Sonic #68 Review By Rolland Therrien SURPRISE! Well, after the long (and overrated) "Sonic World Tour", our heroes, Sonic and Tails, with Nate Morgan along for the ride, are finally coming back to good old Mobotropolis, just as their friends the Freedom Fighters were getting ready to recieve them in Knothole. But in the capital, not only have people finally cleaned up the city, they've been preparing for a full-fledged celebration! Sonic, in his usual modesty, believes it's for his return, so he and his two friends are Icognito. Meanwhile, back in space, another wierd satellite is activating, this one called "K-Sat". Hmm... last few times a satellite like that activated, something wrong went down on Mobius... And this one seems to be shooting soemthing at some asteroids... Meanwhile, Snively is attempting, try as he might, to organise the Devil's Gulag escapees into some sort of coherant group. Not so easy, as each member has his own way of doing things... The meeting ends abruptly, however, when Kodos and Uma Archanis, who, if you remember, had been lifeless crystal statues since #53, suddenly come back to life! We'll get back to them next issue, I think. Back in Knothole, Sally and the freedom fighters get a message from the king: Someone from Sally's past is finally coming home after a long time away. Sally and her friends know he can mean only one thing: Sonic's home! As the FFs rush towards Mobotropolis, Sonic and Co. (still in disguise) have some close calls with blowing their covers, when, all of a sudden, the comic steals a story element from "Armageddon" and meteores start falling on the city! Sonic and Tails rush to help people in trouble from this. Unbeknownst to them, so do the FFs a few blocks away. After a while and a few individual deeds on their respective sides, Sally and sonic finally run into one another, Sonic saving Sally's life from one last falling meteore. After everything calms down, Sally and company reunite with Sonic and Tails,, and Nate is introduced to them. Sally says she thought the king had warned her about Sonic's return; this is unlikely, because he just came back himself. They go to the castle to figure out what's going on. There, after Sally says Sonic's back, after beating Ixis Naugus, the king says (And I quote): "That's all well and fine, but we've no time for such trivialities! [...] We have Important matters to attend to!" Excuse me, your highness, but Naugus was a threat to the kingdom! His defeat IS an important matter. So what could be more important then Sonic's return? Why, the return of Prince Elias Acorn, of course! Fresh from his premiere appearance in Knuckles #19-21, the young crown prince makes his debut in the Sonic books in full glory! A few panels, after we see the shocked looks on everyone's faces, Geoffery St-John pulls the hood of Nate, sees an Overlandert and immediatly jumps to conclusions, accusing the poor guy of vbeing an assassin! Fortunetly, the King clears this up and welcomes his old friend Nate back. Just sa Sonic gives up hope of getting a big party for his birthday, we are invited to skip the next three pages... And we see a huge splash page featuring our favorite hedghog getting a big B-day party! All in all, a pretty good story. The art was pretty good, and the story was well-paced. The handling of each character was well done (Antoine is bumbling, but well meaning, Sonic was his usual heroic motormouthed self, and we are given yet another reason to dislike Geoffery St-John). A few glitches could be that a little too much was being stuffed into a single issue: Sonic's return, his B-day party, the meteores, Nate's return, Prince Elias' homecoming... Spreading all of this over two issues would have given us more room to breathe. Still, a nice issue, compared to the stories from a few months ago. Rating: 3 rings And now, for the back-up story, featuring Lupe and the Wolfpack: Survival of the Fittest Okay, here's the run-down; Lupe and the pack raft all the way across some river to a deserted city. There, they find a pair of orphaned overlander children, Aerial and Athena. The story ends with the pack debating what to do with the kids. Okay, this story was still uninteresting. We get a few tidbits about the individual wolves, personnality-wise (Diablo's a scavanger, Leeta and Lyco are loyal twins, Reynard's a paranoid...), but we're still not given any reason to attach ourselves to these characters. Maybe if we had some inner narration on Lupe's part, with her telling us about her a bit about her companions, then this story could have been better... Rating: 1 ring Overall Rating: 2 rings.