ARCHIESONIC 101, MODULE 2: AN ONGOING NARRATIVE? IN MY SONIC COMICS?
PRINCESS SALLY MINI SERIES #3
TIMELINE: 3235 (1 YEAR AFTER SONIC #1)
Welcome back to ArchieSonic 101, where there seem to be multiple princesses running around! I have a lot to say about this final issue and the mini series as a whole, so take your seats and let’s get started!
I have no idea where the jetpack on this cover came from, because it’s certainly not featured in the issue. I kinda wish it was though, jetpacks are cool. Could you imagine Spider-Man fighting another Spider-Man that had a jetpack? That’d be neat.
…anyway! Let’s take a look at this issue and see how the mini series ends, shall we?
This is a weird splash page. Penelope and Arlo (who has eaten ALL the weed) are back from the dead, Sally and Geoffrey are having a very awkward staring contest, and Robotnik is practicing his dance moves.
I'm not even going to bother showing the next page this time, because once again it is nothing more than a giant, completely unnecessary wall of text. It's just a bunch of blah-blah-blah-ing about Sally's leadership.
Aaaaand since I'm brushing up against the Tumblr image limitations with this issue, I'm skip the recap page too. You know where we are - our heroes are walking right into a trap. Hooray!
I'm breaking this one out early for this issue, I guess...
Hamlin says, "Oh, put a socket in it, you rusty old bucket of bolts! We gave at the office!" Ignoring the use of socket instead of sock, as I assume that's meant as a robot pun... gave what at the office? What office? What does this even mean?
According to my Google-Fu, this was something people used to say when they were being harassed by charities for money. So I guess this is boomer-speak for, “Get lost, I’m busy”? Maybe? Possibly?
Also, for a mission of this importance could Sally and co really not find any better ammunition to use than paintballs?
Wait, wait, wait. Hold on a minute here. Is it seriously just the three of them attacking Robotropolis right now?! What happened to this being a coordinated attack between all the Freedom Fighters? Let’s have another look at what Sally said about this plan back in issue 1:
But here in issue 3 there’s been no mention of the other Freedom Fighters or the other substations they were supposedly attacking. It seems like in this issue it was just those three stations that needed to be taken out, and Sally’s team were doing everything by themselves. This is a really terrible idea - as Dylan said, trying to invade the enemy base with half of their team missing is just plain nuts. But assuming that they succeeded here and managed to defeat Robotnik, don’t you think Sonic would be a little salty that they took down his arch enemy without him?
Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, Hamlin was about to fall to his death.
(impressed whistle) Sally clearly does NOT skip arm day - Hamlin must be like twice her weight! And what is Dylan doing during all this, dare I ask? He was closer to Hamlin when he started falling!
Wait, is Geoffrey supposed to be Australian? That’s a weird choice - skunks aren’t native to Australia. Then again they’re not native to the UK either, which is the other location one would assume he’d be from based on his dialogue throughout the mini series.
Curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal!
...I'd use the gif, but again - Tumblr has a limit of thirty images per post. Damn you gifs, you're too tempting to use!
Once again Penders and Kanterovich have conveniently forgotten that there were supposed to be more than three substations involved in this plot.
This idea of replacing some of the Freedom Fighters with robot copies intrigued me though. I think there’s potential for a pretty interesting story here - a Sonic version of Marvel’s Secret Invasion, if you will. I’m sure it’d at least be an improvement over the version made for the MCU. :P
“Robot roboticization engaged.” If Robotnik had actually bothered to read the warning on his monitor, he might have gotten the hint that something had gone wrong with his little scheme.
Surprise! Except probably not. I may have given the twist away a few times in these reviews, but I feel like most readers probably could have put the pieces together by the end of issue 1 when Geoffrey revealed that there was a second Sally. Combine that with the sudden colour change of Sally’s vest during the issue and I don't think it was too hard to figure out.
Also Robotnik is really lucky that Sally didn’t bite his fingers off when he was fondling her face a few pages back. She must have been tempted. :P
Sally’s Clint Eastwood impression needs work. She only got half of the line right.
If anything, this is the big twist of the story. It turns out Geoffrey actually was on Sally’s side all along!
There’s a lot to take in on this page. First of all, Arlo and Penelope are back, so I guess we know what happened to them in the last issue now.
Secondly, this action scene requires Geoffrey to put on a hat, for some reason.
Thirdly, "P.O.W.'s" is a dumb abbreviation to use here, as it has more syllables than "prisoners" or even "freedom fighters." It's just more needlessly wordy vocabulary courtesy of Ken Penders (or possibly Mike Kanterovich, but this feels like Penders' dialogue).
And finally: “You KICK Robotnik? You kick his body like the football? Oh! Oh! Jail for Sally! Jail for one thousand years!!!"
Seriously though, that kick was extremely satisfying.
Why did Robotnik decide to destroy this factory? It seems to me like the situation was still salvageable for him. Sally and co. would have had a hard time defeating those stealth bots, and once they’d been eliminated Robotnik could have gone ahead with his plans for the auto automatons. He wouldn’t have had an Sally infiltrator to take her place - since he was stupid enough to explode her - but he probably could have organised an ambush for one of the others, like Tails.
I believe the reasoning that the writers are going with here is that Robotnik believes the robot Sally didn’t fool anyone and so he might as well destroy the entire project, but that seems stupid now that Geoffrey has played his hand and revealed his true allegiance. It should be pretty obvious that he’s the one who tipped Sally off.
This is a nice little callback to the mini’s prologue in Sonic #20. The entire story begins and ends with timers counting down from 30 seconds to a building exploding.
Does the Freedom Fighter training program include how to pilot enemy saucers? I can believe Sally being able to fly these things, but I’m not so sure about the rookies.
Even Sally thought this plot was too convoluted. But yay, participation medals all around!
Sally took a hell of a risk here. If she’d called this wrong, Geoffrey could have carted her straight off to Robotnik’s roboticizer as soon as she was asleep in that tube, and she wouldn’t have been able to do anything to stop him. That’s a lot of faith to put in someone she had only just met, especially someone who had recently been pointing a crossbow at her.
My takeaway from this is that “Sally” and her team did a crappy job of searching the area after Penelope and Arlo disappeared. Okay, maybe that’s not totally fair. “Sally” did hustle everyone away from the island very quickly, although at this stage I’m not entirely sure if that was due to Robotnik’s programming or whether it’s the same call the real Sally would have made. I feel like the real Sally probably wouldn’t have left without at least searching the area, but that’s just me. Who knows what the writers would say? Geoffrey would also have been there to cover the Rebel Underground’s tracks - he probably would have had an idea where his teammates would have surfaced and done what he could to hide any evidence that they’d been there, or draw everyone’s attention in a different direction.
Ahh, the ol’ double switcheroo plan. Or as we call it in modern times, the Uno Reverse.
Okay, I didn’t notice the Sallys switching between calling skunk boy “Geoffrey” and “St. John,” so I’ll give the writers points for subtlety there. But again, having the plan hinge on Robotnik doubting the usefulness of his Life Model Decoys is ridiculous, considering that it’s obvious that the only reason the infiltrator Sally failed is because Geoffrey warned the real Sally.
Ick, ick ick. This is all kinds of wrong, and not just because Geoffrey is a smug creep. I don’t want this review series to turn into a giant Penders-bashing extravaganza, but at the same time I feel I have to do my due diligence as an educator and guide to this series. So for those of you unaware, Sally is about 15 years old at this point while Geoffrey is 20 or so. I'll give you a minute to take that in.
Yeaaaaaah. This is a problematic character, which isn’t that surprising considering that he comes from a problematic writer. Since we’re on the topic, consider the following Tweet:
Gross. Unfortunately this is pretty normal for Ken Penders’ social media. I feel like his attitude is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. As more and more time goes by and he becomes more recognised as the irrelevent relic he's become, he gets more forgotten and ignored and blocked by the public. So he’ll post any old ghastly thing that comes into his head just to get attention again, and frustratingly, it works most of the time. He certainly received a lot of outraged replies to that post I mentioned, but instead of apologising and trying to deescalate like a normal person, he in fact doubled down.
Once again I would like to point out that Sally is only fifteen, but that's hardly the point. So if any of you reading my reviews are new to the world of Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog and were wondering why Ken Penders is so reviled among the Sonic fanbase, a large chunk of it is because of stuff like this. There's some other pretty awful stuff as well, but I'll get to that when it eventually comes up in the issue reviews. Yaaaaaaay...
For now I don’t want to dwell any further on Ken Penders’ attention-seeking habits and questionable morality - I think he’s a ghoul, so let’s just move on for the moment and take a look at the mini series as a whole. I think that even if we put aside the problematic skunk man, the story still has a lot of problems. I’ve already covered why the resolution doesn’t work for me, as Robotnik should have been able to figure out that Geoffrey ruined his plan rather than it being because his Sally LMD wasn't a convincing copy.
There are two other main problems I have with this story, the first of which I did touch on back in issue 1: there are too many bland and uninteresting characters. I challenge you to look at Penelope, Dylan, or Arlo, and tell me one single personality trait they have in this mini series. How about hobbies? Interests? Feelings about the battle against Robotnik that they're being drawn into? Anything?
This is one of Ken Penders’ (oh whoops, here I go talking about him again!) most common writing habits - introducing lots of new characters that bring nothing to the story, usually at the expense of existing characters who would have worked perfectly well instead. I feel like the story might have worked a little better if Sally was acting as mentor to maybe just one trainee instead of four. That way the writers could have spent more time concentrating on the new character rather than having to split time between one angry guy and three others who were born without personalities. Or even better, they could have gotten rid of the trainee angle altogether and had Bunnie along for the ride instead. Having Sally’s bestie on the mission with them and being the one to question if Geoffrey was trustworthy could have made for an interesting story.
But the biggest problem I have with this story isn’t the problematic skunk, or the inability of Robotnik to figure out what happened, or even the boring excess characters. No, my biggest problem with the Princess Sally mini series is that Princess Sally isn’t even in half of it. After that first scene with her and Geoffrey in issue 1 she disappears from the story, not returning until almost the end of issue 2. This mini series was Sally’s big chance to get to show off why she’s a great character, and she spent half of it sleeping in a tube. Now while she was unavailable we did get a Sally doppleganger that was supposed to be her equal, so debatably we still got to see “Sally” in action when she took down those two substations, but it's not the same. Also, the cover for issue 3 is a complete lie, as we never get to see Sally confront her doppleganger. There’s a certain amount of satisfaction to be had from seeing Robotnik accidentally exploding the fake Sally to be sure, but I couldn’t help feeling a little cheated that we didn’t get the battle shown to us on the cover. Although come to think of it, we’ll actually be getting some Sally vs Sally action in the very next issue we study...
You may remember back when I reviewed the first issue of this mini series that I mentioned that the writers had two other ideas for this mini series that they tried to get approved before SEGA chose this one. The first one involved Sally encountering her roboticized mother, Queen Alicia, leading an underground civilisation in the sewers beneath Robotropolis. This story would have had Alicia escape at the end of the to become a returning threat later in the Sonic comics. When that initial pitch was rejected the writers tried a second one which involved Sally and Bunnie going on a roadtrip, Thelma and Louise-style, to the other side of Mobius to deal with some unspecified threat. SEGA rejected that pitch too, leading to the third pitch - Sally training a new group of trainee freedom fighters. I think either of those first two pitches could have been pretty interesting. Would they have been a better story than what we ended up with? That’s hard to say, since there’s so little information to go on. But as I said before, I think having Bunnie there for Sally to bounce off of could have made for a much better story. There was originally going to be different covers for the mini series too, which when put together would have formed one big image, like what would be done in later years with the Knuckles comics.
Brrr, that image of Sally in the roboticizer gives me chills. It reminds me a little too much of the SatAM episode, Sonic's Nightmare.
I can’t help but wonder if the roadtrip idea was repurposed later in the year for the Tails series? The Tails mini had a different writer, Mike Gallagher, but it’s not hard to imagine Archie and/or SEGA telling him to take that roadtrip idea and make it about Tails instead. But that’s something we’ll look at in the future - we still have a number of other issues to get to first. So on that note: next time we’ll be returning to the main Sonic comics, featuring the return of the Antiverse! Until then, class is dismissed!
