The unnecessary darkening of an entire franchise, ridiculous retcons, the insulting altering of many characters personalities just to make the story work, shock value and dark twists at every turn, shock value deaths or possible deaths for no other reason then just to make the story darker and more depressing due to the false belief that darker is better.....these are things that can be used to describe the recent Sonic the Hedgehog comics for the past year.  However, it is also the exact same thing you can use to describe DC's Identity Crisis.  This was a move by DC to make their comics darker and more depressing due to the fact that they thought Marvel was doing better then them thanks to darker story lines when in fact it was mostly due to Marvel having better story lines and advertising.  Many people consider it a stain on DC's existence while others hail it was one great story.

For more info on this, you can watch Linkara's take on Identity Crisis here as well as why it was so flawed, with a ton of it having some amazingly similar comparisons to Sonic as of late: thatguywiththeglasses.com/vide…

Essentially, Identity Crisis was a great divider.  Unlike many stories, some people hated it and some people loved it, mostly based on preferences and what you enjoy to see in your comics.  Do you like the heroes winning or do you like seeing them die at any moment?  Do you like seeing them victorious or do you like seeing them devastated and broken as they hold their dead loved ones in their arms?  Do you like stories that treats the characters with respect, or are you fine with their personalities being mutilated and altered just to fix the story?  Do you consider this "just a comic book" or do you take more of a sports approach to these things and get mentally invested in them the way the fans do at sports game?  The way you answer these questions will greatly decide if you hate or love Identity Crisis.

Why did I start a review for Sonic #234 like this?  Because right now Sonic is going through his own version of Identity Crisis.  An unnecessary darkening of the Sonic the Hedgehog universe that doesn't add a single thing to the story being told and is used just to be darker and make everything more depressing.  I'll talk about this more farther down though.

#234 is a short and simple comic, once in which looking at the extra story at the end can be talked about before the main story.  In the extra story we get a relatively pointless backstory that talked about Robotnik (the original Robotnik that's long dead...not the one currently in charge and talking to Naugus) and Naugus.  What's important of this side story is the fact that Naugus is the one that told Robotnik that Elias was leaving the city and allowed him to ambush and attack him.  You can tell Naugus will only become worse and worse as the stories go on based on this.

Now for the main story, Sonic, Tails, Amy, Bunnie and Antoine are set to escort Elias out of the city and not only is Tail's plane fixed....but Antoine and Bunnie are using hover boards.  I already have massive issues with this, since it makes my wonder WHY DIDN'T SONIC USE ANY OF THESE TO GO AND SAVE SALLY?  Would he have really waited around watching Geoffrey's trial if he could have used any of these to reach the Death Egg?  It seems that Sonic even slept the night before escorting Elias so it raises even more questions.  Already we have some rather stupid plotholes jumping out at us.

Not long into the escort the Death Egg shows up and we learn that Bunnie isn't handling her flesh and blood body well at all.  As the robot goons come out she tries to use her arm blaster and remembers that she doesn't have one anymore (why...didn't she think of bringing any weapon at all?  Antoine has a sword, Amy has her hammer, Sonic doesn't need one and Tails is flying his plane, so what's the deal Bunnie?).  Soon into the scramble Robotnik sends out Metal Sonic and Mecha Sally and Bunnie gets tossed aside like a Fly by Metal Sonic and then Mecha Sally knocks her out cold in one hit, saying how useless she is now without her cybernetics.  Mecha Sally then goes on to destroy Tails' plane and Robotnik orders Metal Sonic to self destruct onto Elias vehicle.  Sonic goes to intercept him but Mecha Sally stops him, leaving Elias open for an attack by Metal Sonic.  Sonic begs Sally to fight it but she is pretty much 100% gone at this point, nothing more then a brainwashed puppet for Robotnik to order around.  With no other options, Antoine grabs on to Metal Sonic and pulls him away from the vehicle and Robotnik orders him to self destruct...blowing up Antoine in point blank range and sending his body plummeting to the ground.

That's right folks....a robot suicide bomber just horribly injured one of the main Freedom Fights for the last 19 years....

Upon his victory, Robotnik orders a retreat, sending Mecha Sally back and starts to celebrate, leaving the FF to pick up the pieces.  Sonic is completely devastated and lost and Bunnie is holding Antoine in her hands, crying and equally as devastated, with Amy and Tails crying in the background.  Sonic claims that there is still a chance since Antoine is still breathing and rushes to take him to the doctors and we end with Antoine's hand falling limp and lifeless to his side with a quote from him saying that it was always an honor fighting with his friends for the greater good.

THE END

So...........what's my thoughts of this comic? Well I must admit I was pissed when the rumors started coming out that Antoine was killed in the issue, since in my opinion he's the most developed character in the entire comic atm, who has matured and has had the most character development...so hearing that he was killed off really got me in a rage mode.  However, I was shown the actual issue and got to see how it all played out and I think I know what all of this build up was for.  If we look at the Sonic Universe 30 Years Later arc, we will see that Antoine and Bunnie's kids as teens are cyborgs but we were never told why.  My theory is that Antoine will be rushed to the infirmary, stay in intensive care for a number of issues and then be revealed to be good as new as a half cyborg, with robotic limbs and other prosthetics.  Soon after my bet is that Bunnie will also get cyborg implants and they'll become a cyborg couple fighting for the greater good together (but now able to have children).  Eventually they have kids and as they turn into young adults they choose to follow in their parents' footsteps and become cyborgs themselves.

However, if it turns out that Antoine truly is dead and the 30 Years Later Universe arc was just pointless drivel, then Flynn's got a lot to answer for...and hopefully with a pink slip in the near future >.>

For months now I've been worrying about what 234 would bring, namely that Sally would kill someone.  Luckily, Sally didn't do a whole bunch in this issue and instead of a flat out death we probably have a serious crippling injury.  So while my worst fears didn't come to pass, we still got something awfully close.  So what does this mean about my anti-Flynn arts and what I plan to do for the future?

Well, let's look at the arts individually.  My first art?  Heck yeah I plan to keep that one around! browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&sec… Flynn just blew up Antoine with a robot suicide bomber.  It doesn't matter if you hate or love this fact, he's been raping our childhood for a while now and this is just the newest insult he's done.  If you don't consider this raping our childhood I don't know what else Flynn can do....as for the second art, I still plan to keep it around, but that one is more of an opinion art and not so much a fact. fav.me/d4n9tzp While he might be raping our childhood, some people like rape T_T  Or they might think turning Sonic the Hedgehog into a comic book where robot suicide bombers kill main characters is a turn in the right direction.  For them they might think this recent stuff is making the comic better then ever instead of screwing it up horribly in the worst way possible.  However, for me I still most definitely think that things have officially gotten too dark and that blowing up Antoine is starting the stretch the line to the point that it will break any second.  I plan to do one more anti-Flynn art based on 234 but will only do more if he continues to do issues like this.  If this turns out to finally be the rock bottom point Flynn talked about that hopefully we can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel instead of only falling more and more...my guess is that 235 will be the rock bottom point when Silver shows up and 236 is when Sonic goes on the attack again.

Here's a question I have though:  Was any of the mutilation, pain and injury done to the comic main characters really necessary based on the story line?  For Sally, the beliefs are that she was roboticized to get her out of the picture for a while and to possibly have her be fully dressed when she gets turned back to normal (due to her new all blue metal body).  Did she really need to get roboticized for any of this?  Couldn't she have gone on a spiritual journey for a year and then come back will a new clothing design?  We'd get even better results then the current mess and we wouldn't have all the enraged fans.

As for Bunnie getting deroboticized, it looks like it served no other purpose then to make Bunnie completely weak and helpless and to actually help in Antoine's suicide bombing attack.  If she was still part robot she could have fought one on one with either Mecha while Sonic fought the other.  Instead, Flynn went completely out of his way to make her as weak, helpless and useless as possible in this comic so that she's going to feel even more devastated, useless and broken next issue.  Oh but wait, she was deroboticized to show how Sally will get turned back to normal right?  Well I already proved that she didn't even need to get roboticized in the first place, so that's rubish.

Antoine getting blown up only serves one point, to explain why their kids are cyborgs in the future (if he's not actually dead by 235).  However, that means Flynn just blew up a main character for no other reason then to explain why he himself decided to have cyborg kids in the future in his own version of the future.  Sure this shows that Flynn has this mess of an arc in the works for a while now but if the kids weren't cyborgs there would have been no need for a cyborg Antoine.  Heck, if Sally wasn't roboticized, and meaning Bunnie wasn't de-roboticized, then Antoine could have stayed fine and the kids could have been cyborgs due to her it being a part robot (sure that raises a question of how she'd have kids with a robot bottom half but there are plenty of comic book ways to figure that out that would have made more sense then most of the stuff going on atm).

So let's see, we got Geoffrey's retcon turning him into an evil henchmen now which comes out of nowhere, we got Rotor crippled due to a back injury he got during Flynn's earlier works, we got Fiona turned evil for hardly any reasons when Flynn first started out, we got Mina turned into a robot hating jerk (seems her character gets fixed in 237 but we'll find out then I guess), and we got Hershey missing in action and most likely legionized....who else am I missing that isn't a video game based character?

Ah right, the one and only depressing turn that makes even a nano of sense, Nicole.  The only reason Nicole has been put through Hell for the last year is only to allow Naugus an easier chance to get to become king and ruin not only the kingdom but to turn all Mobians into hate filled idiotic jerks.  However, that raises the question of how the Iron Queen was able to hack into Nicole, since Nicole is from the future.  You'd think she'd have firewalls set into place to protect against most problems encountered in the past.  It would be like a hacker from the 1950s trying to hack into a computer with the best firewalls and protection money can buy today.  So while Nicole's torture does contribute to the story while none of the others do, it still doesn't make much sense if you think about it.

Now for the main reason why all this crap is happening: TO LET THE VIDEO GAME BASED CHARACTER HAVE THEIR TIME IN GLORY ALONE.  A while ago I created a comic that talked about a disturbing trend in which all of the female comic based characters were being pushed aside one by one while the comic book based ones were find and dandy.  fav.me/d4i6mce Sure, I was wrong about Hershey most likely, but just toss in Fiona in that panel and it all fits still, and Bunnie is still really useless atm.  Little did I know that Flynn's main goal was to quite literally mutilate, cripple, mentally destroy or incapacitate every single bloody comic book based character in the entire comic, just to let Sonic, Tails and Amy get the comic to themselves for a while and get most of the action.  Flynn quite literally crippled all of the comic characters in one way or another, just to give Amy a chance to have her time in the sun.....sure the rest of the FF will most likely stay behind and work in getting rid of Naugus but you still see my problem here.

So right now only the video game based characters are capable of doing anything to help the world, and people wonder why I have anti-Flynn art up and speak out about how dangerous this man is?  I might not hate the man but I still think the comic needs to be saved from him more then ever before.  SEGA might had a mandate that says the video game characters need to look good every so often, but really Flynn?

The worst part is that the story Flynn has done lately didn't need any of this crap to happen in the first place.  Robotnik has a robot Knuckles, Tails and Sonic, why couldn't he just build and actual Robot Sally?  We could have still had all the cameos and cool characters show up in the Universe arc so why do we need characters getting mutilated and defiled on the side?  Sure Flynn has a few neat ideas currently going on as he usually does, but NONE of what's going on story line wise needed ANY of the depressing or dark crap going on.  They don't ADD anything to the story, they're just literally tacked on last second the way Genesis was.  I think that is what I hate the most, the fact that not only is he raping our childhood, but none of it even ties into the story at all and are done just "because".

And now back to Identity Crisis for the finisher.  I have just gone over an entire huge list of why I personally think stuff in the comic right now are pointlessly dark and why so much of it is flawed...but people are still going to say Flynn is saving the comic or that seeing the characters they don't care about die dying is awesome...and that's their opinion.  Just like how Identity Crisis is hated by some and loved by some, the same can be said about the current Sonic story arc.  Some will love it and some will hate it.  It's all about opinions, but I think many can agree that a suicide bomber possibly mortally wounding Antoine is still a little too dark for the kind of comic Sonic stands for.  I just really hope that we've hit the rock bottom point now or in 235, cause if it continues to get any darker and more rock bottom then this, I really don't see how we can get the awesome happy ending Flynn is claiming to have coming in #250...

Oh and for the people that say "calm down it's just a comic" ...say that to people that love sports, have favorite teams, yell at the tv screens and consider that an important part of their lives, cause there's really not much of a difference between the two.

If you're as annoyed as I am about what Flynn has been doing, e-mail him yourself like I have: ianpotto@yahoo.com
Be sure to contact Archie comics as well, they need to know people are getting fed up with Flynn as well: Sonic@archiecomics.com