eggman’s crew, the ship jumping one-woman-band that was Rouge the Bat, and the Chaotix, it got very interesting seeing them get all scrambled about in space.

If that were a Modern Sonic game all the characters would have lazily been shoved together in a single floating box or something. Maybe one or two of them would have been off doing their own thing like Shadow but it’d be a huddle of them just glued together. It still bothers me considering that wasn’t even true for Shadow the Hedgehog. I liked that everyone was also scattered in that game. Made the world feel bigger and gave everyone their own agency without even really needing to do too much.

I also sometimes wonder if Sonic X is the reason the Chaotix had that stigma of just being incompetent for a while. They’ve always been more comedic characters but the games never really portrayed them as bad at their jobs or Vector as delusional like he was in the anime. Their portrayal gets increasingly better and balanced as this book continues though. I love how they are in the final arc of the Reboot and eventually in IDW proper. It’s good stuff.

Sonic wishes Amy and Knuckles would just ambush them and he’s in luck because the doctors panicked and sent Knuckles Man and Rose Woman right to them. He then wishes for them to change themselves back and they attack him with a hearty FUCK YOU!

Sonic gets grabbed by Rush before he can be crushed and they swing into a fight, though, not before Amy lets the added spice to this desperate battle spill.

Mega Man uses the Psycho Burst on Rose Woman and it doesn’t work. That must not be her weakness.

Knuckles Man punches Mega Man into the dirt and Tails attacks him for a distraction. Mega Man decides to use the Acoustic Blaster on him this time but he swats that away too.

At first I thought it was because the Acoustic Blaster was Charmy Man’s weakness but Mega Man asks if they did something special to these two and Tails just says they’re usually pretty tough.

The clock is ticking though so Mega Man has to act fast. Instead of warning Sonic he gets Rush to punt the hedgehog out of Rose Woman’s way so he can transform into his Fire Tornado form and blast into her. 

Then he uses that opening to change Amy back to normal.

Then he grabs her weapon simply known as the Piko Hammer and cracks, nay, demolishes the knuckles of the Knuckles Man robot.

It’s a very powerful looking image. I can’t help but wince at seeing it even though he’s a robot. 

So, after being triple teamed by Rush, Tails, and then Sonic, Mega Man fires the blast at Knuckles and returns him to normal too. It’s over for the Roboticized Masters everyone.

As such, we’re treated with a page that shows off the character traits of the four main Sonic crew the way they were ten or so years ago. Noticeably different to be sure.

Sonic goes in for some oddly vindictive looking bullying tactic for no reason before he gets some immediate comeuppance that makes Knuckles grin when Amy glomps him and starts crying with her really big looking mouth. This amuses Mega Man while Tails just looks on with a cheery disposition. Our fox boy is so happy to have friends.

Were this written today, Sonic’s ribbing probably would have felt more playful and Amy’s hug would have probably felt less cartoonish and led to Sonic throwing a soft wisecrack out there with a smile on his face rather than just being like “GET THE FUCK OFF ME!”

There are things about the past interpretations that I miss, like what I discussed earlier with how they were all more independent, but there are some things I’m glad are gone. I do actually prefer the Sonic and Amy dynamic in IDW to how it is in this for instance. That doesn’t mean I’m on board with literally every change that’s been made. Lord knows most of, if not all, the changes made to Shadow have been for the worst.

There’s things I would keep and things I would leave behind for everyone but that’s natural. It’s just interesting reading this again and seeing how the dynamics for everyone was here. It feels so different. I guess I’m ultimately happy I’m enjoying everyone even more here in the future though. Comics wise at least. Games wise it’s… not been outright terrible lately for anyone not named Tails but… meh… That's honestly mostly due to underutilization if anything.

Ian will save me there hopefully.

Anyway, Knuckles wants to go bash Eggman and Wily for doing this to him and Sonic spits lyrics from his theme at him in response which makes Knuckles upset. I’m not sure why though. Knuckles’ themes are both bangers. Though, my favorite will always be the SA2 version even if the guy who helped create it is a massive piece of shit.

Mega Man says that they can’t find the base and then gets an incoming call from Proto Man. 

The Chaotix have succeeded at their mission! Hurray!

However, they found an access panel to a teleporter that the doctors were using for mass loading of their fortress and can’t access it because it uses colored dots as it’s passcode system… which for some reason just reminds me of an annoying slot machine in Vegas.

Probably a good idea to just fucking barge in through the front. As Monkey D. Garp would say, entering that way is cooler.

When Mega Man hears this he doesn’t give up hope for it working though. Sonic has a genius with him so he sends Tails with Knuckles to go help set it up by going to the beacon they’re going to raise. He throws one last verbal jab at Knuckles too which gets Knuckles steamed in the head again. 

Geez Sonic. The poor red boy is already dead. Leave him be. Seriously though, it is kind of weird that Knuckles isn’t responding at all to anything Sonic is saying. He’s just letting the guy constantly talk shit about him and growling under his breath in response. Bite back Knux. You can do it! Don’t just lie down and take it.

Sonic tells Mega Man to go back to where Silver and Blaze are to recruit them. It’s sunset now so they’re probably really bored by this point.

He then takes off with Amy to find Shadow because she’s really good at finding other hedgehogs when she thinks they’re him.

How the fuck did Sonic even find out about this? He wasn’t there when that happened. The only ones who were is Shadow himself, Rouge, and Eggman.

Not even Tails saw that shit. He only noticed Amy when he saw Eggman creeping up on her at the docks.

So either Shadow snitched. Rouge snitched. Amy snitched on herself. Or, even funnier, fucking Eggman snitched.

Eggman one day was like, “Yo, Sonic. Remember when we first met Shadow? That pink girlfriend of yours HUGGED him from behind. It was the funniest shit I’ve ever seen!”

Also, I don’t put it past Amy to come to Prison Island, knowing Sonic was there, seeing something hedgehog shaped in the distance, and rushing towards it. Plus, she realized it wasn’t him the instant she got a closer look at him which is something the entire Government can’t say when they saw his face on the news.

I also love how Eggman thought it was Sonic at first too but realized it wasn’t IMMEDIATELY. Just clicked in his brain instantly that Shadow wasn’t Sonic. 

God, Eggman really was the absolute best in SA2. The “Because you just told me Fox Boy” moment still hasn’t been topped for me. Not even in any of Ian’s stuff and that’s saying something.

Here the doctor isn’t doing so hot. He’s arguing with Wily about where to put certain features on their ugly ass robot when Orbot chimes in with a backhanded congratulations to them for giving Sonic back-up by bringing all his friends here, essentially. All the Roboticized Masters have been lost. Also, they’re leaking Chaos Energy thanks to a saboteur who has made their way onto the ship and is currently being chased by Metal Sonic and Bass.

The doctors hilariously ride off in a panic to meet this intruder but they kind of show up in the middle of the action. 

It’s obviously Rouge and she’s come across something quite experimental. It says so right next to the giant wheel she’s turning.

The tactic of “this looks important, I’m gonna wreck shit” doesn’t quite work for Rouge here. She unleashes the Chaos Devil which, apparently, can’t tell friend from foe and Bass and Metal Sonic are told to take it down.

They try to but it uses the jaws of it’s arm to nab both Metal Sonic and Rouge in it’s… mouth arm jaw… thing.

They get eaten is what I mean to say.

Then the doctors show up and… I guess it’s less that it can’t tell friend from foe and is more like it’s an unruly dog.

See. It listened eventually.

Eggman greets Agent Rouge and asks if she’s here on a mission from the President or something. Rouge just says she wanted some revenge for nabbing Shadow. Eggman mockingly finds that sweet and sentences her to share in his fate. Metal Sonic takes her to the Roboticization chamber. Bass whines a bit that he didn’t get to go fight instead of the Roboticized Masters and Wily tells him to knock that shit off and go with Metal Sonic to make sure Rouge turns into one too.

They’ve got like four lines of defense lined up and a huge army of revived Robot Masters is their first. It’s about to get wild.

We end the second act of this crossover with Roll worrying if Duo got Dr. Light’s message only for him to immediately show up. Everyone’s got a knack for showing up when they’re called in this issue.

Granted, Duo’s been on his way for a while now.

Sorry I’m late guys. Space is really, really, really, really, really, really big.

So that was it for Act Two of the crossover. We’ll have some new art and new colors for the final round of issues and I honestly can’t wait. This act hasn’t been terrible obviously but the art was a major step down from what came before it and it won’t even come close to what’s about to happen next. Tracy’s still great at what he does but this wasn’t his best work. Not bad but not his best. Not helping, again, was the inker and the colorist here. Talented people, I’m sure, but the combination didn’t lend itself to something that looked as appealing as I feel it should have. 

The Roboticized Masters have all been defeated and we’re all gathering together to raid the Wily Egg. Let’s fucking go!

Also, for those whom it may concern, there's actually a really good episode of the Bumblekast that came out recently that talked about and clarified a lot of things about Archie Sonic (although some of it was talked about and explained before). There's also a really nice discussion about asshole douchebag Sonic from the pre-reboot and how different the foundation for him was and how different the perspectives of those who read the book were. For Ian, he didn't like Sonic and had to learn to like him but others, of course, found asshole Sonic amusing and interesting. And Kyle seems to be a bit in the middle about it. It's a neat little look into different opinions on the direction of his character that I think would be interesting to listen to. I've time stamped the part where that specific part of the conversation starts, though, I'd recommend the whole thing. 

 

[Rienasketch]

On 5/9/2022 at 9:07 PM, Vampfox said:

 

Went on the wayback machine, and checked out Ian's old Bumbleking forum, and found this old Ian quote from the issue 257 topic.

 

On 5/9/2022 at 9:07 PM, Vampfox said:

Case in point: all of Sally's growth revolving around her dealing (or not dealing) with her father, with regaining her mother, discovering she had a brother and all that those plotlines entailed. I am now in a position where I can't reference:
- Alicia
- Elias
- anything Max did during his reign

That's not just something to can write around. Folks are getting riled that I'm using general nouns for the planet instead of saying "Mobius." Imagine how hollow it would sound if Sally were fighting for the "loved ones she's lost." Which loved ones? Can't say. How were the lost? Can't say. How were they important to her? Can't say. And it's not something you can lampshade, because losing most of her family is going to affect her as a character.

Maybe some folks would've been alright with dancing around the issue in vague terms. Maybe they'd be okay with Sonic moving on from his erased parents, or Knuckles just rolling with the genocide of his people (neither of which could be specifically referenced or talked about). But not me. I think that's a disservice to the story, to the characters, and to the fans. I'm not going to lie to you for years with a false promise of a return to the old canon. I was told to make them remember during "Countdown to Chaos," and now I'm making it clear the new status quo is sticking so you all aren't left wondering.

I have no doubt folks will be saying "they should've done it this way!" from now until the end of time. And I completely understand them being disappointed and a bit hurt that we had to change things so abruptly. But please believe me when I say there were many, many long, heated discussions on how to best proceed. This was not something we did lightly, and a lot of thought and effort has been put into this.

It's not the ArchieSonic of old - but I hope the veteran fans can still feel a little comfortable with the SatAM crew still together, still doing the Freedom Fighter thing.

 

Hmmm.. It might have been better if they took from the Sonic Mars playbook, have Eggman hack the nanite city and make the world more like a matrix-esque setting rather than completely rebooting the series completely. For example, making the groundwork early while the Penders case was active. With perhaps a backup arc set in place if something goes wrong. Make the characters notice... inconsistencies. Strange things in the world itself hinting towards an even bigger problem than villains like Naugus or even Eggman -- or who people they think are these characters. This could have also given writers more ability to test the bonds of the characters, make them question what was real, WHO was real and what wasn't while potentially writing new characters to fill in the gaps the old ones left behind. In this case, making a proxy character would be more permissible because the characters within the "matrix" or generated Mobius were programmed to be loosely based on them. Eggman had an entire city's worth of nanites. so I think such a feat could be possible. And a scary possibility I think that would be interesting to explore. Using people as batteries and forcing them in a fantasy world many never wake up from.

And for the few who do wake up, being introduced to a world they're not sure whats real about anymore.

 

[Mangoaxe5]

3 hours ago, Rienasketch said:

 

 

Hmmm.. It might have been better if they took from the Sonic Mars playbook, have Eggman hack the nanite city

 

Ian couldn't use the nanite city anymore cause the nanite city that later became New Mobotroplis first appeared in a Ken Penders story from issue 152.

[Rienasketch]

12 hours ago, Vampfox said:

Ian couldn't use the nanite city anymore cause the nanite city that later became New Mobotroplis first appeared in a Ken Penders story from issue 152.

I was talking more in terms of things I may have done before the trial's verdict was reached. IIRC by the time the King Naugus arc had started Penders had already made it public he was suing..? Though if I got the timeline mixed up feel free to let me know.

During the beginning however, Flynn could use whatever and whoever he wanted. Mina, Elias the council, Julie-su, etc. But while he technically could have written Eggman to hack NICOLE's nanite city that may have required him centering an entire arc around that at the beginning to reboot the world in time before Penders officially won the case. Which would have impeded on the Naugus arc, and that's assuming we got it at all. So I suppose I can see your point on that level. To implement all of what I'm saying in a timeline that's feasible, the Naugus arc would have had to have been almost, if not completely sacrificed and scrapped. Which begs the question if that was a sacrifice worth taking.

Though perhaps it could have been possible...? Archie wasted A LOT of issues on needless filler arcs we didn't need at the time. So perhaps, if they got rid of some of these and took more precautions just in case, it would have been possible to have given the series a better send-off..? But even then, preparations would have had to have been made earlier in the arc for this to work.

Although one other alternative to the nanite city getting hacked is simply utilizing tools SEGA themselves created in games like Shadow the Hedgehog. Like the hackable, artificial reality seen in Mad Matrix. It wasn't as refined, but Eggman already created something similar in the games. It could potentially be used as a failsafe if the story arc went on for too long and NICOLE's nanite city couldn't be referenced anymore.

Here are some ways I might have handled the story from the beginning:

1) After seeing the Iron Queen effectively take the city over, Eggman with the power of the Chaos Emeralds, decided to essentially finish what she started. Using a new set of chaos-infused nano-technology, he's able to hack NICOLE while she's still vulnerable and use the emerald's power to alter the memories of the populace into thinking the world they're living in is real. This way NICOLE's nanites don't have to be referenced anymore beyond a couple issues, because the scope of nanites is at this point, beyond the city itself, bringing me to my next point.

2) To address other Penders related landmarks and characters the nanites are able to spread like a virus but require more chaos emeralds in order to broaden their scope and alter reality the way Eggman wants it. This is what I probably would have done as an alternative to the Genesis Wave. This way we could have spread to things like Mercia and Albion and altered those places as we saw fit.

3) The more emeralds Eggman has, the more he's able to alter reality. With a single emerald he can hack the mainframe of NICOLE and alter the memories of the people --- Or, at least, most of them. But it will take multiple emeralds for him to use the nanites to fully rewrite Mobius. So having more emeralds could allow him to permanently alter the people themselves. All he has to do is trick them into unwittingly consuming the nanites, Allowing Eggman to literally hack into them the way he could a roboticized mobian but on an even more broader, and disturbing scale. This could allow the writers to reboot certain parts of the series through Eggman as well implement characters who have similar functions without directly alluding to them being the exact same character.

However if you're looking for an even harder reboot, you could easily say that almost nothing the characters think they understand is real. And that Eggman's been in control of most of Mobius for a lot longer than we the viewers think. Leaving us just as confused as the heroes as they escape and try to uncover what was real about their memories and what wasn't.

But if you don't want to write Eggman using the nanites, they could have just used the Death Egg, to make like its name to start destroying parts of Mobius.

 

 

[Dr. Detective]

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog - Issue #250: When Worlds Collide - Part Nine of Twelve: All Out War!

Another milestone issue that both Sonic and Mega Man are celebrating together. This one is for the Sonic comic this time. Mega Man’s 25th is good but Sonic’s celebrating his 250th here. It really puts things into perspective eh? It’s insane how big this comic is and how long it’s gone on for. It shouldn’t be possible, especially with how rocky it’s been but it happened and I’m grateful. It’s always nice having more Sonic anything in the world.

Spoiler

Team Mega Man Variant

Is very cute. I love it so much. Sometimes the chibi style can backfire on certain things but it works so well for Mega Man in particular here. Always gotta make sure the tiny blush marks are on his face too.

Team Sonic Variant

It doesn’t look as good with the Sonic cast to me for some reason. Not the chibi style in general just the way it’s been done here. I’m not sure why. It must be really hard selling the already small ones like Tails and Charmy as even more chibi. Do it wrong and they’ll look like potatoes or something.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Ben Bates
Inks: Gary Martin
Colors: Matt Herms
Letters: John Workman
Cover by Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante and Ben Hunzeker
“Team Sonic” and “Team Mega Man” Chibi Variant Covers by Ryan Jampole, Gary Martin, and Matt Herms

All the big players have gathered together in one place just outside the main base of Eggman and Wily’s new zone. When I say ALL I mean that pretty much literally. 

The talent and elbow grease it must have taken to make this two-page spread has me both envious and also a bit exhausted just thinking about it. The amount of time it sometimes takes to just make one good looking image of a character is something to be respected so this… I mean, good God. I recall the second Sonic and Mega Man crossover just going even more insane with spreads like this too. I hope regardless of the narrative, people still appreciate that. 

There’s a lot of chaos happening now too. After re-watching scenes from the second Sonic movie, imagining how this all could go down in motion is just hyping me up even more. Of course, the characters are also doing that thing where they talk over the action, which I always love. It always just adds to the intensity for me. Here the conversation is just about getting to the control panel Proto Man and the Chaotix found. Vector says that they couldn’t figure out the passcode but it’s the only way inside the base so they have to secure it regardless.

We also get our introduction to our final Sonic character, E-123 Omega.

Proper introduction, I mean. He was seen a page before and this page is just the one explaining how he’s here.

Team Dark does their own thing so they’ve been kind of scattered about throughout this crossover. Shadow ended up a Roboticized Master, Rouge infiltrated the base, and Omega stayed behind at the portal but eventually left his post because he needs to blast some shit. Honestly, none of these three feel like they’d be best served guarding a portal to me. Rouge could probably do it fine but her skills are just better served for infiltration.

Omega COULD do it fine too but like… let’s face it, he’s not gonna.

The doctors are time-cloning all these Robot Masters so the objective isn’t really to destroy them all since Sonic notices that they’re beating on some that he knows they’ve already beaten. They just need to get to Dr. Light.

As it happens, Dr. Light is in the middle of something. Eggman and Wily are placing bets on their Motobug and Met to take out Dr. Light first but it doesn’t go well at all because they’re dumb. 

Stoopid robots. Mankind shall reign supreme forever. 

While Eggman is flabbergasted by the fact that these two robots apparently can’t walk into a straight line, Thomas tries to drop some knowledge on them about the fact that despite them both being geniuses they’re not as hot shit as they think they are. Their ambition is too far reaching for their own good and it’s going to blow up in their faces.

Because their exploits merged the past and future together, he has knowledge of things that haven’t happened yet in either of their stories. Somehow he also has knowledge of things that happened in Sonic’s world too. I guess maybe Rouge told him or it just went into his head because of all the strange cross-dimensional voodoo. 

Either way, it’s stuff he probably shouldn’t know. Albert just gets super pissed off at him for making these proclamations, claiming that Thomas is just jealous. 

However, he breathes an example of what he’s talking about to him and we get this wonderful reaction.

It’s going to be a treat eventually finding out what exactly Ra Moon is and how it’s curse fucks with everyone’s collective shit.

He goes on to speak with as much reason as he can but Wily just walks off super pissed off and Eggman… 

Eggman just turns to him with a creepy grin on his face.

He’s got something on his mind. No doubt something similar to what was just on my mind as well…

Cutting back outside, there are a ton of different fights going on across the areas. Some of it is just badassery. Some of it is jokey jokes. Some of it is badassery mixed with jokey jokes.

Watch out Silver, the bald Robot Master wants your beautiful, luscious locks.

Also gotta love Espio and Shadow Man bowing before they start fighting. 

Shadow is shown numerous times getting ambushed or inconvenienced to the point of looking constantly annoyed. I guess that’s par for the course with him though.

Knuckles is bursting through rock themed enemies. Amy is fighting a splash themed Robot woman and gets saved by Tails but not really because he’s fighting all the flying Robot Masters.

Quick Man catches up to Sonic and tries to make a play at him being an equal in a fight but gets made a fool of when he’s tripped and sent rolling into a bunch of other Robot Masters. Sonic says that while Quick Man has more speed than Mega Man, Mega Man has better skills. It’s great. Sonic’s been on his character’s A-game as far as his portrayal in this portion of the story goes. 

They casually take the time to save Rouge the Bat while this is going on too.

Mega Man has acquired the Black Wave now. He looks adorable in Rouge’s color scheme too. Of course, because he’s been made to look cool for a good chunk of the story, Sonic seems to be making up for a bit of lost time on this issue. He’s literally been all over the place here and it just looks more and more impressive with each page turn.

Your boy is having fun.

Throughout this entire spread, we see Quick Man trying to catch up with Sonic. He gets run over and rushes to the next afterimage of Sonic he sees in front of him but by that time, Sonic has already raced around and tangled with a couple of other Robot Masters on the field, hence why he’s catching his breath in the one after image that Quick Man is racing towards. Dude just isn’t fast enough to affect what’s going on in the battle as quickly as Sonic is. He ends up telling Quick Man that he’s quick but he’s not fast.

How embarrassing.

Eventually, Shadow calls Sonic over to huddle up for a meeting. They need to knock this shit off and just get to the evil battle station in the sky. Mega Man is reluctant to leave them behind but Shadow and Blues can take care of themselves. 

Sonic gets taken to the air by Tails and Mega Man rides away on Rush. They’re taking the fight to the doctors now.

Inside the base, Wily is cheering on the Robot Masters and enjoying the show. Eggman is just standing there… contemplating things to himself to the point where Bass asks if he’s not enjoying himself.

Eggman says he’s just piecing together a puzzle. 

On cue, Orbot shows up and reports that a weird signal is coming from the inside of the prison cell. He heads off to go take care of it.

Inside the cell, he finds Dr. Light, scrambling to make a communicator with the outside world using a bunch of broken robot parts…

The menace radiating from Eggman and Metal Sonic as they arrive is some scary, scary shit.

It feels nice that I thought the exact same thing. 

When Dr. Light began rattling all that stuff off, it felt a bit odd. The fact that Eggman picked up on it but just gave him a creepy smile while contemplating what was going on in his head makes this man the savant that he is. He’s just so unhinged and unnerving in this book. 

He tells Metal Sonic to grab him and he drags him to an open hatch to drop him from the fucking ship, claiming that he underestimated him and refuses to do so again.

Dr. Light tries to tell him that he doesn’t have to do this.

Eggman says, “Probably not. But I want to.”

Boss.

This image is fantastic. Ben Bates is great at all that he does, for sure, but there are seldom very few 2D images that elicit the sensation of being so high up like this one does. I’m always impressed whenever a show, a game, or even a comic like this manages to draw someone or something falling from high up and makes it actually feel like I’m falling as well.

It really does look incredible. It’s the kind of talent that makes you want to die, goddammit.

Mega Man and Sonic taking off when they did was an insane stroke of luck because Rush and Mega Man manage to fly by and scan the thing that just fell from the ship.

Mega Man is horrified. 

Dr. Light is an old man. I don’t know how the sheer sensation of falling from so high up isn’t giving him the mother of all heart attacks right now. I’d probably already be dead. He’s built different, this old guy is.

For some reason, the rest of the book is made extra thick due to pages from the Genesis arc where Super Sonic bested the Death Egg Robot being here. It’s sort of relevant since a similar situation is happening right now, I guess. Eggman made a comment about having a familiar feeling when he dropped Dr. Light out of the air lock which obviously harkens back to him doing the same to Sonic after the Genesis arc ended. It’s not a one-to-one comparison but it’s relevant enough, I suppose. I also guess they figured they do something special for issue 250. I dunno.

Incredible, incredible issue. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this one. The instant I saw that opening two-page spread I knew immediately what this one was and how much cool shit was in it. However, I can’t say it’s my favorite of the arc. That one is Part Eleven. We’re gearing up for the heavy infiltration that’ll lead to the climactic showdown though and things just get more and more awesome as they go on. 

Mega Man - Issue #27: When Worlds Collide - Part Ten of Twelve: No Holds Barred

This is a great cover. However, the one thing that always bothered me about it is Dr. Light’s head. All the other neat things about the cover’s lighting, Eggman’s shadowy face, the adrenaline rush that’s being showcased by our heroes needing to hurry up as it’s juxtaposed with Eggman’s dominant position… all of it kind of takes a back seat in my mind to Dr. Light’s head. It looks like it’s twisted all the way around to face me. Like he’s some kind of an old man owl or something. Seriously, no matter how hard I try to make sense of the head’s positioning, his beard traveling that far down behind him is throwing me off. His neck must be in terrible pain. Who is he even looking at? Is he trying to beg me for help? I can’t do shit, I’m afraid. You’d best try not to hurt yourself anymore than you already have my good man.

Spoiler

P.I.C (Pencil - Ink - Color) Variant

It’s a cover showing off the three stages of creating a cover. The penciling stage, the inking stage, and the coloring stage. It’s a neat idea. It sort of invokes the feeling of another Genesis wave happening right at the tip of Dr. Light’s demise too. That’s not what’s happening but when you see a flash of light like this it’s hard to not get that idea out of your head. Still, this isn’t exactly something I’d want to have as a cover. I’d probably like to look at this on the internet as some sort of interesting look into the creator’s creation process rather than have it be in a variant cover collection.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Ben Bates
Inks: Gary Martin
Colors: Steve Downer
Letters: John Workman
Cover and Variant Cover by Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante and Matt Herms

Mega Man spotted Dr. Light in free fall but he’s not close enough to make it. He knows this and patches a call through to anyone who might be listening for help. He then starts to beg and plead for help, now in tears as the reality of what’s about to happen is hitting them both at terminal velocity.

It’s quite wild seeing Sonic so panicked here after all the reassurances he kept giving Mega Man about how they’d save him. It was for Mega Man’s own good, of course, but seeing the danger this close even managed to get Sonic in a frenzy here. It always sort of takes me off guard whenever that happens. Those times where Sonic’s shell is broken does do a lot to remind you that he is mostly putting up a wall of bravado on purpose. 

However, the thing that gets me most is seeing Mega Man crying. The poor lad is alive and this is more proof than anyone could ever need.

Dr. Light’s death is not to be, thankfully. Shadow uses Chaos Control to warp himself in, snag him, and then zip back to the battlefield. There, he crawls a bit on the ground to get his bearings since he almost died and all… but then he asks Proto Man for help in speaking with Mega Man.

Mega Man was ready to go right back down there to his dad but Dr. Light tells him to stay the course. They need to end this because things are only going to get worse. Literally what just happened was too close.

Tails finishes hacking the console that the Chaotix couldn’t crack the code of and the four heroes warp inside. Also, Dr. Light told them that the name of the fortress is the Wily Egg and Mega Man in turn tells the others. Their reaction is similar to mine in much less words.

Dr. Light sees Agent Rouge again and asks how the battle is going. She says it sucks so far and he instills some hope into everyone by telling them not to back down. With Proto Man’s helmet on his head and an arm cannon he fastened together with some scraps on the ground, he starts to defend himself too.

Shit! Santa Claus is packin’!

As the next couple of pages roll by, at the very bottom of them, we see scenes of Duo being put on his way to the battlefield to help out. It’s part ten now and he’s had to journey through space and now through dimensions to reach this point but he’s on his way.

It’s funny because my memories of Duo in the arc were shockingly limited. It was honestly to the point where I was misremembering things and thought that this issue was his first appearance in this crossover. Going back through it, it’s obvious that isn’t the case. He’s been built up and built up constantly and these panels at the bottom are showcasing his little adventure to reach the others as the heat of the climax is rising to its boiling point.

And when I say “boiling point” I mean for all parties involved and not just to those on opposite sides anymore.

Not after jolly ol’ Eggman’s little murder stunt.

The small hints of their union potentially breaking apart were there but this is the sledgehammer that completely shattered the safety glass of their bromance.

The differences between these two characters are on open display now and it was, by far, one of the most interesting and endearing things about Dr. Wily that I found out the first time I read this thing all those years back. I regret not getting into the Mega Man comics when I had the chance. I can still go back and read them but I would very much like to collect them hassle free now because I’ve only grown more and more enamored by these characters.

What’s also interesting is the fact that I could very easily see other versions of Eggman (or even THIS version of Eggman, honestly) getting mad at Wily for trying to do the same thing to Sonic. Sonic X Eggman seemed like the kind of Eggman that could take or leave killing Sonic but would mostly prefer he be humiliated and defeated above all else. Archie Eggman is the kind of Eggman that I know wants that. He’s talked so often about crushing Sonic’s spirit to the point where he keeps making mistakes under the expectation that that would ever happen. Then does the surprise Pikachu face whenever it doesn’t. 

Bass interrupts their arguing to inform them that Sonic and Mega Man are inside the base now. The two doctors compose themselves immediately and set off to put the finishing touches on the Egg-Wily Machine X. Wily sends the Mega Man Killers after them to slow them down and Eggman tells Metal Sonic to take Bass to guard checkpoint X. They’ll be the last line of defense before their last-last line of defense.

They say this while secretly plotting to sabotage the machine so that it won’t work for the other one. 

By law of averages, that means the machine eventually won’t work for either of them.

Whoops.

Honestly, from here on in it’s going to be tough as nails to not just show you the entire rest of the book because there’s so much awesome shit that’s done with the dynamic paneling and the art.

The scene of Sonic and Mega Man arguing over which base the Wily Egg is designed after more is great. It’s a lot less jock-competitive and more fun-competitive. Rush and Tails give each other a side glance of “Oh brother…” at witnessing these two go at it.

The Mega Man Killers arrive and they all start fighting. It’s a fantastic looking battle that leads to our favorite fox boy getting blown up.

Yeah, there was no getting out of that one’s way. Especially since Sonic attacking that guy made his arm swing over towards Tails and that’s when the bomb fired.

Thankfully, there’s no talk of Sonic blaming himself and Tails trying to assure him that it wasn’t his fault. Although, done right, that would have been cute. What we get is just as cute, as well as badass for our two-tailed terror.

Tails is just so goddamn good at this. That’s our fox boy. He jumps into the fray even knowing there’s a chance he’ll get hurt and when he falls in the line of duty, he tries to keep a brave face on for Sonic. 

Duo arrives at the battlefield now and tells Dr. Light himself that he’s here. Dr. Light points at the Wily Egg and tells Duo that he’s needed UP THERE and FAST!

At that point in time, Sonic and Mega Man are ambushed by the Chaos Devil. As the two of them start fighting it, Duo, who’s been trapped at the very bottom of the page since this issue started, takes flight when he senses the Chaos Devil and literally BURSTS through the bottom panel, shattering it, and zooming up and up and up until he reaches the fight!

Like, literally. He demolishes the border of the panel. It’s fucking sick.

As Sonic and Mega Man are coming across more of these kinds of abominations, it really is sinking in more and more how this time nonsense is just allowing the doctors to get away with whatever. They’ve brought people back who were once reformed by grabbing them how they were in the past but have also brought people back from how they were in the future. Then there’s this thing that’s just a fusion of two entities at certain points in their lifespans without remorse or respect for either of their initial state of being. 

It’s just a horrific monster thing that’s being used to give our heroes a hard time while the doctor’s flaunt their genius. The ticking clock makes this all feel so much more awesome though and as the Chaos Devil gains some ground on them, Duo continues to burst through floor after floor after floor.

Goddammit Big. Playing cards in the middle of a war.

 Sonic and Mega Man’s gambit ends up not paying off. Right as they’re about to be drowned to oblivion and back, Duo arrives.

And he arrives with this… THIS glorious fucking image. It lives rent free in my head and has the honor of being one of, if not the first panel I think of when it comes to this crossover. 

I may not have paid enough attention to Duo the first time I read this but this image sticks in my head too much for me to not have noticed him afterward. It’s no wonder I had it in my mind that this was his first entrance because good GOD what an entrance!

So after Duo fists the Chaos Devil into oblivion, by the nature of its very being it manages to reform itself.

Mega Man explains that Duo is a robot from space that fights evil energy. He uses some of his energy to heal Sonic and Mega Man before they head off. He stays behind to face down the Chaos Devil. Playing as him for this boss battle in the video game adaptation they’ll never make would have been the sickest thing ever.

The two of them continue onward and their journey to the final checkpoint before the the time where the big bads come at them with their badly named final boss machine is upon them. The journey is intercut with shots of what’s happening on the battlefield outside and it looks as incredible as ever.

I want to be the very best that no one ever was at drawing and plotting something like this. I can’t help but look at this and wonder how it’s possible to get this good at art. 

Our heroes happen upon a door with a big symbol on it. It’s a big important door and when it opens up, the big, important rival characters burst out of it to finally give the heroes that have fought their way here a chance to take on the ultimate penultimate baddies!

There’s an achievement for winning the fight, of course. People can forgive a hard boss bottle if there’s an achievement at the end of it, right?

My mind's eye had this issue possibly being something I just read through to get to my favorite issue of the book but goddamn. I was wrong. This issue was great too. Every issue since reaching the pinnacle of this fight at the doorstep of the doctors has just been getting better and better with each one we go through. It feels monumental, still, after all these years. I almost feel bad for any Sonic X Mega Man crossover that could happen at this point. It’d be a miracle if it could somehow be better than this. Especially with the pure concentrated awesome that’s about to happen next.

Sonic Universe - Issue #54: When Worlds Collide - Part Eleven of Twelve: Worst of the Worst

Even during the time of me initially reading these books and being filled to the brim with cynicism and unending criticisms back in the day, I came out of THIS issue loving the fuck out of it. Nowadays, I’ve enjoyed and appreciated these comics so much more than I ever did back then and the revisit of this arc has been such a special treat. I’m excited to read this issue again because it, for the longest time, remained the best and brightest example of how fight scenes in Sonic comics should go. Focused on one scene and with a through-line that stretched from the beginning of the issue to the end with no interruptions. That’s how you make for a satisfying, breathtaking showdown. It IS my favorite issue of the crossover. It’s got one of my favorite types of covers too. I always love covers where someone is punching through a mirror and the reflection of big players in the story are looking back at me.

Spoiler

P.I.C (Pencil - Ink - Color) Variant

It’s another version of what the last variant cover did, although I actually like it a little less than the other one. There’s too much white space on this one for me. I know the point is that it’s unfinished but, again, I’d rather just look at these online than have them offset any collection of variants I had with something intentionally not done.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Ben Bates
Inks: Gary Martin
Colors: Matt Herms
Letters: John Workman
Cover and Variant Cover by Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante and Matt Herms

The two doctors are hard at work completing the Egg-Wily Machine X. Wily apparently insisted on the paint job having a craftsman’s touch so Eggman is painting it himself instead of having a badnik do it. The fact that this is a major concern to Wily at this eleventh hour is a contributing factor to why he’s such an excellent character.

Of course, as they do this, they’re plotting against one another in their heads. Wily wants to take out Eggman because he’s realizing he’s too dangerous. Eggman wants to take out Wily because he realizes he’s too weak-willed.

All the while, the underlying concern is that if Duo and the Chaos Devil’s fight disrupts them too much and the Generator keeping this zone together breaks, their worlds could fall into chaos. 

As this is happening, Sonic and Metal Sonic are going at it while Mega Man and Bass are in a shooting fight of their lives. 

I just had to get the Kid Icarus: Uprising Boss Battle theme up and running for this one. That game had the perfect theme for confronting your rivals and enemies.

Sonic’s scrap with Metal Sonic has him gloating at the machine and him not responding with his words because he can’t talk. He does get Sonic to shut up when he lands a good hit on him. However, that just gets brushed off as a cheap shot by him.

Meanwhile, Mega Man is trying his best with Bass and ends up pissing the guy off when he shoots at his dog. Bass leaps into the fray and fires off a blast that accidentally seems to nail Sonic dead on. 

Sonic claims he’s alright and says that the best way to tackle this is to switch opponents. They weren’t built to handle the other’s rival so the ol’ switcheroo is sure to work on them.

Bass then proceeds to whoop Sonic’s ass.

Metal Sonic ends up ramming Mega Man into a wall to double up on the wrongness of Sonic’s statement there. Mega Man gives Sonic a sarcastic quip and Sonic’s quip in return makes it seem like he just realized Mega Man can be sarcastic which definitely doesn’t make sense considering the conversations and ego-fights they’ve had up to this point.

Sonic’s new plan is to take on one of them at the same time while Mega Man opens up ALL the weapons he’s gathered on the person they decide to target. Sonic wants to go after Metal Sonic because of his speed but Mega Man wants to go after Bass because of his range and support.

They settle it the only way you can in these situations.

Sonic loses. Bass is the target.

Metal Sonic ends up barely missing them as they rush off to bum rush the guy. Bass shoots all over at Sonic and Sonic manages to ram into Treble. 

Sonic bounces around and attacks Bass who just swats him out of the way like he’s nothing. That gives Mega Man enough time to change into his Chaos Cannon form and blast him.

When he’s stuck in the chaos bubble, Sonic bursts through it and rams into Bass. At that same time Treble tries to attack Mega Man. He dodges and turns on the Psycho Burst equip to blast Treble away and then grabs Bass when he’s busy trying to hit Sonic again.

The two of them continue to not let up on the advantage they’re getting. They’re not giving the bad guys a single inch now that they’ve got the upper hand.

Metal Sonic removes himself from the wall and charges Mega Man at the same time Treble tries to do it again. He uses the Chroma Camo to get them to ram into each other before quickly turning on the Acoustic Blaster and firing it at Sonic’s battle.

Sonic zips to the side and lets it hit Bass. While he’s off-kilter, he kicks Bass away and then Mega Man follows through again with the Piko Hammer!

With Bass down, they keep the pressure going by targeting Metal Sonic. He uses the Tail Wind to ram the robot Sonic while Sonic slams into him from behind and surfs on his body over to Mega Man, who smashes him into the floor with his Sharp Knuckle equipped.

However, Metal Sonic shifts into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE and rams into Metal Sonic in a manner that looks like it’s about to just demolish him. Before this can happen though, Mega Man shifts into Rapid Stinger and fires off sharp metallic shots that disrupt him enough for Sonic to ram into him from behind and finish him next!

Re-reading this, I think this might be a case where the battle I remembered was slightly more awesome in my head BUT it was still really cool. The thing I think stuck out in my head the most was just how this felt like a beautiful, flowing dance. The attacks would get followed up by another attack from another person participating in the match in such a clean way it often felt like someone was conducting the movements.

The thing that really sells it though is Mega Man using the powers he got from Sonic’s friends. Seeing the spirits of Sonic’s buddies hovering over Mega Man, doing their own character poses and faces really makes them feel like they’re all there helping to take out Metal Sonic and Bass in actual spirit. The only ones that don’t get used are Rouge and Blaze’s, which is a shame, but fitting in more than what they did sounds like it could have been a reasonably hard task, for sure.

What they managed to accomplish with this was super impressive. This fight was a marvelous looking waltz and the heroes used a nice amount of pages to secure their victory. Satisfaction guaranteed.

It’s time to bro-fist our way to victory!

Oh…!

Oh shit! 

The doctors showed up faster than I thought they would. I actually misremembered more than I thought. I could have sworn they didn’t show themselves until the final issue but nope. 

Well, I’m sure our heroes can manag–!

Oh.

Well.

Hmm…

What I love about this is that it sells them looking demolished here so much better than whatever the fuck happened at the end of Generations. Blasting them with a multi-colored hyper-beam of evil just sells the scene so much more.

It's even better when the doctors are actually on the cusp of accomplishing something as opposed to this being a thing where the heroes just reached an area where they were and decided to fight them. No, we’re on a tickling clock here. Shit’s gotten real and our friends aren’t just cheering Sonic on. They’re literally down in the trenches fighting for their lives.

I can give Sonic Forces THAT particular benefit I guess. At least they were there fighting. We didn’t SEE any of it and there was no scene of them being at the actual important fights in spirit so it’s inferior in that sense as well. Not to mention, Forces was animated like shit. It can’t match how well these pages drawn by Ben Bates simulate movement in comparison. The art is just too good.

Anyway, the doctors won there.

Yeah. Sonic and Mega Man had themselves a bro-fist while talking about how exhausted they were and the two doctors showed up to just land the finishing blow. They were a hairs away from passing out and they snagged it at the last possible second.

However, because this is Eggman and Wily we’re dealing with, of course they weren’t killed. They were shoved into glass tubes and brought to witness the final stages of the plan with the fucking Chaos Emeralds floating in the center of the device right in front of our trapped heroes. They wake up to see this is the case too.

Eggman even trots out that same old thing he goes on about, concerning crushing Sonic’s spirit being the real challenge he’s after.

I love how Sonic’s first reaction is “OH HEY! You kept us alive so you could gloat!” like he’s relieved. Eggman is a hard guy to pin down. There’s no guarantee that he’ll just keep you alive so Sonic waking up in this position was probably a massive relief to him, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.

It also serves as another example of how truly lucky Sonic is. Eggman has said this before but he CAN beat Sonic. Easily if he wanted to. The point is to crush this kid’s spirit and declare a true, ultimate victory. It’s the boon that keeps Sonic alive and keeps Eggman losing. If Eggman ever truly lost that spirit of competition the world would be in such a worse place.

Granted, it’s not looking so hot right now. Mega Man asks what the doctors want with a super charged Genesis Wave since they’ve already re-written their worlds. The doctors have to clarify that they were only able to make small changes here and there. However, with the power of all seven Chaos Emeralds and a super charged Genesis Wave, they’ll not only be able to by-pass that little annoying measure but they’ll be able to act as GODS!

Goddamn. They’ve got goals, these two. 

It’s all down to the wire now. 

This is it.

The only thing on my mind when it comes to this final page is how that image of Charmy was clearly cut and pasted here from the previous issue and then reversed. It sticks out so much. 

We’re finally at yet another crossroads in Sonic comic book history guys. Next week, it finally happens. What happens as a result of Eggman and Wily playing God will have repercussions that will literally change the fabric of time and space for Sonic’s world forever. The finale to World’s Collide and the fallout as a result of it happening is stuff that’s going to be covered next week and it feels monumental. 

This issue is still really, really great. My mind built it up for me for a reason. A very good reason actually. This is still one of the best fights in Archie Sonic history. The only fight in a Sonic comic that I feel outdoes it is the one Sonic has against Neo Metal in IDW Issue #7 but when you have to jump comic series to think of a competing example you’ve hit upon something special. 

We’re in the endgame of the endgame’s endgame now.

[Dr. Detective]

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog - Issue #251: When Worlds Collide - Part Twelve of Twelve: Best of the Best

It’s the end of an era. 

I’ve had my ups and downs with everything before the reboot, for certain. More downs than ups when it came to the stuff before #160. More ups than downs when it came to the stuff after #160. However, overall, I enjoyed the experience and I’m grateful I got to get this far with all of you. Here’s hoping the engagement continues so that I can do the reboot as well. If not, I’m thankful I got this far.

Spoiler

E.F.F (Evil Friends Forever) Variant

It really does seem weird that these Evil Friends Forever variants are the only ones that seem like they’re being given a significant amount of effort. I remain happy that they are though. The bad guys treating Sonic and Mega Man over there like they’re the friggin Batman and his group of Outsiders is wonderful. Of course the mere concept of heroism is a frightening story to tell around the campfire for these loons.

 

Convention Exclusive Variant

This is actually a really cool cover. I might have enjoyed having this one on the docket as a collectors item. It works so well that you don’t even notice that there’s no Tails, Rouge, or Omega representation. You just kind of go with it. Omega plays the part of his own robot master.

Omega Man is a badass name.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Ben Bates
Inks: Gary Martin
Colors: Matt Herms
Letters: John Workman
Cover by Patrick “Spaz” Spaziante and Ben Hunzeker
Variant Cover by Ben Bates
Convention Variant by Lamar Wells, Jim Amash, and Dustin Evans

The doctors have WON or so they claim.

They outline everything that’s gone in their favor, kind of. They mention that the heroes got past all their defenses and shit but it doesn’t matter because they still failed. Also, they apparently cheated by skipping the Chaos Devil and it was really hard to make. However, since it’s keeping Duo at bay it’s turning out to be in their favor technically too.

The point is they’re awesome.

So then the endless fight outside gets interrupted when back-up arrives in the form of Dr. Light’s original Robot Masters.

These robots are on the NO SMASH list. Roll was thinking more than several steps ahead and called them in after Light called for Duo. You can never have too much assistance at war.

Knuckles, the strategic war leader, comes up with a plan of action all on his own here. It’s significantly better than Operation Big Wave too. Now that the back-up has arrived, he, Proto Man and Dr. Light can invade the Wily Egg and help out the main heroes. After all, they’re taking too long to resolve things and that shouldn’t be the case with Duo there.

So the three of them fly off using Rush and two boogie boards or whatever.

Inside, Mega Man starts to plead with Dr. Wily to knock this shit off. He never seemed like the type to take it this far. Wily says he was originally only open to slightly altering his own world but Eggman opened his eyes to altering everything. 

Sonic then chimes in by saying that Eggman tried to do this once and everything almost collapsed. Eggman’s response almost gives Wily a heart-attack before he manages to get the full explanation out.

I can totally buy this being a new low for Wily considering all we’ve seen of his character up to this point. Also interesting is the imagined scenario where Eggman has re-written things so that Sonic has been roboticized too. I wonder if that’s what he’d actually want though. I’d think Eggman would roboticize everyone except Sonic just to see if he could “break his spirit”. 

Well, before that can happen, Knuckles and Proto-Man burst through the window to save the day. Dr. Light also lets Mega Man out of his prison.

Sonic, Knuckles hasn’t said an antagonistic word to you throughout this entire special. That’s literally only been you doing it to him. Reading this crossover alone, you’d probably think that this rivalry between the two of them was something Sonic was imagining.

Mega Man gives his daddy a hug but his dad has no E-Tanks on him in return. He suggests doing a fusion with Rush to get a quick power-up though and we see this nice little form.

It’s pretty distinct. I like how it’s not just another red Mega Man since we’ve seen at least two of those so far.

Of course, Sonic’s got an idea and by that he means the same idea he always has. Try to take over the world. I mean, the Chaos Emeralds.

That’d be quite the twist though, right?

Anyway, the two doctors are trying to get the Egg Wily Machine X online with Knuckles and Proto Man all up in their grill. They’re apparently powering it by drawing power from the Genesis Chamber which Eggman tells Wily to not take too much from. Wily is confused by that order since Eggman said that the Chaos Emeralds have limitless power. However, Eggman’s concern is with the Genesis Wave itself. It’s still at a fragile stage so messing with it can cause something bad to happen.

He can’t exactly explain fully because Knuckles clamps himself on the window of the machine and scares the shit out of Eggman. They’re really in a tight spot now and it’s all because Sonic has friends. 

So, as a result, this is something that would probably never happen in a Sonic game coming out today.

The doctors try to demolish their opposition but find that they can’t.

The doctors have just made it impossible for them to properly use their machine. Congrats. You played yourselves.

The two of them immediately get to work on fixing it so they can do a system reboot. Knuckles and Proto Man start to demolish the shit out of it while this is happening. The two doctors have an amusing sequence with one another where they tell the other what they need to do to fix the sabotage and manage to BARELY do it in time before Knuckles can land the final blow.

They do a system reboot and the Robot is all better and glowing with Chaos Energy. Knuckles is a bit pissed off about this since he was so close to getting to beat the main villains for once. He remarks that he should have let them steal the Master Emerald since he could have used it to neutralize all the Chaos Energy they have.

That’s a really good idea actually. Knuckles has been really good in this crossover.

Anyway, Eggman says he’s going to kill Wily. Wily says not if he gets him first and calls him a psycho… then Eggman proposes a truce until they win. Wily says he doesn’t have a choice so he agrees. 

They’re too alike. It’s so sad that the bromance is sort-of over. Though it still feels like some of it is there.

Either way, the sabotage made it so that they were preoccupied with fixing themselves and thus Sonic and Mega Man had time to gain access to the emeralds as well.

Ta-Da! Super Sonic and… SUPER Mega Man! 

They both look cool, especially in Ben Bates’ pencils and Matt Herms’ colors but the best thing about this page is Eggman’s fucking face.

This poor man. 

It looks like he actually regressed a bit. 

So yeah… they go bat shit.

The space behind them has transitioned into being actual space now. The Genesis Wave is about to go off. Removing the emeralds won’t do anything. It’s charged and about to happen regardless.

The fight is raging on as the zone the doctors have created is collapsing all around them and everyone else. Dr. Light, Knuckles, and Proto Man reach a “safer” spot out of the way of all the blasts and lasers happening, where Bass, Treble, and Metal Sonic are standing by as everything is collapsing.

The fight the two supers are having is incredible. The doctors are trying their best to keep things from going too crazy but Mega Man fires a sun at their shield and destroys it. Super Sonic then starts ripping through the robot. Wily tells Eggman to do something about the hedgehog while Eggman shouts at Wily that his nemesis just destroyed their shield and for him to do something about Mega Man for once in his life.

Duo has the Chaos Devil’s eye in his hand and now both him and normal Chaos 0 are looking over what’s going on with question marks in their speech bubbles.

Chaos is cute.

I can’t help but wonder if he doesn’t understand how or why he got here and is witnessing THIS and his brain is trying to process it like “What the fuck…?”

Anyway, they have to end this now and like all poetic endings they end it the way they started things… with a Super Sonic shot!

It looks awesome and it gets the job done.

Even the Bro-Fist has been upgraded. 

We’ve unlocked the Super Bro-Fist. That’s the name of the achievement for when you beat these two in the final boss battle for the video game adaptation they’re never gonna make.

So with the robot destroyed, the two heroes have two huge clashing balls of energy to take care of in order to fix this. Mega Man thinks they might still have lost but Sonic says they just need to use Chaos Control to fix it.

Mega Man doesn’t know what that is but Sonic explains that they just use the same juice they’re running on right now in their super forms to will their universes back to normal. Mega Man asks if it’s truly that easy and Sonic says no. They’ll need to concentrate in order to do it properly.

Wily, meanwhile, is slumped over his destroyed machine and all sad that they’ve lost. He recounts everything they’ve done up to this point and now it’s over. He also asks if he’ll remember any of this once Mega Man resets it all.

However, Eggman is a psycho, just like Wily said. While Wily has resigned himself to it, Eggman is hard at work, trying to will the destroyed head of the Egg Wily Machine X to do his bidding for one final gambit.

Wily says “Ivo, it’s over. I know it’s a challenge for you, but show a LITTLE grace and dignity.”

Even after all that, he’s still got a good enough head on his shoulders to try and appeal to what little sense he feels Eggman should have within him.

However, as he learned and as he’ll witness yet again, Eggman is a psychopath. That’s the true mark of the difference between them. 

When things don’t go Eggman’s way, he loses his goddamn mind. It’s why he shot a missile into the center of Station Square after all his plans went up in smoke in Adventure. It’s that same shit where he just goes full blown nuclear without thinking about “collateral damage”. 

So when the heroes are about to fix their worlds, Eggman slams into Super Sonic before he can and knocks him off kilter.

Mega Man has managed to do what Sonic has told him and built up Chaos Energy to fix his universe but is concerned for Sonic. Sonic tells him to just fix his world. He’ll take care of his universe.

So… reluctantly, Mega Man does Chaos Control.

That’s it for Mega Man for right now. We’ll see him again.

Probably a lot sooner than we realistically should have too, honestly, but for now it’s going to be a nice farewell.

I can’t wait until I read his series. That’s going to be a lot of fun. I can already tell.

Meanwhile, Eggman is busy fucking everything up for Sonic’s world. 

Sonic’s Chaos Control ball of energy has gone all haywire and out of control. He can’t properly concentrate to build it up more so he figures it’s what he has now or nothing and fires it. 

Eggman shouts, “NO YOU DON’T! FIRE!” and blasts it with his multi-colored beam of energy.

So an unfinished, crackling Chaos Control just got hit with a destructive Eggman robot hyper-beam into Sonic’s world.

As a result, instead of a comforting bright light, the place fucking shatters.

That’s really goddamn terrifying. 

Can you imagine witnessing something like this? Restoring an entire reality on your own has to be crazy stressful enough but to see it literally SHATTER like that in front of you?! 

Goddamn.

Well, it happened.

It’s over.

I don’t know how to tell you guys this but Archie Eggman, if his body count wasn’t already the highest out of all the Eggmans in existence, just excelled at reaching a new plain of destructive mass murder. His body count is probably in the trillions if Sonic’s entire universe of planets was affected by what just happened there. Then again, maybe some survived and are just different people who exist with different lives unconnected to Sonic and the others now? Who knows? 

Maybe it’s my sick brain but because of what actually happened in real life, I can’t help but view it as them all just being erased from existence. It’s by far the much harsher way of looking at it but it’s also the most understandable and immediate conclusion one would come to. The luck you’d have to have in order to remain as one of the characters in this book feels like it’s on the level of the Thanos snap.

Only, here, there’s no way to get everyone back because their memories will be gone. Or rather they will pointlessly return for a bit before disappearing again as a result of a weird editorial mandate. Ian Flynn has talked numerous times about how the next arc went down and how it wasn’t his idea to do the weird memory device thing so fear not. It’s only the people not writing the book who are at fault for that.

However, there will be more to discuss following the direction of the book and the decisions made concerning the reboot that’s about to happen. One of them will be the initial reaction to it happening and how unreasonable some of the fans were about the necessity of the changes being made. It was really interesting going back through this thread and reading what the initial responses to a lot of the changes were. Some of which I couldn’t help but shake my head at, knowing the ultimate fate of the Archie book in general. Perhaps I’ll go more in-depth about that soon but for now, we’re here to also celebrate the finale of the Sonic X Mega Man crossover.

World’s Collide was a masterful treat. It was fun. It was exciting. It was basically everything I feel I could have wanted or asked for out of a crossover between these two. I can’t imagine striking a balance as beautiful as this and having it not be something truly celebrated as it was. Thankfully, that’s exactly what happened. This crossover was a massive success and it paved the way for Archie to take advantage of the goodwill it brought in… only for them to totally NOT do that and fuck it up hard for both series down the line.

Archie is incredibly incompetent and as said before their continued existence does nothing but baffle the senses.

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog - Issue #252: At All Costs, Part Two: A New Lease on Life

It’s time to hit the ground running with a new era and a new status quo for the Sonic comics going forward. What a cover to do that with too. It looks sketchy in the best way possible. Here he is folks. He’s rising for the ashes and landing in the meadow of what looks like some REALLY wet grass to say “Hey all, I’m back and I’m better than ever!”

I think it’s true, honestly. Despite lamenting the loss of the previous continuity and all the promising things it had going for it due to Ian’s masterful streamlining of the events and characters within… I do think I ultimately recall enjoying the experience with the Post-Reboot as a whole a tad bit more. Or at the very least, I think I recall preferring its continuity overall. We’ll see if that opinion remains the same but at the very least I feel a lot more optimistic about the times ahead than not.

Spoiler

SEGA Variant

We’re back to the variant covers that suck I see. Yeah, it’s a Sonic model pasted over a Green Hill Zone background. Or is that Seaside Hill? I can’t tell. Either way it looks bad. Especially the weird blurring effect on Sonic’s feet. Meh.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Evan Stanley
Inks: Terry Austin
Letters: Jack Morelli
Colors: Matt Herms
Cover by Ben Bates
Variant Cover artwork provided by SEGA

There’s going to be an unsurprising amount to talk about here, starting with the comic’s title. Yeah, if you didn’t catch it, this story is being treated as a part two of Issue #247. So this issue is technically the ending of a story arc but also the beginning of the new continuity. 

It’s got to be the weirdest two-part story arc in the book as a result.

The first page of the book shows Sonic falling in a white void of sorts as memories are swirling around him. It’s understandably confusing because we get a shot of Issue #175 where Eggman defeated him and a shot of Super Sonic writing “Hi Sal” on a window with condensation. I don’t remember that second thing happening but it might just be my faulty memory again. However, we also get shots of Sonic fighting Shadow from Sonic Adventure 2 and a shot of the wisps and Tails’ communication foibles from Sonic Colors. These are no doubt here to show that the stories of the games are mixing and meshing in with the stories of the comics… only, sort of.

Because the previous continuity has been wiped out I guess it literally can’t be mixing with what happened in Issue #175. It’s weird.

Sonic wakes up with a massive headache. He’s back in his own world and thinks to himself about how he hopes Mega Man got home safely. He doesn’t say Mega Man of course. He says “the kid” because he can’t outside of the crossover. Anyway, he’s home. 

Like, actually home. As in, he's somehow in Mobotropolis.

He’s instantly confused by this since the last thing he did before the crossover was try to rescue Sally with Silver and Amy all the way up in the Arctic with the Arctic Freedom Fighters.

Tails flies in and says that Sonic took a nasty hit off-screen and out of Sonic’s memory. The confusion deepens as Tails explains what’s going on.

The most confusing part about this is Silver being highlighted in the adventure where they rescued the wisps. In Colors DS, maybe, but it’s still weird. Tails is saying that the two of them came here to save King Acorn from being attacked by the Tails Doll monster thing.

By the way, that thing is still here. It survived the purge just fine and is still attacking the city. 

I’m with Sonic on this one. I think I was even more on Sonic’s side back in the day because I recall this issue being nothing but a massive confusing mess. That’s why I was so opposed to any ascertainment that the reboot’s first issue was a better established starting point for a new Sonic comic than IDW. That idea was baffling to me. There’s definitely some modicum of knowledge you need to have both about what came before and what’s happening in the outside world that made this possible in order for this to make sense. If you were a kid reading this and you had no idea what a Ken Penders was or what a lawsuit was I only felt bad for you because this had to be a bit of a trip.

Anyone starting this book off as their first Sonic comic would likely be confused as to why Sonic’s so confused or what Sonic’s talking about when he suggests that the king being in trouble might be the fault of Naugus. 

Who the fuck is Naugus? Why would Sonic jump to that conclusion? If you’ve watched SatAM you might know so I guess you’d have a bit of a lucky break there but then you’d likely be wondering why the King was back and why Nicole looked like… well, a lynx.

I may have missed the part where Nicole referred to him as “Wally” the first time I read this but you guys on the boards sure as hell didn’t.

I was reading over discussion about it and how some of you were confused by Nicole referring to him as such. As people on the internet tend to do, a lot of jumping to conclusions were being done in a manner that made it seem like it was obvious and that anyone thinking too hard about it needed to calm down. 

“Calm down folks. His name isn’t Wally. Clearly. There’s no fucking way his name is actually Wally”.

That’s me paraphrasing but it was a bit hard containing myself. There was a lot of this going around. Although, the guy who kept insisting over and over again that they weren’t going to do a reboot when the Ken Penders situation went down owned up to being wrong in a really classy, respectful way. Props to them.

I do think one of the more ridiculous arguments that came about as a result of this happening was how there were people insisting that a reboot wasn’t necessary and that all you had to do was just… not refer to any of the people and concepts that were being taken from the book and somehow continue on from there.

Ian’s a good writer but he’s not a magician. I almost wish I was more active on this forum at the time so I could chime in and ask what the fuck they were talking about.

The quote that Ian Flynn posted on his defunct forums was one I wanted to highlight when talking about this but it was already brought up. He pretty much laid out the fucking obvious problems with that ascertain though I would argue it doesn’t take much critical thinking to realize that just trying to pretend everything is fine but somehow not mentioning any of the Penders stuff would have been impossible.

Ian said it himself. People get upset whenever he can’t refer to the planet as “Mobius”. You really think people are going to accept him not being able to say the name of Sally’s brother or even talk about him when the fanbase gets riled up over something like that? 

If this were a situation where Naugus took over Geoffrey’s body but you couldn’t show Geoffrey’s body or mention Geoffrey or anything Geoffrey’s done up to this point the story wouldn’t be able to function. You can’t continue the story without mentioning or showing what happened to Harvey Who or Elias or Larry or Shard… that’s just not possible.

The moment you try is the moment you get a really strange book where characters are literally only talking like robots and using pronouns for the names of characters they SHOULD know. They’ll be living in a city that’s been taken over by Naugus but the story arc revolving around the characters that he screwed over has to be danced around all the time. It’s not possible. IT’S NOT.

Even now it doesn’t work. That image of Nicole talking to Naugus barely makes sense to me. She’s talking about how he lied and cheated his way onto the throne but because the previous continuity is gone, literally what is she talking about? Did he somehow manage to do that in a different manner is a story we didn’t see and never will see?

It can’t be because he still has memories of the past because when he gets angry at Nicole for not keeping to her promise of making a Super Ring to restore his magic (because apparently he lost his magic?) he grabs her and the memories of the old continuity flow into him.

I guess whatever plan this Naugus hatched to get the castle wasn’t something he was that attached to because he jumps out the window and flees, screaming that the quickster can have this crazy place.

It’s a place that’s currently being attacked by the Tails Doll monster and just gave him horrifying memories of him mutating himself and shit so I guess I understand.

Anyway, this is the first instance of this pointless plot point. Nobody likes it, especially Ian Flynn. He didn’t want to do it. He said that if we’re doing a clean slate then teasing the fans with images of the previous continuity wouldn’t amount to anything but pointlessly get people’s hopes up.

I believe Paul’s reasoning for wanting to go through with it anyway was so that the people reading the book could feel like what happened before still mattered and that they didn’t just waste 200+ issues of their time… but to be honest, even if I see where he’s coming from on that, not only is this not the way to do that but also I don’t necessarily believe that would have been the case.

Like, even reading the reboot, concepts and ideas that came about as a result of Ian’s initial restructuring of the book after #160 still feel like they’re affecting how the book’s flow is working for me. Not only that but because of how they handled the story, the previous continuity and the World Collide crossover literally leads into this one. 

As a result, the way they wrote it, it’s all one big story. Yeah, realistically, we know what ACTUALLY happened but in terms of the narrative this literally is a continuation of what came before. Sonic’s world has been rewritten and now there’s a new status quo for the characters themselves. It’s not like IDW where it’s just a completely different book. 

Is that a charitable read? Maybe but it’s also 100% accurate. That’s what happened.

You didn’t need to show people visions of their past world. Especially if it’s all going to melt away anyway. Sonic remembering it and being confused is the only thing I would keep.

He’ll become acclimated to the new world and discover along with the audience what things are new and what things are the same and once he’s done, his mind will meld with the world he’s in and he’ll be sat snuggly in with everyone else. That’s fine.

You don’t need the others to remember too. It’s just not worth it.

Naugus flees past Sonic and Tails but they decide the weird bulbous monster that’s supposed to be some sort of simulation of what would happen to Tails if he fell into some TMNT ooze is the bigger priority. 

Sonic and Tails do a spin attack through the Tails Doll and Sonic notices it absorbing the city. Sonic asks where the Nanites are to fix the place up and Tails asks “What Nanites?” which prompts Sonic to give him an annoyed look.

Tails suggests they destroy the gem in it’s weird face thing but before they can, it slams it’s tail thing down at them and Tails hits the muddy grass… only to spot Nicole.

Nicole is all errored out and red. She’s trying to speak but it’s all garbled up nonsense. Tails sees this and goes to try and save her but she’s warning him to stay away… only he can’t understand her so he picks her up and…

Tails is too stunned to dodge the hit coming his way so Sonic has to save him.

To say that he’s shaken up by the experience would be… accurate. 

He manages to get over it quickly enough though.

The fact that they have no choice but to get over this quickly so that the plot can happen is also a bit of a boon to what is, otherwise, turning out to be a rather fun and interesting introduction to this new continuity. It still would have been confusing and not an all-around desired starting point to any book in a normal sense but it works for what it is here just fine without this added unnecessary step.

Like, seriously, Tails should be running for the hills like Naugus was earlier. I know he’s a hero and junk but the full weight of existing within and experiencing an entire other world and people you don’t know and relationships you did have but DON’T have any more would not be something he could just function with in his mind after this.

At least not at first. He’d need a longer adjustment period and unfortunately there’s too much to cover so he can’t get one.

Imagining Tails reacting to the fact that there was a continuity where he not only had parents but grew up without them and got them BACK because they were stuck in space and had a huge political falling out with Sonic where he punched him in the fucking face and junk feels like it should be marinated on longer than this.

One of the images shown was of Tails fighting Speedy but it was hard to make that out as Speedy. It looked more like Tails was grimacing as he was tossing some poor fucker off a cliff or something. I was like “When did Tails do that?! Holy shit, I missed a really awesome story arc along the way.”

Meanwhile, in the “Efrikan Plains”, the smoking wreck of the Egg Wily Machine X is sprawled across the ground. Apparently he hit the ground with a ton of force because there’s a skidding mark within the dirt too.

Eggman survived of course. 

Eggman crawls out of the wreckage and shouts that Orbot and Cubot better have survived as well.

It’s like he’s giving them an order to not be displaced by the distortion of the space-time continuum. 

Luckily, they followed his orders to the letter and survived in one piece. So that’s good. Metal Sonic is nowhere to be seen though.

The doctor almost gets crushed by his falling Egg Mobile.

Man, even by your standards Eggman, blaming Orbot and Cubot for something they had literally no say or involvement in so brazenly feels like you were up shit creek without a paddle as far as people to pawn this failure off on. 

I do appreciate that Orbot and Cubot are responsible for Eggman’s actions but only when he fails or when something bad happens as a result of them.

Eggman hopes Sonic is having a worse time than him and that’s our cue to cut back to Sonic who’s doing relatively okay at the moment. All things considered.

Tails sticks Nicole into the Tails Doll through its R2-D2 socket and it immediately lurches about with a desire to PURGE whatever is in its system. Sonic then spin dashes its top off, along with it’s gross intestine looking things and grabs Tails Doll out of there.

Sonic then “disables” the control gem and he and his little brother have a cute little victory moment together.

I remember this scene well as an example of how, even in a confusing mishmash of important and fearful world changing nonsense, Sonic and Tails can still hack it and have a little bit of fun. It’s adorable.

Since Team Freedom isn’t a thing that exists anymore their fight against the Tails Doll monster was stolen from them but to be honest I doubt anyone cares about that. I might be the only person in existence to bring it up and even I don’t care about that.

Sonic crushes the gem and they decide to head into the castle, now able to take a breather while having a chat.

So now that the “WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME?!” phase is over, the two of them are in the acceptance phase, sort of, and are trying to mull over what exactly is going on.

It gets even weirder when Sonic says he’s starting to remember “new old stuff”. As in he’s remembering stuff from the old continuity happening in THIS continuity but with different details.

Someone on the boards of old said that they preferred this new past shown between King Max and Eggman here as using Eggman’s classic design instead of the still obviously evil Warlord Julian design makes it more believable that Max would trust this guy.

I’m inclined to agree. Teddy Roosevelt in a cute little cape just looks like he could sell being more trustworthy. The book was in a different place and trying to accomplish a different thing at the time but even then there was no getting around the fact that it was basically the Sultan calling Jafar his most trusted advisor and stating that he was in desperate need of his wisdom.

After the heroes enter and Tails wrings all the rain water out of his tails onto the castle’s carpet like a dirty boy, he explains that Nicole defragmented a bit when he grabbed her and regained his memories. Nicole’s suggestion that they find the Freedom Fighters must be an extension of this.

Tails reasons things out in a way that is pretty transparently some techno-babble space time mumbo jumbo. It doesn’t make any sense, what he’s saying here.

Why is Nicole defragmenting whenever the others regain their memories? I dunno. Sonic suggests he’s unaffected because he was at the epicenter of the Genesis Wave when it collapsed on them. I can see how that would make sense but then Tails says that Sonic being at the center of this conflict might mean that the others can react with Nicole because they have such a close connection to him. Also Tails has to throw in that Naugus was already pretty messed up by the first Genesis Wave so he puts it together that he must have reacted to Nicole, freaked out, and ran off because of it. 

So we’ve got a pointless process to get done that subsequently only works because the Freedom Fighters have a “close connection” with Sonic. It’s really flimsy but again it’s hard to blame the writer for this when it’s not even something he wanted to do. 

Also, both your sets of parents are dead.

Anyway, they manage to accomplish the mission they allegedly came here to do and rescue the new and improved King Max.

Say hello to Anthropomorphic Nigel Thornberry everyone! He’s quite smashing isn’t he?

I’ll admit, his design here isn’t my favorite. At least not yet. I recall him looking better to me in someone else’s style in a later story arc. Still, I can’t help but agree with Sonic here.

This isn’t one of those situations where he should be lamenting the loss of a character’s original state of being. King Max was an old, doddering, senile old fool with disgusting old man values that plagued the book for far too long. With how physically and mentally unwell he was it’s shocking he lasted so long. 

It’s also ironic that out of him, his wife, and Elias, he’s the one who managed to survive.

He holds Tails’ hands and asks if there’s anything he can do to help. Tails asks if he can point them in the direction of the Freedom Fighters. The king can’t do that directly but he leads them to a computer where it turns out he’s gotten a message from Rotor. Tails deduces that it’s coordinates and he and Sonic hurry off to find him.

The king stops them for just a second and asks to be informed the instant they find his daughter.

We then, on cue, cut to where Sally is in her new design.

This design came out well before the comic was rebooted so people, when they saw it, thought it was what she was going to look like after she was de-roboticized. No one, at the time, was really even considering that it was going to be a Post Reboot design.

Between the two of them, I prefer this one. I like seeing Sally with bottoms on. I honestly kind of prefer the male characters were at least allowed to wear pants too but for some reason they’re not. It’s very strange.

It’s not even because I’m a prude. I just think they could do with being a bit more fashionable. 

Would Tails wear overalls? I bet he’d wear overalls at least once right?

So yeah, we’re here. The world has been reset. There’s a ton of dead characters (or in a more charitable read, re-booted people who no longer have any connection to Sonic or the Acorn Kingdom and thus will never show up in this continuity… but come on. They’re totally dead) and a bunch of new concepts that we’re going to be introduced to over the course of the coming issues.

I don’t usually post the off-panels but this one felt kind of appropriate.

Sonic had a lot on his plate and he’s got even more on his plate now. There’s no escape. 

Despite my gripes about the direction the upcoming four part story arc is going to have to take as commanded by the editorial department, this issue ending the two-parter that was interrupted by a 12-issue special was actually pretty good. Issue #247 was horrendous so I’m glad it “ended” on a stronger note. We’re going to be saddled with quite the heavy adjustment period for a bit. Ironically, by the time all the set-up and world building for this new continuity ends the book will be on death’s door too. I can see why something like that happening would make Ian not want to do all that again, for sure. You never know when the Sword of Damocles just decides it’s had enough of your shit.

Still, because of this book’s often weird structure, we’re not going to hop directly into the next arc of the main book. Nope, the spatial distortion did something else that we need to take care of first.

Sonic Universe - Issue #55: Pirate Plunder Panic - Part 1 of 4

Are you ready, kids? Well, I’m not. Yeah, so, while Mr. Flynn is busy trying to make sense of the book due to the mess that Penders created for him to clean up (AGAIN) we’ve got Sonic Universe over here. Tracy Yardley is back writing for it again. I loved the hell out of Babylon Rising but I remember really not liking Pirate Plunder Panic. 

Treasure Team Tango wasn’t that good a re-visit for me either, unfortunately. I recall the problems with that one being how insufferable Team Dark was but the issues I had with THIS one was that it really felt like it didn’t have much of a clue what kind of story it wanted to tell. I remember it being especially weird towards the end where characters would show up and disappear really fast or show up and do nothing. As for the ones active in the plot, I don’t remember what it was they were trying to accomplish.

I’ve changed my mind a lot about past arcs I didn’t like. I’m hoping this’ll be one of them. Either way, this won’t be the last time we tangle with pirates in a Sonic Universe story arc so even if I don’t like it, at least there’s still a chance for a similar concept to enchant me.

Spoiler

SEGA Variant

Yeah, it’s another low effort variant that SEGA put together in arts and crafts class. There continues to be nothing to say about it. That image of Metal Sonic’s head floating and fading into the background is kind of funny. Also, the generic Green Hill checkerboard cliffside just sinking into the water to simulate an island on Blaze’s world is appropriately goofy, I guess.

—

Script and Pencils: Tracy “Y’arr” dley!
Inks: Jim “Avast Ye” Amash
Colors: Thomas “Mizzen” Mason
Letters: “Fire When Ready” Fiegal
Cover by Yardley, Amash, & Downer: Scallywags All!

The pirate jargon in the credits is a cute touch, though, it’s wonderful how I didn’t even know it was there until today because I never bothered reading the credits when I was younger.

So, the story begins with narration from Blaze. She’s recounting what her journey has been up to this point. She’s been on a mission to recover all the Sol Emeralds and mentions going to other worlds to do that which is reminiscent of how she was during the old continuity. This likely contributed to confusing some people and made them wonder if Blaze was unaffected by the Genesis Wave that reset everyone’s memories.

Blaze even talks about this since she recalls being kidnapped by a great evil and turned into a Roboticized Master during the World’s Collide crossover and also mentions that the heroes that have ended up with her on her dimension have cloudy memories of their past world.

We see Marine barking out orders and insulting the cannoneers of course but more importantly we see Amy, Cream, and Cheese fighting on the deck of the ship. Amy being here feels like it makes more sense than Cream and Cheese being here but that’s only really because Amy was in the crossover and Cream and Cheese, physically, weren’t. That said, the spatial distortion kind of randomly scattered everyone so who’s to say what “makes sense”. 

Blaze tries to put a nice spin on it by saying that it feels like the Sol Emeralds called them here to help but if that’s true then adding a certain duo of jewel thieves to the mix might have been their biggest and strangest gamble yet.

There’s a lot that’s confusing to them about what’s going on. Ian talked about how everything had to be reset, including the stuff with Blaze. The out that she has about being from another dimension wasn’t necessarily going to cut any slack for her… but it honestly does feel like they’re kind of skirting around that a bit with her by pointing out the differences between what she seems to remember and what Amy, Cream, and Cheese remember.

After all, Blaze is the only other person aside from Sonic and Eggman who just recall the crossover with no problem. 

One thing I can say with absolute certainty though is that the ship they’re fighting looks badass.

Look at that. I want it.

Blaze also mentions that it’s been a week since Amy and the others have been here so this likely takes place over the course of time it takes for, at least, the first three issues of the next main series arc to finish. Either that or time just flows a bit differently here but as far as I know that’s never been a thing between Sonic’s dimension and the Sol Dimension.

Anyway, Blaze wants to board the ship to get the last Sol Emerald back. They try to warn her that it’s dangerous and that they’re there to help her but she just screams at them to do what she says. In that instant, Amy has to push her out of the way of a… bomb. It’s not a cannonball, it’s a bomb with an unlit fuse.

Blaze scolds herself for losing her temper and almost getting walloped because of it. Amy tells Cream that it’s okay to let Blaze handle things the way she wants to.

We then get a shot of Marine attempting to take control of the cannon fire back and forth by ordering another volley. However, the shiny bronze looking cannon on their ship fires a volley of shots at them that ignites one of the bombs that landed on their deck.

Amy hammers it away before it can explode and Blaze takes this time to zoom with her fire over to the other ship. 

Amy also mentioned that it was weird how they were firing bombs rather than cannonballs at them. She also remarked about them looking familiar too. 

HMMMM. I wonder…!

Well, anyway, it’s time to cower in fear because Marine has an idea. She tells this to Cream and Amy and they do just that. Stand afraid!

Meanwhile, Blaze gets to the ship, deciding against melting it like she said she was gonna because diving into the water to search for the Sol Emerald in a sunken ship sounds like a bad time. 

So she decides she’s going to be stealthy, steal the emerald, THEN sink the ship under the assumption that no one aboard probably deserves any mercy.

Then she comes across Bean.

Okay… so… whereas I was “speculative” about how much Blaze knew before, here it's just been outright confirmed that she remembers everything. The caption is even telling us to look back to a Sonic Universe arc from the pre-reboot for info on what she’s talking about here.

This is a very interesting direction to take. It’s pretty much exactly what people said they should have done with Sonic and the main cast who stuck around; have them remember but not go into specifics.

The difference here, and the thing that makes this a more okay direction to go in, is the fact that Blaze not being a part of Sonic’s world means that the connection she had with it was already tenuous at best.

She never stuck around long enough for it to matter and the people she’s interacted with have literally and luckily only been with official Sonic characters that she can mention without fear of legal trouble. 

She fought with Sonic. She had an adventure with Amy, Cream, Cheese, Team Dark, Team Hooligan, and Team Babylon. She also was in the World’s Collide crossover and despite the fact that she remembers the weird Mega Man characters, they’re all legally okay to recall too since everyone who showed up in that crossover were purposefully game only characters for the sake of comfortable reading and marketing value.

Basically, there’s literally no harm, whatsoever, in having Blaze recall past events because all the people she knew from the old continuity all survived the jump. They were all official game characters. For once, her minimal interactivity with Sonic’s world ended up being in service to her. 

It’s quite miraculous.

Anyway, Marine’s idea is to fire festival fireworks on the ship while Blaze is over there.

Her reasoning is that Blaze told them to distract them and also she says that Blaze’ll be fine.

Maybe she will but…

Well, anyway, Marine says it’s a good idea and takes being talked out of it… really badly. Like she’s quite the mean bitch here.

No, actually it’s just going straight to your thighs.

And then it blows up.

As Marine succeeds at blowing her own ship up, we get introduced to the cohorts helping to run this ship, Swash and Buckle. Hardy harr harr.

In one of Bean’s more rare moments of lucidity, he manages to explain to Blaze what happened to him and Bark and why they ended up here. He also throws in the tidbit about how much water there is around this place.

Blaze’s world is insanely interesting to me, I gotta say. The idea that it’s actually a planet that’s mostly water and some islands makes for a really interesting place in my head. Not at all uninhabitable but also kind of scary to think about. What’s hurricane season in this world like?

I’d like to see more of it but unfortunately, adventures in the Sol Dimension have been severely lacking since 2007…

Swash puts their captain on speaker phone and broadcasts his warning to Blaze all across the ship that he knows she’s there and that if she refuses to come out he’ll blow the rest of what exists of Marine’s ship away.

Blaze tries to get in good with Bean and it’s proving to be a bit of a task.

When it turns out that they’re about to get discovered she tells him what her plan is. She promises to save his partner and him so that they can get off the ship. Bean, however, doesn’t like that she’s talking bad about his shipmates and reveals to them when they come down that she’s here.

Blaze is surprised to learn that Bean is with the pirates but Bean kind of lays it out pretty succinctly that the last time they met he was teamed up with a money grubbing assassin. Like… why wouldn’t he throw his lot in with pirates?

So Blaze says, fine, she’ll melt him too. 

Bean doesn’t quite get that she’s going to kill him though. She says he’ll share in their “fate” and Bean acts like “fate” is some kind of tasty food.

Back on the boat, it would seem the only one who suffered as a result of Marine’s bright idea was Marine, thankfully.

They’re still not in a good spot though. One of the Coconut Crew comes on deck to tell her that the ship is taking on water and they’re sinking faster than they can do anything to fix it. 

Marine tells the Coconut Crew to get lost on the lifeboats while the main characters stay behind to lend Blaze a hand. Cream suggests, although it's impolite, that they ram ‘em. It’s what Mr. Sonic would do.

Blaze and Bean are having their little fight as she puts together that those “cannonballs” were actually Bean’s bombs. He says he’s got to earn his biscuit and grog somehow, which is confirmation that he drinks despite being in an everlasting state of drunkenness.

He then starts to daydream about how great the ship is because everything is shiny and coated in metal. Even the ship’s captain is named Captain Metal.

Speaking of which, the guy tells Blaze over the speaker that she’s got to the count of three to show herself and begins the countdown before he rains fire on that sinking vessel in the distance housing her companions.

Blaze has shown herself as he instructed but she gives him an ultimatum anyway. Either he hands over the gem he stole and she lets them live or she kills everyone and sinks the ship.

Captain Metal and Bean think it’s a good offer but opt for a different one. He just sends out a silver colored cannon this time. It’s an upgrade from the bronze one from earlier.

Blaze says that she thought that if she turned herself in then Captain Metal would let them live.

Captain Metal simply says that he lied.

Then he apologizes for doing it like he just stepped on her toe by accident.

Granted, despite this being a thing that’s supposed to make him look evil, I’d wager a guess that Blaze threatening to murder him and his entire crew if he didn’t give back the thing he decided he wanted didn’t do her any favors.

It’s telling how Bean doesn’t seem to give a shit either. I guess he isn’t deserving of mercy.

Also, an interesting tidbit, it gets pointed out that Captain Metal knows Blaze but Blaze doesn’t know him. I had assumed it might be easy to ignore as a thing where, hey, of course he knows who she is because she’s a princess or whatever but since we know she remembers the past events I’d say it’s something else.

No real reason to beat around the bush about this but it seems pretty clear to me, both now and back then, that Captain Metal is supposed to be that one Metal Sonic that got blowed up during the very first Sonic Universe issue.

Despite these two recalling those past events, it’s never explicitly stated but it’s pretty obvious. Especially during this scene where after Blaze loses her cool and attempts to kill him she gets ambushed from behind and clonked on the head into passing out cold. 

As she’s laying there with Bean… roasting something from the sizzling ground it looks like, Captain Metal explains he’s been given a “second chance at life”.

I love the line “Beggin’ yer pardon, mum” for some reason. 

It’s a great thing to say as you knock someone out.

Anyway, Captain Metal reveals himself. It’s a Metal Sonic that’s been somehow resurrected and repurposed into looking, acting, and talking like a pirate.

I mean, hey, it’s an incredibly interesting concept for a Metal Sonic, that’s for sure. If you’re going to have multiple ones out there you might as well make a Shard or a Captain Metal out of them for variety’s sake. It also lends credence to the idea that it wasn’t a waste seeing so many of them show up just to get destroyed.

I gotta say, I’m seeing the light of hope for this one a little more than I did when I revisited Treasure Team Tango. I vastly enjoyed this first issue more than I recall doing back in the day. I actually had a good amount of fun and I appreciate that the ship battle wasn’t just an un-choreographed mess that devolved into pointless noise on the page. The concepts here are interesting and so far it promises to be utilized well. We’ll see if it actually is though as I recall my issues with this arc being in the second half of it. Hopefully that part reads better too. This was a good start though.

[SanPolo4389]

Is it bad I only remember the Universe arc for Blaze getting flanked and then does nothing for most of it until the end. Because I remember on deviantart that someone who was a Blaze fan kept bitching on this and says how “she’d never get knocked out that easily.” And also complained how Ian kept making her suck throughout the Archie books (despite this being written by Yardley!)

[SkyHorizon]

13 hours ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

Man, even by your standards Eggman, blaming Orbot and Cubot for something they had literally no say or involvement in so brazenly feels like you were up shit creek without a paddle as far as people to pawn this failure off on. 

 

Actually, Eggman blames AL (in "Dr. Wily"), not Orbot and Cubot, I think you misread that part.

 

Anyway, that's the end of the old continuity. That's quite the accomplishment, you did a great job at reviewing every single Issue until now. I may disagree with your opinions sometimes, but that doesn't mean that I didn't appreciate al the work you put into them.

So, congrats! I think that if you're really going to do the same with the Mega Man comics (trust me, they were amazing, in my opinion a lot better than the Sonic comics and I WAS NOT a Mega Man fan), it would be a blast!

[Dr. Detective]

6 hours ago, SanPolo4389 said:

Is it bad I only remember the Universe arc for Blaze getting flanked and then does nothing for most of it until the end. Because I remember on deviantart that someone who was a Blaze fan kept bitching on this and says how “she’d never get knocked out that easily.” And also complained how Ian kept making her suck throughout the Archie books (despite this being written by Yardley!)

I recall something similar. I've never been slammed on the head by a huge metal fist but I don't have a problem believing it could knock a Sonic character out.

Personally, I think it's fine.

[Kuzu]

Yea I remember a lot of people calling out Blaze's treatment in this arc.

[SanPolo4389]

1 hour ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

I recall something similar. I've never been slammed on the head by a huge metal fist but I don't have a problem believing it could knock a Sonic character out.

Personally, I think it's fine.

I mean I understand why she was brung down sometimes since the 4 part story would be cut short, but the guy I watched on Devianart made it sound like she should've seen that sneak attack coming, she was being written wrong in that arc, and that Amy, Cream and Marine took her spotlight. Which I think is a bit excessive. 

18 hours ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

I don’t usually post the off-panels but this one felt kind of appropriate.

Sonic had a lot on his plate and he’s got even more on his plate now. There’s no escape. 

I'll take "poorly aged thing" for 100 Alex

[Dee Dude]

I always liked Treasure Team Tango, being one of my personal favorite SU arcs because it doesn’t really feel it’s set in the pre-252 continuity, the story is more right at home with nu-252 or even IDW because it only featured the game cast without a single Archie OC (outside of the Sally mention & Nicole transmitter who are from Satam but still).

My only main problem with the saga is that they made Rouge WAY too much of an unlikable jerk who acted completely selfish and uncaring of Blaze’s world compared to Shadow who was somewhat understanding but prioritized the mission.

[Dr. Detective]

Sonic Universe - Issue #56: Pirate Plunder Panic - Part 2 of 4

It’s one of them metaphorical covers, yarr! They aren’t literally being cooked in a pot to be served for dinner. It just feels like it. Har har har! 

No, really though, it’s a pretty good cover. I can’t help but wince when I look at it though. That fire is pretty huge and being boiled alive is something that feels like it should be reserved for Oden.

Spoiler

SEGA Variant

A somehow even lazier variant cover than the last one. It’s got the same background but it’s been obviously reversed and Amy’s 3D model has been pasted there instead of Blaze’s. If there’s people out there who don’t understand the variant cover craze when they’re actually really good then they’re really not going to get it when it comes to something like this.

—

Script and Pencils: Tracy “Pencilbeard” Yardley!
Inks: Jim “Inkbeard” Amash
Colors: Steve “Prismbeard” Downer
Letters: Jack “Fontbeard” Morelli
Cover: Yardley! Amash & Downer-beard

The credits this time were a bit lazier too. Everyone is just “beard” now. The other one was harder to read so I guess I understand why they changed it but still. 

Blaze has been captured and put into a metal cage. She’s narrating how much it sucks to be her right now but gets interrupted when she starts examining a flame in her palm and then Bean starts roasting a marshmallow over it.

Then we get an entire page and a half detailing why that cage is special and why she can’t bust out of it. It’s purely there so that the people that think Blaze should just coast through this story with no problems and no obstacles can take the threat seriously but apparently it won’t work. 

Again, to me it’s fine.

So that’s where we leave her for now. Trapped in a cage that has Bean’s piss leaking all over the top of it.

Out in the ocean, a crate is floating in the water that gets its top punted off by Amy’s hammer. Apparently it saved the girls from the blast somehow.

However, it’s not going to stay afloat for long and Marine starts to freak out which prompts Amy to grab her like she’s about to do some intimidation tactics on a villainous mook.

She was scaring Cream so it makes sense of course but it is a rather interesting showcase of how much this character’s point seems to be that she’s just unlikable. We even see her caption box call her a “nautical nuisance”. I mean, geez. If you can’t say anything nice then… I don’t know. Blow a cannon up in her face?

Marine calms down and then perks up again when Amy says they need to rally together to get things back on track. She then freaks out when she sees what she thinks are sharks in the water.

Amy isn’t scared and actually goes to fucking attack them but it turns out they’re dolphins. Also, Dolphins are nice here and they also apparently speak Chao so Cheese communicates with them and tells Cream that the dolphins are offering them a ride to shore. 

Sure, that may as well happen.

We cut back to Blaze where, funnily enough, a lot of the henchmen are just trying to make her feel better. It’s kind of endearing. Bean recognizes that she’s all broody now so he asks Bark to whip up one of his Blue Ribbon Tropical Fruit Smoothies. Then Swash tells her that if she plays her cards right she’ll probably come out of this in One Piece.

One Piece is bolded too. I don’t know if it’s to emphasize the fact that he’s saying she’ll probably be turned into mincemeat if she doesn’t play ball or if it was a deliberate reference to the pirate themed anime and manga series. I can see both.

We then get an intense mound of backstory for Captain Metal. They talk about how he’s good in battle and cut off the heads of other robot pirates around here. They’re on the island he took over so we literally see the robot heads they’re referring to and they’re still alive. They start calling the passing group a bunch of cowards for not facing them down even though they’re only heads on a stick.

As for his recreation, some of the details are lost, but the full crux of what happened is kind of shocking and interesting. It’s a true case of bad things happening to good, well meaning people if the doctor that fixed up that old Metal Sonic is anything to go by.

All this is intercut with Bean still giving instructions to Bark on Blaze’s smoothie.

I’m mostly just shocked that there actually was this much chatter about Captain Metal’s backstory. I don’t remember any of this being here. The only bit I recall was Bean setting a smoothie in front of Blaze and her lazily slurping it, because it’s a funny image.

I have to give them props. They went all in on making it clear that Captain Metal was that blown apart Metal Sonic without directly referencing the old continuity. It works really well and it stands as one of the few examples where they realistically could get away with it too. Well done.

The dolphins, meanwhile, have helped Amy, Cream, and Marine land properly. Marine did not enjoy the ride despite all the smack-talk about being an expert dolphin rider from earlier. The ones with less experience on the high seas are fine of course. She just sucks that much.

Then she’s immediately grabbed and “kidnapped” by a bunch of tiny robots. Amy feels put upon in her attempt to save her…

Amy really doesn’t like Marine.

Anyway, these little robots keep saying “Help” and “Fire cat” over and over again. Eventually, Amy gets the picture and decides it’s best if they let them carry them off to where they can “Help fire cat”. 

Inside the metal drum, Captain Metal whips out the Sol Emerald he stole and tells Blaze that his plan is to use them all to power an engine of mass destruction. Blaze suggests a blunderbuss and to be honest I think a blunderbuss powered by the Sol Emeralds would be cooler.

The tiny robots outside, meanwhile, manage to carry our heroes to the metal drum. Their chief explains that they’re called Sprockets and that the pirates are meanies who like to smash them so they’ll help them save the fire cat.

Our three girls start climbing up the metal drum as Captain Metal continues to exposit his plans to Blaze on the inside.

Blaze states that the Sol Emeralds are hers to command and that they’re useless to him. I don’t know how true that is but Captain Metal says it’s a moot point anyway because he found a device that’ll allow him to use the Sol Emeralds just fine.

It’s a device from another world where the rules of this one don’t apply. He found it one day and they fixed it up. 

Immediately, I felt like I knew where this was going but I still could hardly believe it. 

However, it’s true.

It’s the remains of the Wily Egg from the Sonic and Mega Man crossover!

It’s now been dubbed the Egg O’ War.

This is incredible. I love how the pre-reboot and the post-reboot are taking aims to be connected to one another. I don’t like the memory recovery thing happening in the main book but this is a much more awesome way to handle it.

I again must reiterate that I like how what Eggman did at the end of World’s Collide contributes to this whole thing being one flowing narrative on its own. It leads into the next phase of this comic’s story rather than stopping it and making it just an entirely new book. The dregs of the crossover showing up here sells that idea so much more too. 

Also, they made it look like a skull and crossbones. That’s cute.

The Sprocket Chief points out Blaze in the distance and Amy has Cream fly her over to the cage. They tell Marine to stay put and, surprise, she doesn’t.

Instead she leers at Captain Metal, angry that her ship was destroyed and decides to ruin everything by generating conflict the way you don’t want to see it generated. By characters just being fucking stupid for no reason.

I feel like I could forgive this moment if it were funny but it’s not. She’s just here to make shit worse and nothing else.

Captain Metal just stands there as she talks at him before he takes to blasting her. Unfortunately, Cream manages to yank her out of the way.

Now that Captain Metal knows that Blaze’s friends are alive and here he has the hatch beneath her cage open so that the Kraken can have its way with her and her friends.

He goes to grab his Sol Emerald so he can partake in the next part of his plan… but a certain shiny obsessed Duck/Woodpecker, who’s ACTUALLY funny and makes things worse on purpose because of his alignment has thrown a wrench in the proceedings in a way that’s turned this entire thing into a wonderful clusterfuck.

Bean and Bark have betrayed Captain Metal by stealing the Sol Emerald for themselves and making off with it!

Now his attention is divided, the heroes are in danger, and the chase for the Sol Emerald has entered into a three-way frenzy.

The Kraken is arising from the depths below as they run off with the emerald. There’s so much going on. I appreciate so much that this final page wasn’t just an image of some guy’s new design or whatever. There’s a lot that’s actually happening so it feels great that this is what we’ve got instead.

It’s interesting how both Marine and Bean are standing out as opposite ways to handle the kind of character that generates conflict. Bean is actually funny and when he messes with the flow of the narrative it’s usually for the better because it makes things more exciting. Because he’s so chaotic and a bad guy, generally, it is also a lot more expected and easier to accept. Conflict is just generally more fun than a boring story where everything goes right and Blaze just defeats the enemy by being better, faster, stronger than everyone.

That said, Marine seems to stand as an example of how that kind of character can fail. She’s on the side of the heroes but her attitude sucks. She’s bossy and mean to the people around her and doesn’t listen to anyone because she considers herself an authority for some reason. She’s ignorant to her surroundings and because she can’t really fight, she’s useless in battle as well. Traits like that aren’t a deal breaker but if it’s only in service of making the heroes have to babysit her or deal with the fallout of her deciding to mess things up, like a crucial rescue plan, then it feels like she only exists to be hated. Amy and the caption she has at the start of the book basically say as much too. 

I’m not super mad about it or anything. It’s just one of those things I can’t help but notice. The issue itself was really good. I liked a lot of the elements on display here and the way the story is utilizing them. It remains really interesting seeing how it’s handling the Sol Dimension as an area that remains unaffected by the significant change Sonic’s reality has gone through.

 

Sonic Universe - Issue #57: Pirate Plunder Panic - Part 3 of 4

To me, this is the best cover of the arc but it’s also the one where I remember things starting to go downhill as far as the narrative was concerned. I don’t recall what was done with the Kraken or Captain Whisker here being anything that was worth the hustle. Introduced too suddenly and gone too quickly, I believe the issue was. However, reading it the way I am now might lead me to singing a different tune. It’s time to re-experience the second half of Pirate Plunder Panic.

Spoiler

Variant Cover

Uh… well… hey, at least someone attempted to not be lazy by just sticking a 3D render from some game on the cover and calling it a day. Unfortunately, the art is pretty bad. I apologize to the artist but this leaves a lot to be desired unfortunately. The perspective is all over the place here. Everything seems weirdly cramped. The perspective of Bean and Bark is horrendous. If that ship is supposed to be behind the glacier where Sonic and Marine are, then the two of them look huge. Especially Bean. Somehow Bean looks way bigger than Bark.

Meanwhile, Marine, despite being behind Sonic, looks like she’s almost as tall as he is. She’s easily the worst thing about this cover. Her stance is weird and her face is really off-putting. I’ve no clue where she’s looking. It ain’t at the ship, that’s for sure. Why is she so happy here? She’s usually just pissed off. You’d think being stuck on this glacier would make her upset. 

Lastly, Sonic, you’ve been in a story going on within the main book for a while now. You really don’t need to keep appearing on the covers for the story arcs that just involve the ladies. You really don’t. The first issue’s cover looked dope as fuck so I gave that a pass but this one looks like complete ass. Go away. Amy and Blaze can carry an SU arc just fine. 

—

Script and Pencils: Mr. Midshipman Tracy Yardley!
Inks: Lieutenant Jim Amash
Colors: Commander Steve Downer
Letters: Captain Jack Morelli
Cover by Yardley!, Amash & Downer
Variant Cover by Best, Morelli, & Evans

Again. Apologies to those who worked on that cover. Seeing it paired with the best cover of this arc, in my opinion, didn’t help my perception of it though.

The colors in this story by Steve Downer are really good, I gotta say. Matt Herms isn’t the only one that can achieve a good looking effect with their use of beautiful colors of course. Especially when the other members on the staff are doing good work as well.

Everything’s gone all topsy turvy and things are just going to get more hectic right off the bat. As Blaze is burning the bars with her flame, Bean and Bark have betrayed Captain Metal and are trying to make off with the Sol Emerald. Meanwhile, Marine is telling Cream what to do next but he weird manner of talking has left Cream unsure of what she’s talking about.

Captain Metal offers new gold plating for whichever of his crew can nab the emerald back, which prompts Bean to go on a crazed screed about how he’ll never get it back.

Then it gets taken from him… but to be fair, Bean was still technically right about it not being Captain Metal.

Yes, they named this motherfucker Johnny.

He works for Captain Whisker and was one of the villains from Sonic Rush Adventure. 

He’s just here now, I guess. 

Yeah, this caught me by surprise and to be honest it might need to do a lot to justify itself other than having it be a means to an end for certain characters to cooperate with the heroes. I believe I mostly saw it as a way to just squeeze in some fan-service at first. 

He makes off with the Sol Emerald, leaving our heroes in the dust. Amy breaks the bars that Blaze is stuck in and she erupts with fire right before she’s nabbed by the tentacles of the Kraken. 

Then she flies off with the others. 

Captain Metal is about to say some mean pirate-y things to them but the Sprockets start annoying him by tugging down his hat and stomping at him like flies. He waves them off, declaring he’s so totally murdering all of their asses, before he realizes that the heroes have fully escaped.

He’s then given a report by one of his lackeys that Bean and Bark have ALSO escaped and he takes it well.

His lackey is taking this well too actually.

I wonder if it’s true if you say “Hoy!” when your head gets cut off. Or maybe that’s just a robot thing. 

Captain Metal tells Buckle and Swash to ready his submarine. They try to tell him that it’s in the dry dock because “Ol’ Rusty-Face Pete is still scrapin’ the barnacles off’n her hull!”

Boy was that hard to read. Hearing it sure pissed Captain Metal off too because he just blasts Buckle in the stomach and then tells Swash that he’s got five minutes to do what the fuck he told them to do or he’s going to take out his hard drive.

For some reason that hit harder than a flesh and blood man says he’s going to take out someone’s heart… for two seconds before I realized I was being silly.

Anyway, they do the “Say the line, Bart” meme.

YAAAAY!

Back with our heroes, they’re chasing Johnny and unable to catch up due to the baggage. Since I never played Sonic Rush I guess it was just always a thing that Blaze could just fly with her flames? Good to know I guess.

She’s not able to catch up because of her carrying Amy and Cream having to haul Marine around. Amy asks why there are so many pirates and we get that interesting lore about how most of the land is ocean and it’s really lawless. She plans to rid the world of all the piracy going on when she gets the Sol Emeralds back.

I don’t know if that’s a good idea though. What about old video game preservation? What then?

I don’t know if I want to re-elect Blaze for princess if she does that…

Well, anyway, they reach a high cliff and Marine spots Captain Metal’s ship, The Metal Marauder, docked below them. She wants to take it because they blew hers up. Seems fair if not a bit like a pirate herself.

Blaze is uneasy about being so high up and this is where he patented fear of heights comes into play.

Again, I missed this trait of hers because I didn’t play Rush or Rush Adventure. This was my first introduction to it from her and I didn’t hear about it again until Team Sonic Racing. 

You gotta remember, I played none of the Sonic handheld titles so Blaze was a character who was lost on me for a long while before I eventually checked out the cutscenes from Rush and Rush Adventure. Due to not experiencing it first hand, I don’t remember much from either of them either. Especially the first Rush.

My first impression of Blaze was from Sonic 06. It was quite possibly the worst first impression of a character you could have given me. Even today, my mind recognizes all these interesting tidbits about her but can’t fully wipe away the stink of that bland sheet of paper I first encountered in that awful game. 

Blaze gets pissed and grabs everyone so that they can just take over the ship.

Marine tells the pirate robots there that they command the ship now. When one of them asks why they should listen to her, instead of giving them ample warning, Blaze and Amy decide to just murder two of them in cold oil.

Stuff like this is actually really unsettling.

Like, robots, especially in THIS world, aren’t treated like appliances. Omega, General, and even Metal Sonic are all treated like their own characters. Plus, even though these guys are mooks, when you show them running scared and fearing for their lives it seems pretty dark to just have two of them get melted and bludgeoned to death right in front of their eyes.

I guess robots are still technically lower life forms though. David Cage and his story about the emancipation of robots would probably attempt to use this as a plot point of some kind. 

If those robots equal one polygons each then they have exactly two emotions. But how many emotions is people?

I wonder which of you gets this joke I’m making right now…

Anyway, Johnny returns to his boss’s ship and we get the first appearance of Captain Whisker in his full glory. 

This will be his first and probably last involvement within a story for a Sonic comic… maybe.

Anyway, he’s happy to have the Sol Emerald that Johnny got. Mim and Mum here take cracks at him despite this. Johnny tells Captain Whisker that he took it from his rival Captain Metal.

Interesting. A Metal Sonic turned pirate going up against another pirate that looks like a Metal Eggman. Well, a Metal Eggman Nega to be precise.

Speaking of which, I continue to be baffled by the fact that Nega's name is STILL being brought up after all this time. Last we heard of him, he was going to war with the Zone Cops and wrecking their collective shit. 

Now that Sonic’s reality has been nuked, the Zone Cops are all dead but Nega seems to still be around despite the fact that he still can’t be used.

The two annoying buzzards are trying their best to be a double team of SA-55s here. I’ve only known these two for a couple of panels and they’re already insufferable. Captain Whisker telling them to fuck off down the ship’s pipe was a godsend.

Johnny spots Captain Metal’s ship in the distance but sees that it’s being piloted by Marine and Blaze. It don’t matter though. He’s still going to sink it.

We get our very first actually endearing scene between Blaze and Marine where Blaze gives a suggestion about the wind, Marine says that she’s the captain, Blaze says she means no offense, Marine says no worries, and then Marine gives that same order while Blaze has a smirk on her face. It’s like the only one that utilizes Marine’s bossy nature in a way that’s endearing based on the way the characters are reacting to it. It’s not just her being annoying and someone saying she sucks. 

Then, as if on cue, the real captain of the vessel rises from below deck to give a soliloquy for the ages about the lost shiny.

It’s quite possibly one of the best and brightest uses of prose one could have expected from such a heartbroken mallard. That said, it’s only possible because it’s funny. Like Roger Rabbit, if it weren’t amusing, he’d be speaking some gibberish or another language at random here.

Anyway, despite how epic that speech was, Marine isn’t sold so he goes to the real feather in his cap for this argument. 

That being the fact that he’s the one wearing the captain’s hat.

Yaarr! That am bullshit, your honor!

The heroes sure are getting what they want today by acting like ruffians and thieves. It ain’t fair I say.

Well, anyway, the face off between Whisker and Marine is still underway.

The two of them count down and give the order to fire the cannons and–!

THE KRAKEN!

This is some epic shit.

So, reading this arc today, a lot of what I recall from memory is starting to re-contextualize itself now. Tracy Yardley, when he writes for these arcs, likes to go big and likes to utilize as many of the cast as he can at once to create a really cool clusterfuck that deals with a lot of back and forth between factions that aren’t necessarily on one another’s sides.

It’s quite possibly my favorite method of story-telling ever, which is why I loved Babylon Rising so much. I have no clue why I wasn’t able to see it back when I was reading this arc back in the day. Perhaps it was still because I was in my distaste for Blaze phase or maybe I just really wanted the focus to be on a different group of characters? My opinion of everyone chosen for this arc isn’t the highest but it’s not because I don’t like them. Aside from Bean and Bark, I think I’ve always just had a preference for characters that are either a lot more goofy or animated.

That’s why I like Bean so much nowadays. Back then I think he might have been a bit too much for me to appreciate but looking back, having a character this childish and juvenile just be a straight up unapologetic villain (with a tiny bit of a moral fiber to see him easily working on the side of good when it suits him) just makes him more interesting.

Meanwhile, Marine is supposed to be that kind of character I like but she doesn’t really work because she’s not really all that fun. She’s got all the negative traits with none of the excitement, usefulness, or balance that I find in characters like Omega or Charmy that makes them endearing to me.

Amy is a good girl but she’s a bit too basic a character here for me to be too excited by her going on a pirate adventure. She’s not the kind of gal I’d be hankering to see on an adventure like this because she’s playing it straight a whole lot. 

Cream is Cream. She’s… Cream. 

That’s probably why I wasn’t digging this arc back then. The group selected for it didn’t excite me all that much and I was too busy being upset and critical about it to recognize that this the kind of shit I live for.

I love it when two sides of a battle go at it and then a third side rises from the ocean and gets in between both of them. I say it all the time but I love organized chaos. It’s soooo much fucking fun.

Cream sees that shit’s really bad and not getting any better so she goes over to Bean as he observes the shinies he actually does have and asks for his assistance. 

Unfortunately, the rest of the way this plays out is sort of exactly what I remember being underwhelmed by in my head… although, it’s no where near as upsetting thankfully.

Bean says he can defeat the Kraken easily, something the rest of them can’t, including Blaze.

He says he’ll do it if he gets to be captain and Blaze just snaps at him and says fine. Marine turns around and makes an upset “Oi” at them for this but nobody cares what she thinks so it’s fine.

So Bean makes the bomb and after being crushed like a pancake, Bark tosses it into the Kraken’s mouth and it just dies.

I recall a review of this arc getting to this part in the story and writing this sequence as follows.

“Hi Kraken.”

“... Oh. Bye Kraken.”

Yeah, it’s kind of lame.

Granted, it’s not as troubling as my mind’s eye remembers it being. For one, the Kraken didn’t come out of nowhere like I remember it doing in my memory. It was something that seemed to have been subjugated by Captain Metal beforehand. Honestly, if it weren’t called “The Kraken” I probably wouldn’t have been as upset by this as I originally was. Probably. 

Secondly, we’re almost done with the arc and Captain Metal needs his final push for the finale so, I guess something had to be sacrificed for it.

That said, what this arc does to end the third issue on as a hook for the final one remains the absolute weakest hook I’ve seen for a Sonic Universe arc yet.

When the explosion that destroys the Kraken happens, Captain Whisker drops the Sol Emerald into the water but it gets grabbed by Captain Metal before it can get submerged. He rises from the ocean in his submarine and the two ships overlook him in his sub with the Egg O’ War in the distance. 

Both Blaze and Whisker hate the shit out of him and this prompts Captain Metal to make an awful pun about how they don’t need to be crabby…and that they should leave that to him.

Which gives him the floor to end this issue on this shot.

I thought this looked like the dumbest shit back in the day and not for nothing either. 

First of all, this arc already ended one of its issues with a full page spread shot drawing of its villain and it was the same guy. I feel like this is the only arc that does that shit twice. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was for a good reason but… it’s not.

It’s just Captain Metal again but this time he’s got stupid Darth Maul robot legs. What about that is supposed to resonate as something more threatening?

He can scuttle on six legs now. You wouldn’t like him when he shifts into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE!

So yeah. I think my issues with the arc are creeping in now but thankfully, we’re almost done so it’s not as big a deal as I previously thought.

Yeah, this was the issue I remember things taking a nosedive for me and honestly, aside from the weirdness at the end, it stayed the course. I recall Captain Whisker having such a minor part to play in the proceedings that I relegated his part in this story as a glorified cameo. Maybe he still technically is but the fact that the majority of this third issue was actually mostly focused on the altercation between him and the heroes actually did a lot to mitigate that feeling for me.

Unfortunately, the same effect didn’t quite go all the way there with the Kraken but that’s okay. It’s not as important as Captain Whisker, especially since it’s fucking dead now. I’m glad the biggest things I remember having issues with as far as this arc was concerned are kind of IT and not much else. They’re not even that big of a deal here really. It’s just kind of silly, all things considered. 

Sonic Universe - Issue #58: Pirate Plunder Panic - Part 4 of 4

This is a pretty appropriate looking cover for the final issue of this story of course. The color scheme of Burning Blaze was always really cool to look at, definitely. I still personally like the one before this one more but this one is still inspired. Special attention should be given to how the scroll with Burning Blaze’s name on it is literally being set aflame due to being so close to her. It’s a nice touch.

Spoiler

Chibi Variant

Good, God. What’s with everyone’s cheeks? They don’t look rosy, they just look like someone went crazy with clown makeup. Other than that, yeah, this one looks okay. It’s way better than the last variant cover, for sure. I’m usually pretty cool with chibi stuff but sometimes it’s hard to make it look good so I tend to be more appreciative of stuff that can succeed at doing so. I’d give this one a pass but it’s still so-so to me.

—

Script and Pencils: Tracy “Yardarm” Yardley!
Inks: Jim “Athwartships” Amash
Colors: Steve “Dead Man’s Chest” Downer
Letters: Jack “Man O’ War” Morelli
Cover by Yardley!, Amash & Downer
“It be a fine” Chibi Variant cover by Ryan Jampole, Rick Bryant & Dustin Evans

One thing I’ve noticed whenever Swash and Buckle get introduced either in captions or by the characters is that they’re always introduced as “Buckle and Swash” and never the other way around.

I can’t help but feel like the only reason it’s like that is because they don’t want you to see the obvious pun in their names… but that can't be right because then why make the pun anyway? Whatever.

The three sided ship battle between Blaze, Whisker, and Captain Metal reignites after Blaze gives us the latest in her journal entry. She only needs one last Sol Emerald to complete the mission she’s been on since she first showed up and thus, ironically, completing her character arc for the Archie Book as a whole.

In other words, Pirate Plunder Panic actually works as a conclusion to Blaze’s story within the books. Obviously it wasn’t intentional. She was supposed to show up again in a story that never came out and we only got line-art of but as things stand, things panned out shockingly well for Blaze on pretty much every front. She even remembers the old continuity, which made it possible for her to have this finality to her story.

The three ships bombard one another with cannon fire as Blaze just charges at Captain Metal since, you know, he’s the one with the Sol Emerald.

She keeps trying to reason with him by saying that the world is going to fall apart without that emerald. The storm brewing around them is serving as proof of that. Captain Metal doesn’t care because the Egg O’ War can travel to other worlds.

He smashes Blaze’s face against the metal hull of his ship and then electrocutes her with his crab hand clamped onto her tail. If she weren’t a Sonic character she’d be fucking dead but she is so she’s just unconscious.

Marine sees this and tells Amy and Cream to go after her. Amy asks Marine if she’ll be fine handling Captain Whisker’s crew with just Bean and Bark but she says it’ll be fine.

So they leave to go be heroes while Captain Whisker raids their ship and gets fended off by Bark the Polar Bear on his own while Bean tosses bombs at Swash and Buckle over at Captain Metal’s ship.

Marine, in her one out of two good moments in this story, is finally acting like a captain.

I mean, hey, a hero moment is a hero moment even if it’s about as impressive as Sally giving out orders that a lot of the other characters have routinely been shown to do just as well. Granted, Sally did come up with the brilliant “Dog-pile on Super Scourge” tactic so maybe I’m not being too fair here.

I’m being mean though. It’s a good moment. It’s just not enough to off-set the entire rest of what she’s done for this book and that’s a bit of a shame. I want to say that I want to like her but it often feels like there’s little point in even that since she doesn’t ever show up in anything. The only reason she’s still remembered is because of her connection to Blaze and thus will crop up in conversation every now and again whenever someone proposes a Sonic Heroes sequel and we need a third wheel for Team Sol or whatever.

It’s a feeling that extends to the rest of the cast though. As of the lead up to Frontiers that’s happening right now where we’re most likely going to get another Sonic-only game that ignores the foundation of what the Classics set by introducing Tails and Knuckles to answer for a lie about how the old games “only let you play as Sonic” and thus created a self-fulfilling prophecy where the actual era that did that is the current one… we’ve still not seen any good utilization of the extended cast outside of spin-offs, comics, movies, shows, and action-figures.

Granted, it’s great that they can shine in anything at all but the bread and butter of everyone’s excitement and attention will always be on the mainline games and it’s just not a thing that’s ever going to be in the cards for the others again. Not even Tails.

The most we’ve gotten is a shallow skin of Shadow that can’t even be used in all of Sonic’s stages in Forces so as far as Marine is concerned, she’s not just dead and buried but her grave has sunken below several layers of the Earth’s core…

Also, I thought the stipulation for Bean helping them out with the Kraken was that he was captain now. I guess this moment IS hacks!

Blaze wakes up strapped to a machine that’s powering the Egg O’ War, with the Sol Emerald going haywire in the center.

The Egg O’ War takes to the skies and when Johnny sees it he tells his captain, for the second time since this battle started, that he’d really like to get the fuck out of here and live. 

This time, though, Captain Whisker agrees with him and they head back to their ship. Marine, of course, tries to take credit for it by saying they’re running from her which prompts Captain Whisker to say “Let’s give tHe GrEat CaPtAiN mArInE a parting gift, shall we?” and he shoots a torpedo right through the ship she stole.

So yeah. That’s the second ship she’s lost this week. Crikey.

Fear not though. Bean is still insane so he chases after Swash and Buckle because they’re shiny, acting like he didn’t just serve on their crew before for some reason. The two of them abandon the submarine and swim after Whisker’s ship in the hopes of using it to get back to Pirate Island, leaving Bean with no shinies.

Still, Marine has a third vessel to steal; the submarine. So they’ll be fine.

Inside the Egg O’ War, Captain Metal is about to extract the Sol Emeralds from Blaze and use them to power up his ship when all of a sudden the day is saved by Cream, Cheese, and Amy Rose coming onto the scene.

Cream’s battle banter being that of a mother scolding a child sound both appropriate but also really humiliating. That’d probably be worse than having to withstand all of Spider-Man’s chatter.

They free Blaze from her prison and then start having themselves a good wallop on Captain Metal so that Blaze can grab the emerald.

They’re no match for him but the point was to distract him anyway so Blaze manages to grab the last one. You all know what that means.

I had a similar reaction to Amy there. Again, I doubt it’s a “robots are lower life-forms” thing. Blaze probably would have melted Captain Metal if he were flesh and blood. She makes threats about doing it to flesh and blood people all the time.

The only reason we actually got to see her do it this time is because he’s a robot though. 

Also, Captain Metal’s voice echoes at them from the sky. No, he’s not a ghost. He’s just become one with the Space Colony Ark and is determined to keep it on its collision course.

Blaze burns a hole through the escape hatch and tells Amy and Cream to leave while she fries this place. The one thing on my mind was how that escape hatch was made of metal and she just burned through it so bad it left a red ring around it.

I couldn’t help imagining Cream trying to squeeze through it and getting grilled by the edges of that opening. Hot metal ain’t no joke. It hurts just thinking about it.

Blaze makes good on her promise to burn the place down. Captain Metal keeps screaming things at both her and the warnings his computer keeps giving him. He keeps talking as though Blaze can’t win and that she can’t beat him. He has no real proof of that and no reason to believe it’s true himself so it’s best to assume he’s saying this out of desperation.

He really wanted to fly around on this ship and use the emerald to plunder other planets while Blaze’s world fucking died. Blaze doesn’t say a word to any of his ramblings and just finishes the job, like a boss.

Blaze lands back on the ship, looking pretty, and getting congratulated by her friends.

She also extends a word of thanks to Bean and Bark. She’s in a really good mood now.

The versatility of characters like the Hooligans, or the Babylon Rogues, or Rouge when she’s written correctly, is something that I cherish a whole lot. They always make for some intensely interesting scenarios. It’s partly why I tended to enjoy Eggman’s role within the games during the 2000s era a lot, especially in Shadow the Hedgehog. The idea that he could serve as a vehicle for both hero and dark missions just intrigued me as a kid. 

The series has a gold mine of characters that it’s just not making any real good use of and it sucks. I suppose I wasted my rant on that already though.

Blaze takes this time to reiterate that the Sol Emeralds brought them here to help her. It was fate or whatever. Blaze’s quest is at an end now.

It’s also interesting how she states that her memory of Amy’s world is vague and fuzzy but she does recall enough about the old continuity to remember… well, the basics of her past adventures we should say. She can’t go into specifics because the world itself has changed but I guess this is finally that middle-ground I was suspecting might have existed for her.

It’s still a strange tight-rope they’re walking here but it works well enough. Especially since we’re not coming back here again so there’s no real reason to worry about it.

Amy makes a comment about how she worries that home will never feel the same again. Interesting…

Cream asks how they’ll get home and Blaze takes care of that for them.

So there they go.

Marine starts crying and Blaze asks her what the matter is.

She says she misses them already.

The two panel shift is what makes that funny, of course.

What really gets me is how great the facial reactions of Bean and Bark are. Bean is cartoony enough to shift between good and bad depending on the mood of the situation rather than the alignment of his character and Bark just seems like a big ol’ softie. They’re great.

We end on the heroes returning home… well, first there’s a pointless “TO BE CONTINUED????” thing where Captain Metal’s eye re-activates below the surface of the water. This is the Metal Sonic that refuses to die and I’m here for it. Though, it’s still a little silly.

Also interesting is how Amy seems… like she realizes that their home is different somehow…

…Which is strange because she should remember the world the way it currently is right? Or maybe the Sol Dimension stuff did something to her the same way it did to Blaze?

Their memories are probably going to work the same way it will for Sonic. They’ll get acclimated to their new way of life and what remains of that feeling of strangeness will dissipate into nothingness. 

It sounds scary and sad but that’s the nature of how things are.

I gotta say, I did not expect Pirate Plunder Panic to be one of the stories I would change my mind on but it happened. I did. This story was a lot better than I remember it being. My old grievances were either non-existent or so minor that they merely held back the story in a tertiary sense. I do still have issues with the conceit behind Marine’s character. I want to say I understand what’s being attempted but it doesn’t feel right still. That said, everybody else was fine. Amy and Cream were perhaps a bit too “fine” as they didn’t feel like they had any noticeable, stand out character moments as far as a showcase of their personalities but they made up for it by participating in the action. Bean and Bark took up the slack on the personality front by being charming as hell. 

As for Blaze, her story comes to an end here and it works shockingly well for something that probably wasn’t intended to be as succinct as it is. She’s grown a lot since she’s first shown up and I’m actually really glad you can tell that too. My younger self couldn’t because of my awful first impressions of her character from Sonic 06 but thankfully I seem to be moving away from that the older I get. If anything, I certainly do appreciate and love the fact that she’s around. Some of her more overprotective fans need to chill out though.

[Razule]

To this day, I still don't understand how Captain Metal survived the reality shift if Blaze's world was also affected by it. I don't remember if Ian ever said anything about it. When the multiverse was destroyed and reshaped itself, did it just.. not know what to do with him? Since another version of him existed and he wasn't in his own zone before the Genesis Wave?

[Dr. Detective]

5 minutes ago, Razule said:

To this day, I still don't understand how Captain Metal survived the reality shift if Blaze's world was also affected by it. I don't remember if Ian ever said anything about it. When the multiverse was destroyed and reshaped itself, did it just.. not know what to do with him? Since another version of him existed and he wasn't in his own zone before the Genesis Wave?

I just assumed it didn't affect him since he was in the Sol Dimension. Is there a reason that wouldn't work that I missed?

Also, Tracy Yardley wrote this story so there's a chance Ian might not have your answer unfortunately.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

9 minutes ago, Razule said:

To this day, I still don't understand how Captain Metal survived the reality shift if Blaze's world was also affected by it. I don't remember if Ian ever said anything about it. When the multiverse was destroyed and reshaped itself, did it just.. not know what to do with him? Since another version of him existed and he wasn't in his own zone before the Genesis Wave?

 

1 minute ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

I just assumed it didn't affect him since he was in the Sol Dimension. Is there a reason that wouldn't work that I missed?

Also, Tracy Yardley wrote this story so there's a chance Ian might not have your answer unfortunately.

IIRC - was it ever confirmed the Sol Dimension was overly effected, beyond sending Blaze and Amy into it? They were both in Sonic's world, and iirc, Blaze remembers Worlds Collide, while others don't, so I always thought it was implied Blaze was affected differently.

[NegaMix]

Long story short - It was implied in either an interview or BumbleKast or... something, that the reason Blaze's dimension isn't impacted nearly as much as the rest of the multiverse (to the point where that Metal Sonic can still exist) is because of the Jeweled Scepter, a powerful relic of that world which has some amount of control over space and time. It was the main macguffin of Sonic Rush Adventure.

Speaking of Metal...

1 hour ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

I’m mostly just shocked that there actually was this much chatter about Captain Metal’s backstory. I don’t remember any of this being here. The only bit I recall was Bean setting a smoothie in front of Blaze and her lazily slurping it, because it’s a funny image.

I have to give them props. They went all in on making it clear that Captain Metal was that blown apart Metal Sonic without directly referencing the old continuity. It works really well and it stands as one of the few examples where they realistically could get away with it too. Well done.

Initially, if concept art of the character is anything to go by, they were originally gonna make it even more clear that this was that same Metal Sonic from the old continuity. However, Sega had mandated at this point that there can only be one Metal Sonic, no more than that. So that's why the most we see of Metal in this backstory, is vague silhouettes with the red eye (as well as maybe affecting his final design too, as they probably had to make him only vaguely look like Metal Sonic).

[SanPolo4389]

12 hours ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

That said, Marine seems to stand as an example of how that kind of character can fail. She’s on the side of the heroes but her attitude sucks. She’s bossy and mean to the people around her and doesn’t listen to anyone because she considers herself an authority for some reason. She’s ignorant to her surroundings and because she can’t really fight, she’s useless in battle as well. Traits like that aren’t a deal breaker but if it’s only in service of making the heroes have to babysit her or deal with the fallout of her deciding to mess things up, like a crucial rescue plan, then it feels like she only exists to be hated. Amy and the caption she has at the start of the book basically say as much too. 

So basically she's the annoying sidekick character in movies/animated shows.

12 hours ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

We end on the heroes returning home… well, first there’s a pointless “TO BE CONTINUED????” thing where Captain Metal’s eye re-activates below the surface of the water. This is the Metal Sonic that refuses to die and I’m here for it. Though, it’s still a little silly.

And now starts the trend in the reboot universe of stuff that never gets followed up on, which isn't the writers faults but stings.

[Dr. Detective]

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog - Issue #253: Countdown to Chaos, Part One: The Builder

We’ve got a four issue story arc to greet and meet all of our friends, new and old, for this grand and brand new continuity. Well, it’s technically the same continuity because things shifted to be like this IN-story but you all know what I mean. This four part cover is going to look beyond epic when it’s finished too. 

Spoiler

Variant Cover

I naturally thought this was Metal Sonic when I first laid eyes on it but the caption says Silver Sonic. I can’t exactly tell the difference here but that’s okay. This is a really cool looking variant cover. We’re going to be getting some less lazy ones in the future for damn sure. I appreciate it.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencil Layouts: Tracy Yardley!
Pencil Finishes: Lamar Wells
Inks: Terry Austin
Colors: Matt Herms
Letters: John Workman
Cover by Ben Bates
Variant Cover by T. Rex

This is the first time I think I’ve seen Yardley on just the pencil layouts of something with someone else finishing them. I thought that was just a fancy new term for inking the book but nope. That’s Terry Austin’s job here. Interesting.

Ian Flynn has a lot on his plate so this four part arc has a lot it needs to do right out of the gate. If I were him I’d be both worried and yet also excited. I dunno. As someone who likes to write as well, I can’t help but see this as a viable challenge. It’s almost like being given free content to create. With such a heavy goal in mind and a ton of characters to go through it almost feels like there’s a bit of a layout one could follow. 

I’m not saying it’ll be easy though.

The first couple pages of this issue is Sonic and Tails reiterating their mission to find Rotor. He’s the one Freedom Fighter they’ve got a lead on and attempting to restore Nicole by giving him back his other set of memories is the primary goal. 

A part of me wonders if this is something they should ask the person they’re going after if they want to do but if the goal is to restore Nicole, they’ll definitely go for it. Still, it just seems polite.

Tails seems to be doing fine. 

Well, he’s mostly fine. Nicole informs Tails that the reason Rotor is being so secretive and hard to track down is because he’s hiding from Eggman to work on a secret project with Tails. Tails says he THINKS he remembers that but it’s too hard sifting through two sets of memories.

Yeah, one of those has got to go. And one of them will. Don’t worry.

Anyway, they happen upon a place where they can get a guide. 

We cut back to the Efrika Plains where Eggman is continuing to slum it. 

He had to camp out in the woods and is looking mighty dirty. Despite this, Orbot and Cubot are the ones complaining. Orbot then plucks at Eggman’s last nerve when he passive aggressively wonders where they could get a mechanical genius to fix the Egg Mobile.

I don’t blame Eggman for snapping at him and shouting that he’s got no tools to fix the fucking thing with. He’s got no idea what to do or how because he has nothing and doesn’t even know where the fuck he is.

That’s when a group of motor riding henchmen roll up to them, spewing smoke in Eggman’s face.

It’s here where we get introduced to the new concept for Eggman’s forces going forward as well as our first member of the Egg Bosses, Axel the Water Buffalo.

He comes up to Eggman, asking if this is a surprise inspection.

Eggman is momentarily confused but plays along.

I don’t know. I’d be a bit more concerned if my doctor was performing surprise inspections but that’s just me.

Oh my God, that look! 

Also, the detail on this is incredible. It’s starting to remind me a lot of Steven Butler actually. However, you can tell by the design of Eggman’s figure that it’s totally Yardley. Plus, the one who actually finished these pencils was Lamar Wells. There's such an interesting range of talent here. It looks really good though. 

That look Eggman gave wasn’t him planning to have relations with Axel for saving him. He basically jacked his ride and made him sit in the busted up Egg Mobile.

It’s basically a purple version of the monster truck version of the Egg Mobile he rides in Sonic and SEGA All-Stars Racing. That vehicle is still the absolute best one Eggman’s ever had in any of these racing games. 

Now that Eggman’s more lucid, he's regretting his earlier actions at the end of the crossover a bit. That’s kind of how I’d figure he’d be here though. Sometimes you just fly off the handle in a fit of rage, shit gets fucked, and who you gonna call?

Anyway, the guide they found was Big the Cat.

This next page is going to depict the following conversation as though Big is hard to talk to and Tails succeeding at talking to him is some sort of miraculous feat.

What it actually depicts is Sonic asking Big a bunch of questions and getting straight forward answers and being annoyed that he isn’t going on about something he didn’t directly ask him about.

Ah. But then the child genius Tails DOES ask Big about the thing they want to know about and it works. Bully for him!

This is a cute scene. I don’t actually have a problem with it. It’s just… I mean, come on Sonic.

We then reach another area of the forest where Sonic comments on the nice view… but the aesthetics of the first Sonic Adventure are still here.

It’s actually really nice seeing the entrance to the Final Egg all dilapidated and falling apart here. I enjoy callbacks like this quite a lot, though, in this continuity it feels more closer to home for ME because what happened here is more game centric.

They comment above about how their memories seem to be running together and Tails has a little mental crisis, wondering if their new memories are going to override the other ones.

That’s definitely going to happen but, in a way, it’s almost not worth worrying about. It’s like death. Death is scary because it’s unknown but when it happens the fear is gone so… might as well not be scared at all right? I don’t know. I don’t think that’s how it works for most people. Even for me. 

However, it’s going to happen and I can’t imagine it’ll feel weird then.

Imagine right now that you actually lived some other life that you have no recollection of. It doesn’t quite feel like you actually lived that life now does it? It’s just something you imagined on the spot because this is the only life you’ve lived. As far as you know. 

Well, talking about this will have to wait. Big sees someone fighting in the distance and it’s here where we get introduced to our new continuity’s version of Rotor the Walrus.

This design certainly fits the aesthetic of the games a lot more than the other one. That said, I do think I prefer the old continuity’s design more. That war-torn, worn-out, grizzled, broken back version of Rotor was so much more unique and interesting to me. Just looking at him, you could feel the history radiating off of him.

That said, when it comes to the standing of Rotor’s character in general, it does technically do him some good to be back on his feet and taking part in the action again. At least, if you’re someone who felt intensely sorry for the way the trajectory of his life was going in the old continuity.

Although, it was getting better. He was becoming more active with his new Team Freedom and quitting the Council saw that stage of his life on the sidelines ending. It’s not like he had nothing going for him there.

Here, it might be a harder sell to have him just going back to being a big bruiser on the battlefield for me. I guess that part of him works well enough but the initial reason Rotor ended up going down the path he did in the old continuity was because Tails made him seem redundant. I’m sure there’s still people who saw no issue with having two tech buddies on the same main character team, serving a similar purpose, and thought it’d be fine just for them to be smartie-partners… but to be honest I do still see that as a bit of a problem. 

Rotor’s different enough from Tails to stand out as his own character but what they bring to the table doesn’t feel different enough yet. It’s not like being a tech guy MEANS he’s instantly redundant. Their positions in expertise being different could easily solve that. It’s like how Zoro and Brook are both swordsmen but have WILDLY different movesets and manners of fighting despite that.

They all fight alongside Rotor when he’s shown to be in need of assistance though. They need to stop this horde of badniks before Eggman can get the signal to their location. This leads to Sonic doing a quip that actually successfully got me to laugh.

Also Big did a spin-dash. Whoooooaaaaa!

Interesting about Silver Sonic though. He looks a tad different to me.

Anyway, he’s something called a Horde Commander. I’m guessing that’s like a step below “Egg Boss”. Instead of ruling over any specific region, he’s kind of like that golden robot in Sonic Heroes where if he’s destroyed, you’ve pretty much solved the problem. He’s the leader of the platoon of robots that’s sent out to spoil your crops, basically.

Now, remember that variant cover with the cool schematics of Silver Sonic that made him look super imposing and menacing?

Yeah, well, forget all that because here comes Big “Duke Nukem” the Cat.

Did Rotor just say ska-doosh? Like he’s the fucking Kung-Fu Panda?! How dare–!

Anyway, the point is, he got blowed up. It wasn’t a very climactic battle but it sure did look cool.

Alright so… what happens next is a bit hard to parse for me. Just a little bit.

So, it would seem that what’s happening with the memory thing here is that once the memories are ZOOMED into you, the current prevailing memories are the ones from the OLD continuity.

I say that not because of Sonic’s reactions but because of Tails’ reactions.

Sonic naturally is a bit surprised to see Rotor like this, asking if that’s really him when all’s said and done. Rotor gives him a fistbump and plays it off as him being weird. Sonic asks him where the hell they are and he gets excited.

It’s here where he shows off the Sky Patrol. Yes, it’s the flying Hall of Justice. 

I have my misgivings about the concept but, then again, it’s probably going to sound redundant at this point. It’s nothing super bad anyway. The point is that Tails insisted on this place being named after one of the spin-offs he starred in and he doesn’t remember…!

It’s very interesting because Tails is now reacting to all this stuff as though he’s seeing it for the first time when before he was reacting to Sonic as if him being confused about this world made HIM seem weird.

Now that Tails has been indoctrinated into the “confused about this world I’m living in currently” club, Rotor is in the same position Tails was back in #252 when he first confronted Sonic.

It’s a very neat WAY to do this, honestly. No matter what end of this thing you’re on, you end up looking kind of crazy. Sonic and Tails look insane to Rotor and Rotor looks kind of off and weird to Sonic and Tails. On the outside looking in you can probably make a case for everyone in this scene just acting weird and being at the mercy of whatever the universe is doing to them.

Now it’s Rotor’s turn and he takes it… well? Not well?

Eh?

Visions of when he was fat on the bottom and not on the top rush through his mind. He also remembers getting his back crushed and sitting on the council. Ho’boy.

Yeah, he’s rattled. Who could blame him?

Sonic and Tails ask for a briefing on where everyone else is since Nicole is actually a little more fixed up by that. Again, the explanation for why this is working to fix her is flimsy as shit but it’s a result of what was demanded by the higher ups I guess.

Rotor gives them the low-down.

He was here fixing up the Sky Patrol. Antoine is just outside of Knothole with Uncle Chuck. Bunnie’s on an undercover mission. So is Sally. Amy is M.I.A.

Amy’s off having fun with some pirates right now.

Sonic is happy to hear all these names. He’s glad Uncle Chuck is still alive. He’s glad Bunnie’s here and not in some far off land. He’s glad Antoine’s not bed-ridden. He’s glad Sally’s not a robot.

Damn. A lot of those interesting developmental plot threads just got jettisoned into the ether. It’s still such a huge shame but at least Sonic is happy.

Anyway, Rotor needs some time to be alone and think. Big stays behind with him. That leaves Sonic and Tails to go off and re-discover more of their home. Well, Tails is going to re-re-discover it technically, I guess.

Back with Eggman, he’s turned his Egg Mobile into a Flying Egg Mobile. He still doesn’t quite know the layout of the world or who works under him so he keeps framing things that should be questions as orders or pop-quizzes to Axel. 

He asks who the nearest Egg Boss is and he’s told it’s Lord Hood.

Hey! A character who survived the Thanos Snap! If you told Lord Hood himself that he was so lucky he probably wouldn’t believe you.

When he gets the answer he wants, he flies off, leaving Axel to snort in anger at him as he leaves. One of his men asks him why they listen to his orders and Axel says because they HAVE to. Plus, the roboticizer apparently works again. Uh-oh.

Meanwhile, Eggman is more worried about fixing something far more scary and intense than his lack of energy.

Oops. I dun did an apocalypse.

My bad.

That was a good first issue to this arc. It was a nice blend of dialogue and action. I think everything here worked well in tandem with one another, perfectly. That said, it’s standing out how anyone choosing to start with this arc at the Post-Reboot might have a bit of difficulty following some of the dialogue. At the very least, if you can get someone to inform you that literally none of the stuff they’re mentioning from the Pre-Reboot is going to matter after this arc is finished then you’ll probably be golden for all the issues after these four. For someone like me who’s been on this ride for as long as I have, that felt very refreshing and nice to read.

 

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog - Issue #254: Countdown to Chaos, Part Two: The Soldier

I did momentarily wonder why the title for the last issue was “The Builder” but upon reading the title for this one, I realize it’s basically what the Freedom Fighters are. Rotor is the builder. Antoine is the soldier. Bunnie and Sally are likely something else. Sonic, Amy, and Tails are… something else too, maybe. Maybe Tails is “The Other Builder” perhaps?

Spoiler

SEGA Variant

Yeah, another one of these. It’s not even really worth my time talking about them or even really being upset by these. It’s a nice Eggman render though. It always has been. The way the shadow on the floor cuts off behind him was a bit odd to me but that’s probably because I don’t know how shadows work.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencil Layouts: Tracy Yardley!
Pencil Finishes: Lamar Wells
Inks: Terry Austin
Colors: Matt Herms
Letters: John Workman
Cover by Ben Bates
Variant Cover Art Provided by SEGA

This issue begins fantastically. It doubles as a high octane way to burst onto the scene for the start of the issue and a hilarious showcase of how Eggman’s personality dominates over all, even when he’s trying to piece together what the fuck is happening.

He’s in his clunker of an Egg Mobile with wings and gets attacked and shot down by G.U.N fighter planes!

He literally crashes through the fortress wall of the Egg Base of Avalon, skids across the ground, and pops out screaming “HOOD!”

It’s great. The dude almost fucking died and crash landed soon after and the first thing he does when he emerges isn’t to check on himself or anything. It’s to start screaming at someone in anger so he can push them around.

Lord Hood is, of course, here and ready to bombard the doctor with excuses for this transgression against the Eggman Empire.

We found out recently that this man decimated G.U.N during the Forces war so him finding out that G.U.N is just occupying the space over territory he’s claimed for himself has got to be an affront to the senses.

Back when I first read this I was just as confused as Eggman was but the man carries himself so well here that you’d be forgiven for thinking he was already on the up and up about everything and was just in a spot of a bother right now. 

He never acts confused. He never shows weakness in front of his Egg Bosses. Instead of asking questions, he demands answers or frames his questions as though they’re something else. 

This is EXPERT, high level character writing. I don’t think I’ve seen Eggman written better by anyone quite like he’s written by Ian. 

We cut back to Sonic and Tails who just had a nice little walk through the forest of Knothole. Sonic comments on how it was a nice walk. 

Sonic and Tails comment on how it’s not their Knothole but it’s close enough. It’s gotten a second chance. There is no nanite city anymore so I guess the purpose of keeping Knothole burned to the ground was no more. It does kind of suck that we’ve lost that wasteland of the old Knothole to serve as a reminder of what happened back in #175 but that’s fine. 

It’s making Sonic a lot happier and the hits just keep coming. He spots Uncle Chuck right where he was said to be and Sonic takes the man by surprise by racing over and giving him THE most adorable fucking hug ever!

AAAAAH! SONIC IS SO CUTE HERE! I CAN’T!

Look at him, rubbing his cheek against Uncle Chuck’s like a happy little kid! It’s adorable! My heart…!

He’s even got those FORBIDDEN tears in his eyes.

Yes, the “mandate” was never that Sonic can’t “cry”. It’s that he can’t “bawl” like a baby. He’s had tears in his eyes before. Just not in the games.

Also, a significant change has been made. Well, first thing first, Uncle Chuck looks nice. He’s clearly just a lighter colored Sonic with exaggerated facial hair but whatever. It’s fine. We’re not going to have a Penders issue where there’s a TON of hedgehogs and all of them looking exactly like Sonic would make it a huge problem when continuing forward. You can definitely tell who is who between them.

The actual change I wanted to mention was the caption box stating that he’s Dr. Chuck the Hedgehog and considered “Uncle” to many.

So he’s no longer got a blood affiliation with Sonic but the relationship is still the same.

Honestly, as a sucker for the found family trope, I tend to find myself gravitating towards this idea rather easily. The idea that he could be considered an Uncle to many is just really heart-warming, especially because he’s not directly related to anyone. I’ll take him still being around over him being gone too.

He survived the snap.

Unfortunately, your mom and dad didn’t so… I hope your new memories override your old ones quickly before you find out and that sends your mind spiraling into a bit of a crisis.

Uncle Chuck is glad Sonic’s happy he’s safe but says that none of them will be if he can’t figure out what’s causing all the tremors. Seismic activity is happening that’s causing weird energy to seep out of the Earth and he’s collected samples of it that he hopes Nicole will be able to examine when she’s free.

He has a hunch this is being caused by Eggman and… he’s… not… technically wrong…

Anyway, Nicole can’t see him because she’s not fully fixed up yet so they need to see Antoine. He approaches them with “the Mutt” in tow.

Again, it’s a little funny how Tails used to be in sync with the new reality but because he touched Nicole, he’s reacting to these new versions of everyone the same as Sonic is.

Like, they get re-introduced to Muttski and this is both their reactions.

To be fair, I barely knew Muttski and this was still my reaction back when I first saw this.

It’s so strange, imagining a real ass dog being turned into an anthro because of what happened. Then again, it’s honestly always been stranger that Sonic just had a real ass dog as a pet. I never watched SatAM so finding out about it so long ago felt odd. 

I love the faces Sonic and Tails are making a lot though. I wonder if they’re disappointed or just disturbed and unsure of who else suffered a radical change like this.

I know the reason Ian made this change is because of basically what I just said about it being weird that there was just a real ass dog acting as Sonic’s pet but the implications that this new reality could just do this to people is interesting to think about.

Also, “The Mutt” is not a flattering nick-name so I’m glad he’s proud to have it. Forget the dog connotation, it sounds too much like “The Butt”.

Anyway, Chuck tells them to go on ahead with Antoine since they apparently have, to him, unknown business with him. Sonic wants to get Uncle Chuck in on this pointless memory restoration thing too but Tails says it’s not a good idea because of… a paragraph long host of reasons that exist to cover their bases surrounding this scrambled together idea for this plot point.

Basically, Tails says they’re working off a hunch right now so it’s best not to throw in too many unknown variables. The Freedom Fighter connection technically works with Chuck but that was a long time ago and also he spent most of his time as a robotic slave and… for some reason that matters. 

Whatever. The point is that they just want the regular, marketable Freedom Fighters. 

Antoine here is actually going on about how he’ll have to decline a new mission if that’s the reason they’re here. He actually COMPLAINS that there isn’t any badnik attack and says that doing this is BORING but he must remain at his side because he considers Chuck’s work important.

It’s… very cool. Also, it’s funny how neither Sonic nor Tails react to that show of bravado. He’s definitely still got the awkward Antoine quality to him but the fear doesn’t seem to be lingering for him here.

Sonic and Tails keep being wishy washy about what they want to tell him which prompts Antoine to snap at them a bit. He lays it down that if they need his help, just ask! He’s here to help!

So… Tails just tells him to take Nicole.

At least Sonic mentioned that Antoine might need to sit down first. There was more of an attempt at bracing him I guess.

Still, what happened to him was pretty intense and he has a very intense reaction… initially.

The images Antoine sees are of his old, cowardly personality when faced with a spider dangling from the ceiling, his marriage to Bunnie, him sacrificing himself in that intense explosion, and his coma.

Sonic and Tails immediately try to start offering him platitudes to satiate him but Antoine actually puts a stop to that. 

He immediately collects himself because he wants to know what’s up with his wife.

That’s wonderful. I like it so, so much.

We cut back to Eggman who graces us with an epic reenactment of his Weapons Bed level from SA2. He needs to get to the Death Egg and he can’t with what he has unfortunately.

The Egg Mobile that he’s been trudging along with him and trying his best to fix up over and over again has gotten a new form. It looks like a makeshift Egg Walker from SA2, complete with seats for Orbot and Cubot.

He charges forward and attacks the G.U.N carrier directly. Orbot and Cubot, in a rare instance of them being tied to the action, go out and secure a G.U.N jet for themselves.

Orbot starts up the jet and gets it moving. Eggman needs to hurry on over and jump in before it takes off.

Before he does so, though, like a pirate saying goodbye to their faithful ship, he gives a heartfelt thanks to his Egg Mobile before sending it on it’s suicide mission.

I believe Tails did the same thing to the Cyclone when it was destroyed in the Metal Virus arc. I love this little tidbit about the two of them. 

Also, of course, Eggman got an A-Rank for that Weapons Bed Redux level so he says the A-Rank catchphrase at the end.

Sonic and Tails, meanwhile, are continuing their debriefing of the situation with Antoine and are looking into where Bunnie could be.

Apparently Bunnie has gone deep undercover and missed her check-in with them about a week ago. That’s no good so Antoine is about to set off… but then another earthquake happens and the research team of “The Mutt” and Chuck fall into the ground!

Sonic and the others rush over and we get to witness their rescue with a neat looking Black Knight sword spin-dash from Antoine.

He doesn’t just slice, he bounces off the walls too. They’ve all been reborn to function like Sonic game characters and it’s glorious. Antoine is so cool.

Whereas I found myself okay with Rotor, I’m really liking Antoine here.

As for Sonic, well, the debris that continues to fall as Sonic makes his way back up after recovering Chuck’s research kind of sprays into his face when a rock smashes one of the little bobbles on it.

You see stuff like this and you remember that, oh yeah, we’re not just setting up the entirety of this new reality but we’re also setting up Sonic Unleashed.

It’s a bit of a tall order but the arc itself works towards the goal that needs to be achieved by default so it’s kind of perfect for that. Sonic Unleashed IS the Sonic World Adventure after all. What better arc could there be for discovering our new world?

I remember reading this and wondering how the werehog element was going to come into the mix and I recall things being teased for quite a bit.

It’s definitely not an instantaneous thing. This arc is going to keep you waiting for a smattering of things.

I will admit, at least when it comes to the anticipation for the werehog, it works.

The next page is basically a bunch of characters telling Sonic to see a doctor. He keeps refusing and saying he’s fine. Even after Chuck and Mutt leave to check on the villagers and say they’re headed off to Spagonia to finish their research, he says to see a doctor.

Sonic says he did see one, him.

Chuck says a MEDICAL doctor.

Then Antoine sheaths his sword and tells Tails to make sure Sonic sees a doctor.

They’re taking this super seriously and with good reason. 

Antoine also says that he’s staying with Chuck and Mutt. Sonic is surprised since he just said it was boring but Antoine just got a huge dose of danger right now and if Chuck’s research is that important then he’s going to need to be here to protect it.

He’s so reliable and cool and awesome and fantastic. 

Plus, his relationship with Sonic already feels a lot cooler and healthier too. 

The two clasp hands and he sees him off asking if there’s a message he wants to give to Bunnie.

Antoine thinks it over and responds that he should tell her that he is well but will not be whole until he sees her again.

It’s great how much he loves her… and my mind is cast back to when this arc first came out years ago. Someone on whichever forum kept whining and bitching and complaining about the fact that Antoine and Bunnie were still married in this new reality.

“WhY aRe ThEy StIlL mArRiEd?!” they moaned. Apparently the fact that the two love each other and want to be together wasn’t enough. Maybe it messed with some sort of OTP they had? Or maybe they, for some reason, thought it wasn’t logically sound for the marriage to still be intact with the new reality even though some things from the old one carried over fine. 

Either way, it doesn’t matter. They’re together and they’re better off for it.

We end this issue by cutting back to the infiltrator, Bunnie D’ Coolette.

All that jazz would be right if you were about to step into a Knuckles level from SA2.

Another really good issue. I’m amazed. I’m about three issues into the Post-Reboot and I’m enjoying myself so much right now. Yeah, the memory thing will end up not mattering but it’s use as a framing device for discovering this new reality is coming in handy quite a whole lot. It’s making for a lot of amusing faces and reactions too. I’m almost coming around to the idea that it might have been worth it. Either way, this story is really good. Antoine was already my favorite of the Freedom Fighters but he’s been upgraded and become the best of who he always could be and I couldn’t be happier for him. It’s truly wonderful.

 

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog - Issue #255: Countdown to Chaos, Part Three: The Rabbot

So, apparently Bunnie’s role on the team is as the “Rabbot”. Hmm. Interesting. Builder, Soldier, and Rabbot. I feel like that’s saying that Rouge’s occupation is “Bat” or something. Feels a bit weird. I guess finding a specific epithet for Bunnie was going to be tough. I certainly wasn’t able to come up with one. We lucked out and got the issue devoted to her actually plastering her on the cover this time though.

Spoiler

Variant Cover

Oh #@$%!

What the #@$% is that?!

Yes, I’m censoring myself because I feel like cursing properly doesn’t actually do this justice. I mean good God. 

How does one… go about critiquing something that looks like this? All I can really say is… maybe I could make it as a professional artist after all…

—
Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Jerry Gaylord
Inks: Kent Archer
Colors: Matt Herms
Letters: John Workman
Cover by Ben Bates
Variant Cover by Tyler Capps and Matt Herms

So, that Variant Cover gave me a bit of a scare but I’m sure the art of the main issue will be fine.

Oh… Ohhhh.

Well, the art here is certainlyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy… unique.

So this is uh, Jerry Gaylord. I’m assuming he’s an artist on loan from the Gaylord Hotel. 

No, he’s a professional comic book artist. Looking at some of his other stuff, it’s a pretty consistent style that looks… better with human characters than it does for these Sonic characters.

I’m pretty sure this is the only Sonic comic issue he’s done so I don’t think I have to worry about him returning. However, I did remember this issue upon re-introducing myself to the art here. A lot of people were throwing a hissy fit over it at the time and it’s like… not really worth being too upset about. It showed up for a single issue and there are… spots where it looks… not as bad as the rest of it.

When Sonic and Tails dive into the city, they race through Metropolis Zone and… just reach the big bad of the area who has tassels on his shoulders. I actually thought I skipped a page and kept trying to see if two pages got stuck together or something because Sonic and Tails are just in front of this guy on the page after they rush towards an opening in the door.

So I guess this is happening at the entrance or something?

Well, either way, Sonic says he doesn’t like fighting the Egg Army guys. I can see why. They’re not robots and I can only imagine that working with or for Eggman doesn’t come with a lot of benefits. Nor might it be something you even particularly wanted to do.

He doesn’t agree to Sonic’s suggestion that he just surrender though and tells the Bunny girl with him to attack.

She does.

“Bunnie D’ Coolette the Rabbot” is quite the mouthful. I’m glad it’s not all one name like that though. Bunnie D’ Coolette works fine.

Why does it look like she’s floating here to me? It must be the shadows. It looks like there’s space between her feet and the floor, somehow.

Anyway, they catch Bunnie up to speed on everything and then apologize for ruining her undercover mission once they realize she’s okay.

She explains that it’s partly her fault since the unconscious tassel boss behind her was getting suspicious so she had to go even further undercover here. 

She found out that this place is mostly for research and development. They’re trying to build a replacement for the Death Egg and she was just about to nab the generator before it was shipped off. 

Sonic actually feels even worse about running through them all now that he knows that they’re just geeks instead of soldiers. It’s nice seeing him so concerned and not reveling in their defeat here. Bunnie says not to feel too bad since they were trying to shoot at him. That’s also true.

I like this. It feels more balanced than what I think was the case before.

So now that the room to the generator is probably going to be way more secure than before, they’ll need to think of a new plan of action to deal with it.

Sonic, Tails, and Nicole decide not to use the memory zappy thing on Bunnie just yet since they need to fight their way out of this mess right now. Bunnie bought them some time by telling the guards to arm themselves but… they’re armed now.

Her pleas to stay away are ignored and they’re ready to burst in. They’re not respecting her privacy by knocking and they’re asserting their authority as the Egg Army by coming in anyway.

Meanwhile, Eggman has just landed at the Artika continent where he runs down the name of the boss and the name of the place rather easily this time. 

This Egg Boss is called Tundra and his face is obscured for a reason.

He fakes it until he makes it and he does it well.

However, that last scene felt a little too clean and Orbot notices this as well.

Eggman realizes what’s happening and spells out for everyone that the memories he has of the old world are starting to fade and will soon be replaced by the new ones. 

The only ones who started off unaffected by this new reality were the ones at the epicenter of the two realities from before… so just Sonic, Eggman, Orbot, and Cubot. 

The Freedom Fighters are being restored right now but, again, it’s not going to last so it doesn’t matter. What’s important is adjusting to the change… which Eggman is okay with doing.

Yeah, the thing Eggman is talking about here is an immediate issue that begs for attention. 

Obviously, it’s the tremors that are happening right now. The lead into the Unleashed adaption is upon us even more.

Interestingly enough, Ian Flynn talked about how hard it was to get all this to even happen. The reason is because communication between them and SEGA of Japan was very tough concerning getting them to understand what they were even doing.

In SEGA of Japan’s minds, them doing an Unleashed arc wasn’t possible because Unleashed had already happened.

Explaining to them that, no, they were doing a comic VERSION of Sonic Unleashed because it didn’t happen in the comics yet was tough. They just didn’t get it. 

I can sort of see the confusion since it’s likely that this comic was planning on treating things as though some games that happened after Unleashed already took place, like Sonic Colors or Sonic Generations. Especially with both Orbot and Cubot already there.

I can’t imagine the hassle it must have been to get this approved.

Back with the heroes, the Egg Army stationed outside the room are hearing a voice from who they must think is their boss telling them to go after Sonic, who just broke out of the room.

They rush after them and with a huge array of action scenes at their beck and call, they end up reaching the vault with the generator. It’s just a really big cog.

The art isn’t god awful or anything but the bodies that go flying look a lot like weird dolls to me. 

At least the action is fluid in the way it’s conveying motion.

Then, of course, another earthquake happens which completely wrecks shit for everyone and it’s suddenly time to escape.

Everyone escapes but not before they nab the weird looking generator ball thingy and fly away with it. 

Sonic ponders if the quakes are Eggman’s doings again but Bunnie has her doubts since reports of this happening have been going off on other Egg Army bases too.

Sonic briefly wonders if Eggman would be crazy enough to endanger his own bases with these quakes and then remembers what he did at the end of World’s Collide.

So yes. He’d be that crazy and worse.

They get home and Antoine is there to greet her with a hug, a romantic line, and a yawn. They embrace as Tails… leaves the room so that Antoine can hand the memory tablet to Bunnie so she can be up to speed with all the weirdness.

It happens.

It’s a silent reaction but still a heavy one. 

Thankfully, they don’t dwell too much on it. It’s not really necessary. 

Nicole can finally go into her Holo-Lynx form again. However, she still needs to unscramble her database. She says that she wishes this didn’t have to come at the cost of her friend's mental well-being. 

Sonic says they’ve got each other so they’ll be fine. No more emo stuff.

She also warns him that she only has enough memory energy for either Sally OR Amy. 

Again, it’s not going to matter so whatever.

The last page of the book is Eggman walking out in his Death Egg, now well-rested and re-dressed. Also, looking very mighty in the top panel. He reminds me of Lordgenone from Gurren Lagann when he walked out of his mech and started fighting with his regular body.

He also finds out that Sally is no longer a robot. It’s rather unfortunate.

Eggman doesn’t dwell on it. He just decides that this should be handled with a direct approach.

Yeah, fuck it. If he can’t have her as a robot than he’s just going to fucking kill her and make sure she doesn’t get to exist in this reality either. Have it so that Sonic and Sally can never see each other again.

This issue wasn’t as good as the others but it’s mostly because of two unfortunate factors. One is the art. There’s no escaping the fact that the artist’s talent doesn’t align itself with Sonic characters very well. Superman? Sure. Not Sonic though. The second thing, however, is that this is the third memory recovery story and unlike the last two, the ground that was covered wasn’t as unique or as interesting. Bunnie is the least changed out of the three we’ve seen so far. She’s “The Rabbot” again and this time only her legs and arm are mechanical so that people can finally stop asking how she and Antoine can make babies together. There wasn’t a ton to explore with the foundation of her character here but I suppose that works fine for those who didn’t want her to change too much. It’s not a bad issue though. 

[jungle_penguins]

I really do miss pre-reboot Archie, but I still like reboot era enough and following that along helped with dealing with wacky times in real life. I do hope we get the full picture of the planned ideas one day. Iron Dominion through Mecha Sally was some top tier stuff for Sonic storytelling. 

Gosh, imagine being a reader who was out of the loop of the legal shenanigans at the time. Must've been utter confusion for at least 10 readers out there. I can understand the editorial(?) requirement of a transitional period, comic still keeping the numbering after all.

Random thought but why was this period when variant covers suddenly popped up, did the reboot drive some decision making to make variant covers? I'm not into comics all that much so the concept confuses me, I assume it's an easy way to get collectors to buy more issues or something but I find the majority of them never looked good.

[Dr. Detective]

 

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog - Issue #256: Countdown to Chaos, Finale: The Princess and the Hammer

The final cover for this four-part story is easily the best of the four to me as it stands as the one that could, by itself, make for a really cool and awesome cover that doesn’t look like anything’s all that cut off. Plus, the image of the heroes jumping at a maniacally laughing main villain will always be really cool. 

This is quite the awesome image. The thing I appreciate about it so much, honestly, is the background. You can tell what it’s depicting if you’ve played the games but the purple energy crackling through the broken ground remains ominous because it’s not directly showing you what’s behind it all. Using that old chestnut of having Sonic zipping through the image so that he can appear on every cover is a nice thing to fall back on as well. It works for the sake of their marketing strategy. 

Spoiler

End of the World Variant

This is a really nice cover too. It’s got a really nicely drawn and colored Sonic and a really awesome looking background simulating the end of the world. The only problem is how those two things are meshing together. Sonic looks like he was cut and pasted onto the cover and then someone just kind of… used an airbrush tool to make a blue streak from some of the falling rocks to make it look like he was jumping from them. It’s a bit of a hard thing to let squeeze by.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Tracy Yardley!
Inks: Terry Austin
Colors: Steve Downer
Letters: J. Workman
Cover by Ben Bates
Variant Cover by Tracy Yardley!

So, at the end of Pirate Plunder Panic, Amy, Cream, Bean, and Bark were sent home thanks to Blaze using the Sol Emeralds on them. As soon as they get back and talk about tea and crumpets and scones (Bean brings up the scones) a ship crash lands in front of them, nearly killing them.

That’s the world they live in. One second you’re talking about having tea with your mom and the next a princess with energy blades crash lands her ship on top of you because she’s being chased down by a robot doppelganger of one of your friends.

Yeah, Princess Sally bursts out of the crashed ship, sporting new laser blade… wrist-weapon things. They’re honestly pretty cool but all I can think of when I see them are the strange conversations I recall people having about whether or not Sally should have them or not. It doesn’t really seem like the kind of thing that would ruin a character to me but, then again, they also had a similar conversation about her wearing clothes so…

Well, anyway, she’s being attacked by Metal Sonic so Amy jumps in to help. Cream tries to ask Bean and Bark for assistance and they… well. They gotta make that bread.

It’s not “being mean” Cream. This is just a textbook example of goods and services at work. He didn’t say “No”. He asked if you had any money. 

I’m sorry young lady but expecting people to face down a robot assassin for free when they’ve got money to make just isn’t practical. You feel me? You pickin’ up what I’m throwin’ down?!

The fight rages on with Cheese proving to not be as awesome as the Advance games make him out to be. The black shield looks cool though.

I don’t know why but that image of Cheese being swatted away has me imagining him making an anime girl gasping sound and it makes me giggle. 

Sally is a bit confused as to why Amy is the only other main Freedom Fighter here. She says that she sent out a message. Amy says she never got any message because she and Cream were whisked away to the land of Oz.

So it’s just them. They’re not dying against Metal Sonic so it’s probably not inaccurate to say that they’re doing well.

They try their best. Sally even manages to get two of her laser swords into him before his burst shield knocks her off.

We then get introduced to what I assume is the new guard for the kingdom. 

It's probably the most hilarious introduction to a group of people I’ve ever seen.

Just instantaneous irrelevancy. Showing up to say “We got this” and then a panel later saying “We failed you”. That’s brilliant. I love it. Never show your faces again unless we need some jobber entertainment. 

Sonic dives out of the Tornado and slams on top of Metal Sonic right after.

He plays it cool, saying hi to the ladies, before challenging Metal to a race and blitzing off to fight him.

There’s a mildly amusing scene where Amy points out that they did all the work and Sonic just came in to steal the glory but Sally remarks that safety comes first and Amy finishes by saying that glory is second. She’s aware.

Still, it’d be nice to get some of that top billing. Granted, the fanbase tends to have a hissy-fit over Metal Sonic losing fights in any capacity now. I was just upset that he kept getting blown up every single time.

That’s still true here, though he doesn’t get destroyed. It stands out that he’s supposed to be a character now so he can’t be destroyed completely… but the ease with which he’s dealt with after Sonic shows up is still hard not to make fun of. 

It’s not even Sonic who does it. Tails just drops a missile on him and that’s it.

That momentary shot where it looks like Metal Sonic is emerging from the fire and smoke completely fine and ready to attack Sonic looks cool. Out of context of course. He lands with a dull thud and the moment becomes more humorous. That look on Sonic’s face was showcasing genuine worry though. I like that.

I only ever feel sorry for Metal Sonic nowadays. Or, at least I do when it comes to stuff like this. 

Also, interesting is the fact that he’s speaking. I do believe it’ll become a rule that he can only speak in his Neo Metal form. Eggman stating that the silent killer schtick was getting old back in the Pre-Reboot is still something I disagree with. He can pull off the silent killer just fine still.

Anyway, Sonic races back to give Sally a big ol’ hug. 

I can forgive the look on Amy’s face here since she obviously doesn’t and wouldn’t understand why Sally being here, in the literal flesh, is so important to him.

I love the look on Amy’s face when Sonic puts his arm around her. She’s just going “OoOOooOo!” like a little girl. The look on Sonic’s face when he hears Amy clear her throat is great too. You can tell he does totally care about both of them. 

Also, that image of Sally hugging King Max is great. They kept their promise and made sure she visited the king first.

It’s quite the thing to witness. I don’t even recall if Sally and King Max ever truly embraced in the old continuity. A moment where that happened is not in my mind at all. It might just be my shoddy memory but this still stands as a pretty clear and intense break from what the relationship was before.

There’s a lot of love and hugs going around today.

Everyone is here now. We cut back to the Sky Patrol where Rotor is able to finally, properly introduce it to Sally and the rest. It’s ready for launch but first there’s… business to take care of.

Restoring Sally and Amy is the final thing they need to do and Sonic actually offers an explanation on how this works again. It’s actually a much clearer explanation than what we got before, though, the visual of the memory sparks shocking Tails in the fucking eye makes me wince.

Yeesh.

So, since Nicole is a reverse Men in Black Forget-Me-Device they need to get that energy out of her and into the heads of the last two remaining Freedom Fighters so she can have full access to her systems again and finally, FINALLY analyze what’s going on with the world.

The fact that the last two have to be done at the same time in order for the energy to go into them properly is a funny little tidbit. I feel like it’s set up like this as a bit of a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging that these last two girls are the series’ female leads and potential girlfriends for Sonic.

Although, in this new continuity, it stands to reason that Amy actually has a chance. She was a pure, out and out, hopeless romantic in the previous continuity. Here, because of Flynn’s abstaining from any of the romance nonsense due to how much of a minefield it was, there’s no real pursued relationships sectioning off shippers from their in-canon OTP. That makes it possible for them to view whichever OTP they want as possible. 

Of course, that won’t stop the people that want Sonic and Sally to be together from getting annoyed that their relationship is less love and more friendly but… I prefer it this way so I’m good.

Anyway, Amy and Sally try to play this off as though they can handle it, even doing a fist-bump before it happens. Everyone else who’s experienced it knows that their confidence is misplaced.

It happens though and…

She just gets assaulted by a very powerful and painful past. She seems to be reacting mostly to the Mecha Sally stuff but I’ll admit that when she said “Things I said…” I thought back to how she was written in some of the Archie books’ earlier days.

It took me a bit to realize that she was actually talking about all the emotional manipulation she was doing as Mecha Sally. Still, a part of me wants to imagine that she’s also ashamed of how she was written back in the earlier days of the book too. It wasn’t pretty.

Amy didn’t have it anywhere near as bad as her until the Adventure arc in terms of characterization. She still looks a little frazzled though.

Thankfully, that last bit of momentary mental assault was just that; momentary. 

None of them are going to remember this later and to be honest I don’t even recall if this stuff ever gets brought up again after this arc.

Nicole is in panic mode though. She tells Rotor to launch the fucking Sky Patrol. Rotor puts a ring onto a Nintendo DS and she’s finally able to regain her holo-lynx form while explaining that it wasn’t just the planet or their reality that collapsed… but…

I’m sorry, WHAT?!

My memory must be really shot because I sure as shit don’t recall the Multiverse of Madness arc for these comics happening. The premise for this next arc is “Sonic Unleashed is happening” right? Was this… all stuff that was going to be touched upon later? Maybe it could have served as an explanation for how we’d get elements from the old continuity back should anyone out there wish to do an Archie continuation that started at the Post-Reboot and went from there.

That’s honestly exactly what I would have done.

Also, this is our first look at Nicole’s new design.

Better than her old one I would say. I don’t know or care if that’s a controversial opinion. She looks great.

Sally also looks better in the Post-Reboot in my opinion as well, if I hadn’t made that clear.

Anyway, Nicole’s panicked explanation is juxtaposed with Eggman doing the same with Orbot and Cubot back at his ominously lit home base.

Eggman explains, in a line that sounds fucking bonkers when laid out the way he does it, that “every facet of reality fell in on itself and was then recreated. Even our molecular make-up was changed to match out new histories”.

Fuckin’ A. Jesus Christ.

I’ve been calling it “The Snap” this whole time but maybe I should call it the “Ken Penders Gene Bomb”.

Actually, that’s a pretty great name for this. “The Ken Penders Gene Bomb”.

Like the Xorda, he rained death upon the Archie book and everyone mutated into new beings if they weren’t just obliterated by the BOMB part of the bomb.

It’s fucking perfect.

Eggman continues, saying that back when he first used the Genesis Wave he only shot it at the planet itself. However, during Worlds Collide he fired it at their REALITY. The amount of energy it takes to rewrite an entire reality cannot be contained within a rinky-dink little planet.

So the only thing the planet can do is explode, obviously. It sucks but when you snack on too much reality warping energy, your gut just bursts.

In other words, he’s talking about the end of the world.

The world is doomed.

They accidentally survived only to die in a possibly far more painful way.

Sonic and Tails ask Nicole if there’s anything they can do to stop it. 

Orbot and Cubot ask Eggman if there’s anything they can do to fix it.

“Stop it?” Nicole asks.

“Fix it?!” Eggman shouts.

“IT’S TOO LATE!” They shout in unison!

This is quite possibly one of the best two-page spreads in the comic’s history. It’s just a two page spread of our heroes cringing at the world ending. What a way to end this arc and what a way to start this new continuity off with a literal bang.

It really is a show of force when you begin your new continuity with the end of the world.

That entire four part story was very fun and interesting going through it issue to issue. As a whole I do think it suffers a bit from, not just the futility of what they were trying to accomplish, but the relative simplicity of what was going on within the pages. Granted, that’s to be expected and it can be easily excused due to this being something that needed to establish the new Freedom Fighters and their new home. This is the baseline thing they needed to get and they managed to accomplish that as well as provide little tidbits for how Eggman’s empire functions now on top of that. All of that culminating into what’s going to be the start of a story arc within the establishing period of the book makes for a very ambitious project.

Do they succeed at it? Well, your mileage may vary. The Unleashed arc is pretty much the entire rest of the Archie Sonic comics run technically but it’s a Saga that has multiple arcs within it, all of which are doing and accomplishing wildly different things. Your enjoyment is going to come down to how much you enjoy those arcs and how much they work for you as a collective, cohesive whole when it comes to this Unleashed Saga. If you’re someone who can handle individual arcs just fine and love them for what they are without them needing to be seen as a whole Saga then you should be good. Some can even do that while acknowledging that it might not work entirely well as a complete saga or admit that it’s gone on for too long. 

Still, this was a great start despite the misgivings behind some of the elements within the story. I’m excited for what’s to come next.

Sonic Universe - Issue #59: Shadow Fall - Part 1 of 4: Into the Unknown

The title “Into the Unknown” unfortunately has a different connotation today thanks to Disney. The song that’s not as good as “Show Yourself” in a movie that leaves your head shockingly fast after watching it has a far different tone than what this story is going for. 

I think the thing I remember the most about Shadow Fall was how I recall it being an arc that was mostly about having conversations… but when the conversations stopped it turned into a very dark and harsh story at the end. It gave rise to a character that I believe, personally, was the biggest shame to lose out of the ones we got with this new continuity’s abrupt end. There’s already so much to talk and think about regarding what happens here and what the implications are but I’ll save it for when we get into the thick of it all.

Spoiler

Variant Edition

There’s a style to this cover so I definitely want to give it that but… it’s just not my kind of thing, personally. It’s fine. 

Honestly, the main cover for this arc feels a tad off to me. Kind of like that Tracy Yardley variant of the cover for #256 where Sonic was jumping at the reader. That one has Shadow jumping at the reader but in space… and also they’re opposite one another. 

Oh my GOOOOOOOD! 

While Sonic’s jumping at the screen from the ruined world we zoom out and see Shadow floating in space with the ruined world below him! It’s perfect!

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Jamal Peppers
Inks: Jim Amash
Colors: Matt Herms
Letters: J. Morelli
Cover by Yardley! & Downer
Variant Cover by T-Rex 

The Black Arms are BACK… and in comic form baby!

The arc begins rather quickly and gets straight to the point. Team Dark is on a mission with the Spider Troupe from G.U.N to dock onto a new Black Comet passing by the Earth’s atmosphere and murder all the aliens inside.

The man in charge of the mission makes it clear that there is to be no negotiation. When they dock they are to burst in and fucking murder them.

There is no talk of making peace. In fact it cuts to Omega chanting “Dock, dock, dock” over and over again. He’s excited.

It’s very interesting seeing things like this play out from the other side. This is the kind of thing you want to utilize Team Dark for. Sonic wouldn’t be the best person to go on a mission where the point was to kill everyone but Team Dark kind of function like the Suicide Squad for G.U.N. 

So when they drill into the comet, they just go for it.

Rouge is a bit nicer on that front than Shadow and Omega but she also doesn’t REALLY have a problem with it. The most she does here is fly around and avoid getting hit, which is fine. It’s useful for disorientation and other stuff.

Also, despite these things being vaguely human-shaped, they’re monstrous enough to depict killing just fine.

There’s usually a fine line in fiction, especially when it comes to children’s media, where the less human looking a creature is the more okay with watching our heroes kill them the censors are.

That said, it does break down a bit when you stop and think about what it is that’s actually going on. No matter what they look like, this is still genuine murder and it’s pretty intense. 

Like, there’s actually a scene where Shadow grabs one of the swords from one of the aliens and literally stabs him in the back with it.

Then he falls over.

DEAD.

HE’S DEAD.

This is Team Dark. Of course, not all enemies are going to function like this. You’d need more vaguely monstrous, vaguely human-shaped beings to fight in order to get away with more stuff like this but that’s fine. It just means we need more villains. 

Despite them being here to save the world or whatever, it IS a little funny when Spider Soldier Man #2950 rolls up with his super special awesome gun cannon and talks about how great it is at murder.

Then Shadow rubs it down like he’s being mesmerized by the idea of so much potential death.

Either that or he’s contemplating his role in all this. That might be the better way to talk about this.

We cut to a flashback of Commander Oliver Gardener giving his speech to everyone about how they’ve got soldiers working on Operation: Triage to deal with the shattering of the planet… but also, at the same time, a SECOND Black Comet has come over the horizon right the hell NOW and threatens to also destroy the planet.

Either this was a case of insanely good timing on their part or the universe is doing its best to make sure the Archie Comics stay as dead as possible. It will eventually succeed but these characters will keep on pushing for a good long while yet.

The reveal of a second Black Comet shocks Shadow and Rouge. The Black Comet having a sequel was not something they signed off on.

The Commander asks Shadow what he knows about them that he could fill us in on and we get this hilarious panel.

He’s half-way towards doing the Soul Eater cringe face. I also love the way everyone is staring at him. Especially the guy on the far left. 

He’s just like, “OoooooooOOOOOO~!”

Shadow breaks it down for them though. He basically says that Black Doom talked a lot but not about any other colonies. Most of it was stuff about the invasion or how great the soldiers he had with him were.

I gotta be honest, so far, something about reading this arc is getting my creative juices flowing. Either that or it’s heightening my desire to go back and play through an assortment of Sonic games. 

I don’t know why but it might have something to do with the time I was most immersed within the world and story of the Sonic series being in the early 2000s and this game is quite a huge part of that, despite how bad it is. Like, the atmosphere of that game was something that hit me especially hard and I remember finding it super easy to drink in what was happening to the world and how many characters there were and how many different factions were trying to accomplish their own things.

It’s like the opposite way Forces handled their war. Despite having two other playable characters, Forces felt so barren and empty in comparison to Shadow the Hedgehog. We weren’t saving the world. We were running through one city on fire with the rest of the locations either being old ground but sand or old ground but icey… or old ground but… more chrome. 

It feels good. I like this feeling. I wish I could feel this again but with a better game to go along with it. A better script would be nice too. “The Black Aliens will feel their own bloody hell” is definitely a memorable line but not quite one I feel is all that good, if you catch my drift.

Also not helping is how badly localized that game was. The President saying that Professor Gerald saved them all when in the Japanese version he was clearly talking about Shadow is quite the big OOF. 

Anyway, the meeting is over. The Commander calls over Rouge and Omega to tell them something in private. 

Back in the present, Shadow talks with Rouge about how his loose connection with the Black Arms means he can FEEL what they’re feeling in a way and sense where they are. That sounds creepy so Rouge appropriately tells him not to let his thoughts run too deep with them.

Then Mr. Isn’t-My-Big-Overcompensating-Cannon-Supercool Soldier says that they’re going to transport the nuke that they brought with them to blow up the comet while “Tower’s Pet Freaks” take the point. 

At first I didn’t know what he meant but then I realized he was talking about Team Dark.

Ah. So we have an Anthro-Racist here.

I guess that’s typical for what is essentially law enforcement. 

Anyway, they’re being watched by Death’s Eye.

Not Doom’s Eye. The guy in charge of this comet is named Black Death.

That’s right! Shadow’s got a little brother! He’s so cute! He’s got like… 50 birthdays he needs to catch up with him on.

As for Black Death, his design isn’t as cool or as menacing as Black Doom’s, certainly. I think it might honestly be the eyes. Those beady, cartoonish eyes remind me more of Winnie the Pooh than Sonic the Hedgehog. 

Oh great. Now he sounds like Winnie the Pooh in my head. Make it stop!

Despite his design not being as good, I actually think Black Death is a better name than Black Doom. Like, the Black Death was an actual plague that actually happened and it somehow feels a lot less awkward than Black Doom.

Anyway, the progression reaches a big, spiral… area? Staircase? The soldiers are just as confused about the layout of this place as I am. Thankfully, Mr. My-Cock-Is-Totally-As-Big-As-This-Gun-You-Guys is here to grace us with his adult commentary.

A delicate mission like this is the perfect place to be a space racist. 

This is like how the Hidden Leaf Village trapped a scary, destructive monster inside the belly of a child and proceeded to treat said child like absolute fucking shit. It’s the behavior of someone who either wants to die or is too stupid to realize that’s what they’re asking for.

Shadow has a bit of a brain aneurysm when he puts his hand on the walls of the comet. He’s okay though. He was just checking in with the alien hive-mind for directions. It’s like Google Maps but even more evil.

He then turns to Omega and asks if he ever had any doubts about turning on his own kind when he became a force for good. Calling Omega a “force for good” isn’t totally accurate but I guess in the reboot it’s… still technically true. That dumb “Gamma is my soul” plot point isn’t around anymore but whatever.

Basically, Omega says he’s content. He was built to destroy and so that’s what he does. He loves it. When he asks Shadow why he asked him this, Shadow says nevermind.

It’s interesting. I don’t recall Shadow having doubts about killing these guys back when I first read this. Probably because all I remember was his speech towards the end about why he had to kill them… and then the murder that followed but we’ll get to that. It’s all very intense.

Shadow leads them to a room where that goopy transport slime that Shadow can travel upon from the video game is there. The Black Arms use it for transport and, according to Shadow, it can only be used if you’re a Black Arms person or someone who has their blood. Makes me wonder if you had a partner who was a Sonic character in that game, how they traversed the level with you when you went inside of it there.

Maybe Sonic or Knuckles just grinded on the goop to follow Shadow? I dunno.

Rouge says that this is a bad idea but Shadow says he’ll be fine since he’s only scouting.

He goes in and instantly regrets it when he comes out.

He sees a bunch of soldiers just there and they all bumrush Shadow. Oops.

Back with the Spider Squad or whatever, the door closes behind them and they’re trapped inside. The big dicked Soldier is about ready to kill some stuff but even Omega tells the guy to calm his masculine tits and says that what’s actually happening is that gas is filling up the room.

One of them thinks they’re going to be poisoned but Rouge says it’s way worse than that.

Rouge’s “And Prom’s TOMORROW” face is great. It’s always weird seeing her eyes WIDE open to me. It never quite looks right.

Anyway, as for what she’s saying here, uh… yeah, actually. You know… this is actually WAY worse than being poisoned. 

It’s REALLY gruesome. Being paralyized sucks enough but being paralyized and then SLOWLY eaten by a bunch of larva sounds fucking monsterous. Can you imagine? Tails being there makes it worse too. Poor kid.

It’s even funnier to think about considering Shadow stomped on just the one that approached him and left the others to crowd around the heroes. Luckily, they managed to escape when the gas wore off.

Shadow is being overwhelmed by all the Black Arms soldiers. It seems like they almost succeed at taking him out because, for some reason, Shadow’s Chaos Control isn’t working.

Then he hears a voice off to the side and is approached by a dark reflection of himself. He’s Shadow’s brother and he introduces himself as the one who blocks out the light. Yes, he actually says that about himself.

This is Eclipse the Darkling. 

He’s quite the thespian. I like him already.

This was a very solid beginning. It’s doing a good job of eliciting the atmosphere of Shadow the Hedgehog while using the elements it introduced to its advantage. Granted, if you’re not a fan of the elements introduced by that game then you’re probably less likely to appreciate this. I’m not really a part of that crowd though. I typically try to embrace all elements of the series as best I can, within reason. With the Wisps it’s proven to be a lot harder because they keep being shoved down your throat as a gameplay element which is far more intrusive than if they were merely a story-telling element. The lore behind the Black Arms and what their presence ultimately does for the sake of the narrative just has more going for it to me. 

The only real hiccup, I feel, is how I wish the relationship with Gerald was a bit more subdued. I like the idea that supplementary material keeps stating that Shadow was created by Gerald Robotnik and never once mentions Black Doom. Not because I think Black Doom should be forgotten but because I feel his role in Shadow’s creation SHOULD ultimately be considered tertiary. Just have it be that Black Doom’s blood served as a strong, stable, powerful base and that’s it. 

Black Doom was Jesus, handing out his blood for those in need. 

Also, I like Eclipse. He’s very sympathetic. Honestly, he’s probably more sympathetic than he isn’t in my opinion.

 

Sonic Universe - Issue #60: Shadow Fall - Part 2 of 4: A Shadow in the Dark

We have a temporary return to the “Lying Cover” craze that was all the rage during the Iron Dominion Arc. The original version of this cover was actually supposed to be a bit more honest as Shadow’s pupils were gone, signifying that he was most likely under someone’s control. There are a couple of other things about this cover that don’t quite add up. For one, that G.U.N soldier isn’t even in the correct outfit for this mission. I also find it hard to buy Omega just being on his back like that, or at the very least, with so little damage on him. 

As a cover depicting something menacing happening though, it’s pretty good.

Spoiler

Alien Invasion Variant

This is also a pretty good looking cover. It’s a very different kind of cover, that’s for damn sure. I especially like the way the lights are strung about on the page. Most of them are coming from the aliens’ eyes but they’re also coming from Omega’s guns too. The, sort of, stiff motion Rouge is making with her punch throws me off just a tad but that’s whatever. Also, it’s very bold of them to have a cover with no Shadow on it. I like it.

—

Writer: Ian Flynn
Pencils: Jamal Peppers
Inks: Jim Amash
Colors: Matt Herms
Letters: Jack Morelli
Cover by Tracy Yardley!, Jim Amash, and Matt Herms
Variant Cover by Vincent Riley

Black Death is a happy boy. The soldiers are trapped in a room with their bomb and his champion, Eclipse, is about to handle Shadow the Traitor. Always bet on black.

The soldiers put on their VR headsets to ward off the gas. They’re all not worried at all now because they were hiding the fact that they had these on. 

It’s strange since Rouge’s reaction was so intense at the end of the last issue but at the start of this one she’s all–

Was she faking it for the camera? Doesn’t seem like it considering her dialogue here. She’s acting like they should have had these on from the start. So, I guess she was genuinely scared of the gas for a bit..? Even though she had this thing on…? 

I don’t know.

Either way, Black Death just sighs. He tells Death’s Eye to stay with them while he goes to make sure Eclipse gets the job done. He’s afraid Eclipse still has his sights set on “converting” Shadow rather than killing him.

Eclipse just wants a brother though. 

Shadow tries to do Chaos Control in front of Eclipse and he can’t. He acts like this is a surprise to him even though he did the same thing last issue. This issue and the last one are starting to feel a bit like they aren’t aware of the other’s existence.

Inside the death trap with all the soldiers, the burrowing aliens with missile lasers in their mouths burst from the ground and surround them.

I don’t remember these creatures having eyeballs on them but the more I look at the variety of alien enemies there were in that game the more I realize how much stuff was put into it. 

The rough edges on these alien creatures really do make them look creepy and otherworldly. The Wisps look like the kind of aliens that would probably already exist on Sonic’s planet, which is probably part of why they fit in so well. I, for one, don’t mind creatures from another planet having a different design aesthetic. It makes sense to me.

 Especially when the point is to elicit a sense of menace or to catch you off guard with them clashing a bit. It feels off but I like that. At least, if the point is to invade. The Wisps are all friendly and stuff so the point behind them isn’t necessarily meant to make you feel off or any kind of menace. Having them be closer to a more familiar Sonic style is okay in that sense.

Some would argue it’s never okay and, hey, to each his own.

Major A-Hole has everyone escape from the room. Rouge tries to demand they wait for Shadow but Admiral Alpha Male says no and tries to spin it as though Shadow abandoned them. Rouge has to remind him that he was scouting ahead and the reason he isn’t back might be because he was ambushed.

She’s spot on of course.

However, she’s told not to worry about it. They continue on without Shadow. Omega offering comfort with the words of reminder that Shadow is almost as strong as he is doesn’t do much to quell her nerves but she goes along with it for now.

Meanwhile, Shadow asks Eclipse why he can’t use Chaos Control. Eclipse says they’re related by blood and that the ability to use Chaos Control is in their veins. Apparently, that includes the ability to stop Shadow from doing it.

He puts a hand on Shadow’s head and feeds him his backstory.

There he is, sticking his hand out of his pod like the hand to God painting.

Anyway, the concept of a hive mind has always been kind of scary but can you imagine how it must feel suddenly feeling the connection to the main leader of your race just dying while you were off somewhere else. The dude is clutching his heart as he’s reeling from Black Doom’s death.

Seeing Devil Doom in this image with so much less detail will always feel a bit odd to me but, to be fair, it’s hard translating the Black Arms into these comics using the usual style Jamal Peppers would employ. I’d say it’d be tough for any of the usual suspects. 

That’s part of how literally alien they are in their design though. 

Eclipse continues by explaining that Black Death commands the Black Arms in Black Doom’s stead now and they’re all connected to his hive mind. Eclipse is the exception though. He functions like Shadow did in that he can think and feel for himself and is thus trying to go for the approach where he recruits Shadow. He feels a kinship with him because they’re the same. Two ultimate lifeforms made under different umbrellas. 

They share the same blood but the influence Shadow had was under humans. Eclipse was under the Black Arms. Despite that, he wants to be brothers with him.

He’s not able to do it all the way though. Shadow is resisting so Black Death has to step in to help.

For some reason, Death’s Eye looks super-duper detailed though. Now that’s giving me regular Shadow the Hedgehog video-game vibes. It’s great.

Eclipse and Black Death double team him with mind control vibes and evil platitudes. Eclipse even brings up the futility of protecting the people he’s connected with now because his immortal self will render it so that he’ll outlive them all anyway. 

None of this gets through properly. It just serves to make Shadow really dizzy. Black Death is tired of this shit and tells Eclipse to end him. Eclipse pleads with Black Death to let him keep going.

Shadow lunges at Eclipse and says that if Eclipse was built to destroy him then he’ll just destroy him first. Eclipse says that destroying Shadow would be the easier option (and he’s right). The route he wants is rooted in more sentimental value. 

Black Death says he’s got one last chance and then does the mind control thing again.

It finally manages to work.

Of course, it took… MANY pages in order for us to finally reach this point. Including one two-page spread with all the characters in Shadow’s life on it, that was about seven pages of straight dialogue and attempts to get Shadow to come to the dark side where they have the best cookies.

Despite time management being a bit off, what was being attempted on a character writing level for Eclipse is the thing that makes this interesting to me.

Eclipse letting Shadow live will turn out to only be something that’ll benefit Shadow in the long run and that’s the long and short of it. Eclipse will come to regret his decision and fall on the side of Black Death at a point where it’ll be too late for his master at least.

The character arc he’s going to go on will land me in the pile that sees Eclipse as more sympathetic than villainous for a multitude of reasons. A lot of what drives him now is all stuff that’s based on pure emotion. He’s not a part of the hive mind and thus can think, feel, and act for himself but that just makes it so that his actions are a little more nuanced. He still cares for the Black Arms and for his master despite his special privileges.

It really is the better of the two ideas Ian had.

Oh yeah. I forgot to talk about this but the original idea for this arc wasn’t to create Eclipse or Black Death. No, the original plan was to (somehow) resurrect Black Doom and have him create Mephiles and the two would team up to be a revenge duo against Shadow. Like Jafar and Hades from that one episode of the Hercules cartoon.

That idea was rejected. Just hearing it as a premise sounds so… Disney Afternoon. It’s a very goofy idea. Ian Flynn has talked about this a number of times and it still stands as a pretty pure example of how SEGA’s rules can give Ian a challenge to work with so that he can craft something better than what he was originally going to go with.

Resurrecting Black Doom would have undone the victory Shadow had at the end of his game. Having this story instead be about the dregs of the Black Arms trying to get their revenge on the one who felled their leader and using this chance to have them create a completely original “Ultimate Lifeform: Black Arms Edition” just works better as a concept and as an actual continuation of the story.

Not all the Saiyans were on Planet Vegeta when it exploded. It’s plausible that not all the Black Arms were on the Black Comet when IT exploded. 

SEGA’s reasoning for rejecting the idea wasn’t all that though. It was just a blanket “They’re dead. You can’t use them”.

Which… fair enough. Honestly.

LIke… I can maybe see that being a bit odd if the point was to tell a comic version of those stories but it’s not. This is a continuation and using characters that are dead to tell a continuation of an old story sets a bit of a bad precedent regarding death.

Namely, that it can be cured.

Shadow’s the big go to example for that, obviously… but he’s also kind of the only example.

Every other dead character in the series, whether it be Tikal, her shitty father, Maria, Gerald, Black Doom, Mephiles, Gamma, or even non-canon characters like Cosmo… are still dead.

Tikal is a bit of a weird one because she’s a ghost but this series totally has ghosts in it. They haunt Pumpkin Hill, Hang Castle, and that one mansion from Sonic Unleashed so…

Yeah. Shadow may be the biggest example of someone “dying” and coming back but he’s kind of the exception that proves the rule. This series aped a lot from Dragon Ball but the one thing it thankfully didn’t inherit is it’s manner of rendering death meaningless by constantly bringing people back to life.

Even in Sonic 06, when Sonic “died”, it was explained away as “I can sense Sonic’s presence in the wind. I don’t think he’s dead yet”.

Although we still say he died because it’s more bombastic and kind of more alarming (and funnier) that way.

One of the G.U.N soldiers, Lodge, is pretty fed up now. They’ve been walking around in this confusing area for who knows how fucking long now and they want to just set the bomb and blow the place up. Andrews, for once not being a prick, says that’s a negative. He wants to do the mission correctly or not at all, lest they risk making things worse for the crumbling planet below them.

Rouge comments on how she still hasn’t gotten any word from Shadow. She figures he’s either been captured or brooding and she hopes it’s the former because if it’s the latter, she says she’ll kill him herself.

Andrews then asks Omega where they’re going next and they talk some more about not knowing where to go and eventually settle on picking a random direction. Then, finally, Shadow and the horde of aliens arrive.

They quickly realize that Shadow and the aliens’ little recreation of that scene in the first Pokemon movie where Ash and the freed Pokemon walk out of the shadows is for real. 

Andrews isn’t surprised because of course he isn’t.

I also love how Eclipse is talking to Shadow like they’re having a drink by the water cooler or something.

Or like they’re on the couch playing a video game together and having a conversation. 

It’s super adorable. He just wants a brother, guys.

Rouge tells Andrews to get the squad out of there so that they can deal with the alien horde. He doesn’t argue and leaves Rouge and Omega to fend off the mind controlled Shadow.

Eclipse heads after them and leaves Shadow, his brother, to handle his former teammates.

This cliffhanger definitely wasn’t as nail biting or as interesting as it thought it was back then and re-reading it… it’s still not that great. You can already see where this is going as far as the mind-control subplot here.

They don’t veer too far off from the cliche from both how it happens to how it’s resolved.

The best part about this issue was just witnessing Eclipse’s behavior and analyzing it. He’s a very good character and I reiterate that it’ll be a crying shame to not see his full potential for character development reach its zenith. The entire rest of the issue is honestly a step down from the first one. My memories of this arc have me feeling as though there was a lot of meandering in the middle of it. The big stuff that this arc has going for it, I recall, happens at the end.

This issue felt more like it was trying its damndest to fill up the amount of pages it had. With seven pages of the villains trying to mind-control Shadow and the rest of it being the soldiers all angry about how lost and confused they are, it didn’t quite feel as fulfilling as it could have been. Granted, some interesting stuff arose from those conversations too. Plus, having it take so much to get Shadow under their control does help sell how powerful Shadow is and how much of a struggle it would take for this to even work. On that end I feel it’s probably worth more than writing it off as unnecessary. It definitely wasn’t boring or anything but when what it’s trying to accomplish is ultimately in service of a plot point this overdone it can be hard to give that a pass. 

 

[QZX343]

Considering the post-reboot of these comics was how I got into Sonic comics, this was nostalgic to me especially with the Shadow Fall arc, which is one of my favorite Sonic Universe arcs.

I remember not caring much for the Black Arms back then because I found them boring and dull, but after reading this arc I actually found them interesting, mostly due to Eclipse and Black Death, to a lesser extent.