2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At.
< Part 11
It’s time to get
wibbly-wobbly and timey-whimey with a six-part story-arc; we won’t see an arc
this long again until Shanazar, which is over 80 issues afterwards! (although I
guess you could argue The Final Victory is as long given it runs through
multiple strips for multiple fortnights but that’s just technicalities now
isn’t it?)
The Return of Chaotix (Sonic strip, issues 67-72)
Very Un-Quick Summary: The Miracle Planet has returned!
And walking on its chain is Porker Lewis, Sonic greets him but he seems off.
Not far away The Chaotix arrive via Omni-Viewer and take out some super
Troopers while Nigel Kitching writes like Lew Stringer. Sonic and Porker meet
up with them, turns out they’re here because they think the Brotherhood of
Metallix are, Sonic says no worries, he dealt with them, then Omni-Viewer drops
an illusion they’d put up and it turns out the whole Miracle Planet is now a
giant Metallix head – oops. While walking the chain Porker Lewis is revealed to
be a Metallix and it takes all five of the heroes to defeat it, the Link Rings
from Knuckles Chaotix delivering the final blow. On the planet proper they
arrive just too late, Porker is freed but the Metallix return from a trip in
time, now the whole of Mobius is robotosized into Planet Metallix! Sonic wants to stay and fight but then
instantly changes his mind and they flee via Omni-Viewer to the planet below, but
Emperor Metallix is right, they have nowhere to run to. Fleeing some more, this
time from Metallix they listen to Charmy (fucking idiots) and end up in a dead
end, ready to fight until the last they are instead saved by cloaked
individuals who then blow the Metallix up, so cool, the cloaked leader of the
clocked individuals removes his cloak to reveal…Dr Ovi Kintobor!?! Vector has a
plan though, you can trace someone moving through time, it leaves a trail, and
Omni-Viewer can follow it, s they do that, but the Metallix aren’t stupid and
have the trail guarded, Sonic uses a device Kintobor gave him as he left and it
turns a Metallix against the others, just as they get back into the Omni-Viewer
Sonic finds a rotten egg in the hand of one of the now destroyed Metalixes and
brings it along, feeling it should mean something to him. The trail leads to
the day Sonic first became blue, Charmy calls Brown Sonic a weirdo, I lol’d.
As they watch Sonic’s transformation the blue blur
remembers the significance of the egg – it was the egg that combined with the
ROCC explosion ot make Robotnik! Sonic puts in it back in Kintobor’s fridge,
Might think he’s gone mad and is unimpressed with the anti-climax, moving 24
hours into the future Sonic makes sure Kintobor becomes Robotnik and trips the
kindly old doc – yes, Sonic has just had to create his nemesis to save the
world. It worked, and back in the present Sonic has Omni take them to Dr
Robtonik, who doesn’t believe a word of it. Porker has a plot hole he’s found –
if the Metal Sonics were built by Robotnik, home come erasing him didn’t erase
them? Turns out Grimer actually designed and built them, Eggman just made the
self-destruct sequence. Wait, what self destuct sequence? You mean he could
have self-destructed them without sending Sonic last story? yep, he was just
hoping they’d kill the azure rodent the he’d use the programme. Then the
Metallix descend o n the Metropolis Zone, so many of them they blot out the
sun! as the Chaotix and Sonic fight in vain, Eggman scrambles to find his
self-destruct remote, he’s just to slow and Empeoror Metallix grabs him she
grabs it; Sonic is rarely ‘just to slow’ though and thieves the device from the
emperor just before he crushes it, using the battered box to win the day. He
lampshades the anti-climactic nature of the win then just fucking leaves,
leaving Eggman to pull himself together and Grimer to show the dictator his new
Knuckles-based Metallix design.
Fuck me that’s a long story
to summarise, with so much happening just making it worse – and that’s two of
Return’s biggest strengths: it’s pacing and its plot. It’s very well paced, so much happens yet nothing feels rushed and
enough page space is given to each event …. with two small exceptions: Kintobor
giving Sonic the Anti-Metallix device (he just goes ‘oh, here, have this’) and
Sonic just changing his mind on the Miracle Planet, I think the latter is
supposed to be comical though and Elson just fucked up and made it look
serious. The plot is fantastic, it’s quite a simple alternate timeline, the bad
guy is the good guy for want of a nail, but ‘Want of a Nail’ stories can be
quite hard to do, when done right they should be time-travelling equivalents of
a detective story with the metaphorical ‘nail’ making as much sense as the
eventual reveal of ‘whodunnit’ (whochangedit?) with bonus points if, in a story
like this where the characters are undoing the changes, the reader can work out
the answer before the characters. Now this is a kids comic so it isn’t going to
be as complicated a set of clues as your average CSI (or even your average game
of Cluedo) but Return wholly succeeds, as a long term reader and Sonic fan I am
shocked by the reveal but comforted that it makes logical sense and chuffed I
worked it out, and it succeeds with the right amount of dramaticness (that IS a
real word).
Speaking of dramaticness
(and my second clunky segue in two paragraphs) this story wouldn’t be half as
good without Richard Elson; I know I praise him constantly but in he is
essential here. There are a number of panels dotted around with some really
dodgy dialogue, all of which can be summarised as ‘I must do this action
because of this obvious motivation’, in fact Kitching’s usually snappy dialogue
seems to be failing him a lot in the early few parts, especially in parts 1
& 2, but there is so much to like story-wise the odd panel of shitty
dialogue becomes forgivable within one or two parts and Elson, Elson turns in
such dynamic pages that it covers up for the odd slip-up on Kitching’s part, without
them panels like this:
Would inspire eye-rolling
not ‘wow, they just punched a robot off of a giant chain!’
The Metallix are defeated
quite anti-climatically again but this time it’s given a proper build and
aftermath, I don’t think we’ve heard of the self-destruct sequence before in
relation to the Metallix but we’ve seen that Eggman does put self-destruct
style mechanisms in his projects before (notably, the Cybernik) so it doesn’t
come quite out of nowhere, and instead of just pressing the button, Robotnik
has to find it, then it almost gets destroyed, then Sonic gets it and uses it,
then the Metallix’s shut down is drawn very dramatically, then Sonic hangs a
lampshade on the solution being anti-climactic for good measure, so while it’s
no better than the previous two Metallix defeats it feels more satisfying (Total
Chaotix only getting away with things because they didn’t actually defeat the
Brotherhood). Unlike the last part of the trilogy the Metallix are also shown
to live up to their hype; they’re still built up as terrifying threats but when
engaged in combat, either alone or in groups, they are consistently hard to
defeat, it takes one of their own to defeat a whole group of them and the
Chaotix weren’t doing that great when the self-destruct button was pressed,
despite having Espio and Mighty, respectively a character who can spin and go
invisible and possibly the strongest thing alive.
Anyway Return of Chaotix is
slightly annoying in its placement; it starts mid-way through two other Sonic’s
world’s strips and ends alongside another completely different set. And three
of those stories are very important to the overall narrative of the comic. So
I’m just going to finish this one up here as a ‘shorty’ and then do all the
back-ups next part, starting with
the ones I didn’t do in part 11, good? Good (yeah I know you can’t technically
argue back, but I want to feel gracious).
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