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mobius-prime · 4 years

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234. Sonic the Hedgehog #166

DON'T. PANIC. I know. It's back. Don't worry too much though - it only lasts for two issues, so even if you detest this AU with all your heart and soul you only have to deal with it for a couple days. To be perfectly honest, I don't actually find the plot of this installment of Mobius 25 Years Later to be that much more interesting than the previous one. I find everyone to be a little too out of character, for one thing. However, it does at the very least provide a bit of closure to a story that was left wiiide open previously, so there's that.

Mobius 25 Years Later (Part One): Tempus Fugit

Writer: Ian Flynn Pencils: Tracy Yardley Colors: Jason Jensen

Last time on Mobius 25 Years Later, we left off with the timeline seeming to dissolve and rip itself apart while Sonic went back in time to fix the temporal and spatial instabilities of Mobius. Well, he fixed the threat of time coming to an end all right, but in the process somehow caused the timeline to skew wildly from how it was previously. In this new future, Shadow is a brutal and ruthless dictator, worship of Maria as an angelic guardian figure is officially sanctioned by his government, the Chaotix patrol the streets headed by King Shadow's chief enforcer Knuckles, and perhaps most bizarrely of all, Sally is married to Shadow as his queen. I have to note here that no explanation is given at all for how the timeline could have gotten messed up so badly - like, it doesn't really say anything about Sonic destabilizing specific events in the past, he just did something apparently, and stuff got messed up as a result. I'm personally not a fan at all of the idea of Shadow becoming so brutal like this, because it's just so out of character for who he's shown to become in the games (and in the comics coming up in a few issues), but at the very least there's the potential excuse of oh, well, this is a timeline where he didn't discover his true purpose in life and thus got led astray by darker influences or whatever. Regardless, things are very bad, and now Tails is on the scene, trying to figure out a way to fix it.

You see, he actually is able to remember the old timeline due to some kind of protective armband, and knows that this one isn't right. So he decides to go about recruiting some of his old allies to fix things, first starting with Knuckles. He walks in as Knuckles is instructing Lara-Su in her Guardian abilities, and Knuckles, once he realizes why Tails is here, ushers his daughter out grimly so they can talk alone. Tails tries to get Knuckles to listen to him, explaining that he took measures to protect himself, his wife Mina (remember? They got married in this timeline) and their kids from the time shift, and that he knows that everyone who was near the time machine when it freaked out still has memories of the other timeline. This merely pisses Knuckles off for some reason, and he yells at Tails to get out before he arrests him. Tails leaves the room dejectedly, but Lara-Su cheekily tries to cheer him up outside the door, clearly having overheard everything.

I already like this version of Lara-Su way better than the old one. The old one was weirdly whiny and selfish, while this one is immediately more assertive and ready to jump into action. As this is going on, we move to the dungeons beneath "Castle Mobius," where King Shadow is currently carrying out a rather… rough interrogation of Rotor, who's chained up to a wall. Shadow curtly acknowledges Rotor's strength of will in not "cracking" yet (it's not explained what information exactly he's trying to get out of him, but we can assume it relates to the timeline shift), and tells him he knows he will break eventually and leaves - and who is outside the cell to greet him but Lien-Da? She's apparently the one who captured Rotor for him, and she too remembers the old timeline, thanks to Cobar - we finally find out what she did when she confronted Rotor and Cobar back then!

Yeah, really don't like this version of Shadow. The juxtaposition of worshipping Maria as a gentle protective goddess, and Shadow's use of brutal torture tactics and authoritarianism is kind of… bizarre. A Legion mook runs up with information that Lara-Su has joined up with Tails, and Shadow orders Lien-Da to contact Knuckles to conduct an arrest of the two. Meanwhile, the two in question have managed to find Sonic, bedraggled and sitting next to a bunch of trash in a back alley, looking pretty awful. He, of course, is the same Sonic from the old timeline who went back to "fix" everything, and is horrified at how everything has turned out in this version of the future. It's once again worth noting that he sheds a few tears here, especially because this is around the time Sega started interfering more in the comics to make sure things were portrayed to their liking. There's a sketch version of the below page floating around somewhere showing Sonic crying substantially more than he is in the final product, which honestly, I don't know why Sega felt they had to force the artists to tone it back here, because I think if there's any circumstance where a normally cheerful and stoic person might truly lose it, it's losing their two children forever to the abyss of time.

Lara-Su urges the others to get up so they can go defeat King Shadow and save the day, but a sudden blinding light engulfs them. Sure enough, it's Knuckles, backed by what looks like half of Portal's police force, telling the three of them to surrender immediately as they're under arrest for treason…

The Chaotix Connection

Writer: R. Chacon and Ian Flynn Pencils: J. Axer Colors: Jason Jensen

This story is a bit bizarre - for one, it opens with a shot of Knuckles tied up and apparently coming to after being knocked out, only to immediately pull back a full day to show us what led up to this moment. That's a perfectly legitimate storytelling tactic, but it has to be done right for it to work, dammit, and the execution here is mostly just awkward and confusing. And for another, though someone is listed as the letterer for this story, very little of it is actually hand-lettered - the vast majority of it is machine-lettered. Seriously, out of the dozens and dozens of speech bubbles in this one story, which takes up half the issue's page span, only seven are hand-lettered (yes, I counted). I'm really not sure why this would be, nor why they bothered actually having someone letter only seven speech bubbles in the entire story when a computer was apparently doing that job perfectly well, but oh well. Anyway, here's the rundown - yesterday in Station Square, Rouge (sporting her Heroes getup) was snooping around for any juicy information when she got her hands on a nice little tidbit - namely, that Renfield T. Rodent is back. Remember him?

Aw, it's nice to see Sally and Sonic actually joking around with and teasing each other a bit. Things have been so frosty between them for so long, I forgot how nice it is to just see them being sweet and silly. The next day, Renfield's foreman oversees a delivery of slot machines to the new casino while Renfield himself watches from behind a screen, still sporting his capitalist tycoon grin and definitely seeming very shady as he talks to himself about putting on a grand show with this new scheme. The Chaotix and Rouge all arrive at the venue, and Rouge and Julie-Su nearly come to blows when Rouge insinuates that her only reason for coming is to show Knuckles that she's "gone legit." Knuckles breaks up the fight before it begins, and the group is let in early when they bluff to the guards that Renfield is expecting a meeting with them. They agree to split up and search for anything suspicious, checking in every few minutes to make sure none of them goes missing. Knuckles heads off on his own, and soon discovers an elevator that takes him to a secure room where the foreman is discussing the shipment with the help. When he hears Eggman's name mentioned, Knuckles knows this operation is rigged, so he leaps into action and begins to fight everyone present… alone. Seriously, man, couldn't have waited one whole minute to call in your backup? Speaking of the backup, Mighty in particular has decided it's prudent to check the food given what happened last time, while several of the others go for the slot machines as customers begin to file in.

Gotta love Mighty - no time to test anything scientifically, let's just shove potentially poisoned food into our mouths and see if we pass out! Knuckles, upstairs, finishes punching out the mooks and goes for the foreman, but when his fist makes a clanging noise against his nose he realizes that he's one of Eggman's auto-automatons. Things only get worse when said auto-automaton punches back, knocking him clean out. While the foreman ties him up and calls Renfield, Rouge, Vector, and Espio all check the slots, noticing that people seem to be acting weird while playing them. Sure enough, one glance at a screen later, the three of them are hypnotized as well. Knuckles wakes up with Renfield gloating over him, and naturally the rat immediately launches into a villainous monologue about how Eggman is paying him to use his fake slot machines to scan the brains of the patrons, allowing him to turn that data into a blueprint for what basically amounts to a Terminator. In fact, the whole casino is built on top of a factory that will start spitting out robots the moment the scans upload! Suddenly, the writers realize in horror that they only have two more pages to wrap this plot up, and so they go into overdrive figuring out a way to solve it in this limited amount of space.

I love the idea that Mighty just casually crunched up a whole factory and carried it around with him just to prove a point here. The police show up out of nowhere to arrest a fuming Renfield, and Julie-Su and Mighty explain that they knew something was wrong when Knuckles didn't check in, and even more hilariously, apparently on their way up here they just randomly passed the factory and Mighty was like "Yo, that doesn't fit the décor," hence him crunching it up. The president pops in out of the ether to congratulate the Chaotix on a job well done, and as Julie-Su and Rouge bicker some more, the curtain falls on one of the weirdest and most out of place stories we've experienced in some time. Bravo, Romy and Ian, we've officially learned that when you two collaborate, crap gets bizarre!

#nala reads archie sonic preboot #archie sonic #archie sonic preboot #sonic the hedgehog #sth 166 #writer: ian flynn #writer: romy chacon #pencils: tracy yardley #pencils: jeff axer #colors: jason jensen

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