Also noteworthy: the body of water southwest of the Emerald Sea appears to be what's left of the Mediterranean, the Amazon River appears to have bisected South America, and the Japanese archipelago looks like it's being swallowed up between Africa andChina.

That's the end of the geography lesson, now back to our story. The following morning Sally starts delegating authority. After sending Sonic and Tails out on reconnaissance, she discovers that Geoffrey is AWOL. As it turns out, he's gone behind her back. He and his security minions have secured the "armory" and are reporting this development to...King Acorn who appears to be in isolation back in Knothole and who begins a rant about "the enemy within", specifically Sonic's Uncle Chuck. Methinks the monarch is starting to grow crystals in his cranium.

And what ABOUT Uncle Chuck, who seems to have made himself scarce? He's making his way underground where he relays news of Robotnik's defeat to...

OK, here's another memory from the Motor City Comic Con. At one point, Ken handed me a page that he was inking. There's been some rearrangement of the page elements since then, but I recognize the third panel from page 19 as being on that page; it was also only half-inked, and not all the dialogue balloons were in place. I wasn't sure of the significance of it all as I handed it back to Ken who said: "Congratulations. You're the first one to get a look at Sonic's parents." Try sitting on THAT piece of news for six months! Come to think of it, that's about how long it's been since the angle of "What happened to Sonic's Dad?" was quickly raised in #46 and dropped just as quickly. Anyway, Uncle Chuck then brings in the second half of the good news-bad news routine: it doesn't look like it will be possible to deroboticize anybody. And considering the way that the deroboticizing angle has been so badly mishandled in the past in stories such as "Steel-Belted Sally" (#29), "The Day Robotropolis Fell" (#27) and "Mecha Madness", perhaps it's just as well.

Meanwhile. Sonic and Tails have come across some SWATbots who appear to be on auto-pilot. While checking things out, Tails make reference to a story element from "The Return" (#22)...a story set in a future Mobius where Sonic and Sally are married with children and which has since been sort of renounced as being only one future scenario among many. But it's still a scenario that Tails could have no way of knowing anything about. In any event, we don't linger on this major continuity gap as the SWATbot angle itself disappears down the loose continuity hole while Sonic and Tails respond to a call for help. Seems as if Arlo Aardvark has managed to get trapped under some debris. He's in such a bad way that he gives an inappropriate response to Sonic's feeding him a straight line; the routine is supposed to go: "Does it hurt?" "Only when I laugh." Penelope Platypus is no help -- she's too busy trying out that hand-waving thing Freddy suggested thirteen pages back. Sonic can't cut through the concrete by spin-dashing it, so it's time for...a Deus Ex Machina! In this case, his name is Rudyard and he's a roboticized Mobian who frees Arlo.

Quick break for the Fan Art page: Carrol Scheeweiss submits an anime-style Tails, Danielle Hardy sends in more anime-inspired art, Erin Middendorrf submits a fan art envelope showing Knuckles and Sally beneath the midnight sun, but the clear winner in the uniqueness category is Jeff Streets' Lego(tm) Sonic.

Back to the action: turns out Rudyard is the vanguard of a group of roboticized Mobians being led by Uncle Chuck, including Sonic's parents. Sonic does NOT take this news well; honked off at Uncle Chuck for not telling him, he does what he does best and runs away. Tails follows after. This reaction turns out to be a foretaste of what's to come; while Sally is ready to welcome Uncle Chuck and the others with open arms, at least one other member of the B Team has doubts. It's pretty hard to find anything like a Kodak moment here.

Outside the city limits, Tails listens as Sonic vents. Tails then tries talking to Sonic in dialogue that...well, there's something seriously OFF about it. It makes sense but begs for a rewrite. And left unspoken is the account of HOW Sonic's folks got that way. Uncle Chuck or Sonic's 'rents themselves will have to fill in that blank one of these issues. "Later that evening" (it says here), Sally is thinking seriously of abandoning the site and making a fresh start somewhere else. Nicole hints at "unexplored options" but further discussion of urban renewal also slips down the loose continuity hole as we take about 4 pages to have a go at the Sonic-Sally- Geoffrey jealousy bit. Geoffrey tells Sally if she's looking for a friend, "I'm just your MATE!" Uh, are you using "mate" as a noun or a verb, Geoff? Sally replies with the old "let's just be friends" line, indicating that she knows how she feels about Sonic but wants to know where the blue bachelor stands. Sonic arrives and decks Geoffrey, which starts a full-scale fight. The male bonding gets so intense that Sally has to get Bunnie and Antoine to literally hose them down. Unlike "The Quiet Man" where John Wayne and this other guy punch each other out all over this quaint backlot Irish village and at the end of it all become best buds, the fight settles nothing between Geoffrey and Sonic who exchange insincerities.

The pup tents on page 14 have grown up and turned into wall tents on page 35--must've installed an upgrade during the day. Using Nicole as a communicator, Sally chats with her father and reveals that she's been acting on his orders. That's OK, since he's still the legitimate ruler; the fact that he wants this kept secret from everyone else disturbs Sally and leaves a bad taste in MY mouth, too. There's a saying in 12-step groups that "You're only as sick as your secrets." Considering all the levels of secrecy at work (Geoffrey, Sally, the King, Uncle Chuck), cleaning up after Robotnik may be the LEAST of their problems. When Sally asks Nicole for an independent analysis she's basically told: "Deal with it." So she's come home to find the city a shambles, the populace divided, her love life nonexistent, and her father acting irrationally. Sort of like Scarlett O'Hara having returned to Tara from Atlanta in "Gone With The Wind" except that Sally lacks Scarlett's terminal bitchiness. I don't blame her for crying herself to sleep. If you don't want to crawl into that bottom panel and give that girl a hug, check your pulse!

And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse for Sally, she wakes up to discover that the roboticized Mobians have decided to separate themselves and start their own colony because they feel they no longer belong. Sally's plea that they remain united because "You're our fathers and mothers, our family and friends" falls on deaf ears...or deactivated sensors, as the case may be. Bunnie, symbolically enough, finds herself standing between the robotic and biological factions; she may have a future in the diplomatic service as an ombudsbunny. So here's where things stand: Sonic is upset at his Uncle Chuck, doesn't appear to be able to relate to his parents, and has a continuing grudge against Geoffrey, while Sally is having to cope with more problems than she ever had to face as a high school revolutionary. The roboticized Mobians feel alienated, and the King is manipulating both Geoffrey and his own daughter. Seems like the only Mobian who's having a good time at this point is Rotor, who's just got the airport computer back online so we can watch a transport ship leave the city for its weekly run to the Devil's Gulag. Great: the entire city is a dump and the infrastructure is a shambles but the prison system is still functioning--that's what you get for voting Republican. Don't ask me what that space-filling doodle is in the last panel on page 37; it looks like something from a Franz Kline abstract expressionist painting. Either that or Robotnik began roboticizing Mobians only after having tried crucifixion. There follows a one-page soliloquy by Snively, but does anyone in the reading audience really give a rat's rump about HIM?

Rating:

Now THIS is the level of emotional involvement that Endgame should have tried for and that somehow got lost in the "pursuit of Sonic" plotline. The story works and you get the feeling that these characters (or at least some of them) have something like a complex emotional life and that they're not just reading lines and going through the motions. These vistas have always been waiting to be opened up by the Archie staff. Unfortunately, due to circumstances quite beyond their control in some respects, Archie continues to hedge its bets and sabotage its best efforts.

Perhaps the most egregious example can be seen on page 29 in the bottom panel. As reported by Alessandro Sanasi in his review, Sonic looks...different...in that panel because on orders from Sega (which thought that the Sonic drawn by Ken Penders looked "too depressed"), Pat Spaziante redrew Sonic so that IMHO he simply looks tired. A short art history lesson: Michelangelo not only painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but did a fresco on the wall behind the altar depicting "The Last Judgment." Many years after its completion, Pope Paul V (in the name of "reforming Roman morals," according to one writer) had the nude figures in the fresco "draped" by having other artists come in and paint over the genitalia of the figures. Once again, Sega has played Pope Paul V to Ken Penders' Michelangelo. It appears that the Sonic characters can only show as much emotion as Sega's Vice President In Charge Of Making Sure That Sonic Acts Cool will allow.

And he has to show the RIGHT emotion. That means that Sally gets to have a good cry but Sonic can't. Whether it's being confronted with Sally's body or discovering that his real father is still alive and that his surrogate father (Uncle Chuck) has been lying to him for years, there are always going to be at least two dry eyes in the house. Sexist? Of course, it is! "Big boys don't cry" must be the in-house motto at Archie, where the likes of Archie, Reggie, Betty, and Veronica haven't exactly been positioned as icons of male sensitivity or feminism. Archie Comics may, by its very editorial nature, be incapable of dealing with emotions beyond the level on display here, and frankly we'd better just get used to that fact. You want anything more honest, I can recommend a lot of decent fanfic out there.

What Archie CAN do is throw fight scenes at us. While the business with the Dynamac was good if a little long, the latest Sonic-Geoffrey scrap demonstrates that this angle is not only tired but has gotten to be unintentionally funny. Geoffrey's overuse of the word "mate" fails to approximate an Aussie accent and begins to underscore its double meaning for a furry. But in THIS story Ken has pushed the accidental humor into new territory. Not only do you have the overuse of "mate" and Sonic's sarcastic use of "luv" in addressing Geoffrey, we also have Geoff yelling "Let's have a go...!" while Hershey describes the two of them as "going at it like crazed pumas." This reminds me of the phrase "going at it like crazed voles" as used in the "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" episode titled something like "Looking For Parmah In All The Wrong Places". When Antoine and Bunnie finally have to "hose them down", it would appear that the next plot twist Ken plans to spring on us is that Sonic and Geoffrey will admit that they're really gay lovers.

Ken has admitted online that thinking up names for the characters is one of the hardest parts of the job. That is the only explanation that will allow me to forgive him for the names foisted on Sonic's parents, "Jules" and "Bernie." Not only is this too close to "Jules" and "Verne" (the names of Doc Brown's two sons in "Back To The Future 3"), but I've NEVER heard "Bernie" used as a short form for "Berneice" (which I presume was the full name for Sonic's mom). And having seen them in sketch form at Motown, I have to say that they looked more impressive in pencil. Barry Grossman's coloring of the roboticized Mobians is too jarring. Maybe I'm just too used to the more muted spectrum used in the cartoon where roboticized Mobians were gray or silver or slate or gun metal blue.