Author's Commentary: Part Two

Just like the last one but with Knuckles instead, I really like the title text though, very “evil” and mechanical.

The mini-Prologues help recap what we’ve already seen and are presented in noir, because flashbacks are in black and white now, and are pretty much just a scaled down picture of the To Be Continued monologue from the previous comic. Incase you forgot, Knuckles is having Bat problems and here we see again the use of Word Art as a sound effect now, making things more pronounced. I started using this style in this comic, but later moved away from it because it became a tiresome process, though it does make things look more defined.

Again, the Bats are weak but there are a lot of them, so Knuckles is just getting more and more angry. Those traps and Robots in the Spring Yard are like the Bats, placed there and released by Eggman to stall the Freedom Fighters, but also because I wanted Tails to carry Sonic again, which hadn’t happened since BFTCE, I believe.

Sonic gives up the search rather quickly there, but hell we don’t see their every move so it’s just assumed that they’ve covered a lot of ground. This was a good excuse to do something I’d wanted to do for a while and use a desert background, but I couldn’t use Sandopolis because that’s on Floating Island and I wanted to save it for that, so we get a background from a Kirby game instead, and a little cameo by Caterkiller.

These old-school Badniks are in this comic because I wanted to include them. I left them out on purpose and used the E-1000/Eggrobo/Gamma sprites instead to make Eggman’s army more formidable and more like the Swatbots in SATAM, because it looks better and looks like a real army of Robots made for the purpose of conquering. But these Badniks here are weak and pretty useless bits of kit, but it’s all Eggman has because his armies were destroyed during his exile, so it’s a nice little old-school Badnik thing going on. I love the missile sequence here, it’s just something I really liked, and all the parts of Caterkiller and the Bats are smoking and on fire, showing my new attention to detail. Oh yeah, Knuckles is doing the falling pose seen on the covers of all the comics, each character (Sonic, Tails and Knuckles) does their pose in the comics at some point to tie into the covers.

Don’t piss Knux off. Now, again, this was an excuse to use the beach background from Sonic Advance 1, and it’s pretty good, though a bit fuzzy because I didn’t make it, just enlarged it. The jaggered exclamation speech bubble is something I rarely did after BFTCE, so I brought it back here and we see Tails leaping up and twirling his tails, I liked the idea of seeing how Tails is about to fly. Although, I really prefer the helicopter tails from Sonic 3 as opposed to the frame-by-frame animations of Sonic Advance Tails sprites.

Now this background I made, and it’s a little repetitive but it works, and all the stuff is on fire as well and I made that little sand-spurt which also looks good. No blurring on the fight scene because I’m going old school again, back to the techniques I used in BFTCE for a little “moment”. Hey, look, it’s Rouge! She also gets no proper origin or introduction, but is just a character put into this story who is built up from here onwards, building her up using the personality directly taken from the games.

Now, we’re here in the Lava Reef, which, in my comics, is part of the Red Mountain, so the Mystic Caves leads to this and it is all part of a volcano on Floating Island. Can you sense the tension between these two? It’s not really defined in my comics that they have an attraction, Knuckles can’t quite stand her and she has a flirty arrogance around her concerning him, so the two have a rivalry, as they should, but a kind of unspoken mutual respect.

I like the blurring seen here, it works really well and was used very effectively in these comics. It became a bit over-used and hard to do later, but I managed to develop all these interesting ways to mix up the blurs, which gives it a nice effect.

That’s cool, Sonic dashes ahead of Nack and turns to face him, which you can see in the blurs. Tails tries to be a hero and gets a face full of missile. The Action Scene depicting that looks a lot better than some of the ones from previous comics but it still looks a bit odd. Sonic dashing on the spot kicks up another neat sand effect I made, and you can see these all-new flaming and impact effects I picked up being used. That beam coming out the craft, specifically, is an optic blast from a Cyclops sprite sheet.

Tails gets revenge in a nice little homage to the battle against Eggman from BFTCE, showing how weak those Egg-O-Matic’s really are. Tails’s spin attack looks really cool there, as does the little explosion and the effect of Nack being flown into the tree from the blast. Now here’s the clincher, BOTH Sonic AND Tails grab that Ring and we see a very cool effect showing that what Knuckles said is true; the Rings have an effect on those with Emerald powers. Now, Sonic and Tails’s sprites in the Ring grabbing picture (not the insert shot) are placed over sprites of their Super forms, which are just barely visible, which is to subtly show that their powers have been awakened. Only Sonic glows afterwards because he has accessed his Emerald powers before and he now has them at his control, but Tails doesn’t glow. But his Super form DID flash for a brief second, so the Ring has had an effect on him; it’s just not been total yet.

Tails gets to hold onto the Ring (sparking off many, many, many sprite edits to get the characters to hold the Rings in every frame), which leads towards another important development later. I like this fight between Knux and Rouge, very basic, you can see everything happening and it’s all condensed to focus solely on them (and the Ring).

That first panel is my first Anime-type thing, like when swordsmen fly at each other and it does that slow double attack and they land and you wonder who’s been hurt. It looks okay, but I could probably do better now because it looks a little bland, but that cross over blurring was hard to do at the time. Turns out they were both hurt by it, but that kick is enough to finish Rouge off and she disappears. I had no plans at this point to include her again, nothing definite anyway, so it was nice to bring her back later after all. Notice that the Ring has exactly the same effect on Knuckles as it did on Sonic, same effects and everything, bringing out his Emerald powers to the full.

He gets the same glow too, and it makes him look spiffy, I must say lol. Now here’s an interesting part, as Eggman is constructing his Bomb (it’s only partly done here. I actually made the entire bomb then made a half-done bomb sprite afterwards because I do things the hard way, apparently) he decides that he can re-conquer Crystal Island right away with just four Rings, so we see his first priority is to get his old base up and running as soon as possible and that he over estimated how much power he would need (he learns from this later, as in Sonic: Liberty he decides only a fragment of the Master Emerald will be needed to give him full power to take over the world, rather than the entire Emerald, makes transporting it easier and saves time for him). Nice little digital transmission by Eggman, though I maybe should have used the entire sprite instead of just his top half.

Speculation goes to Tails and why he hasn’t had any after effects from touching and holding the Rings, and you just KNOW something is going to happen with that, but I like teasing :P Anyway, here comes Metal to bust his new moves and we see now that the two Mecha’s are tough bastards who can dish out as much as they can take, as if you forgot that fact.

So, Sonic and Knuckles decide to end it quickly and stop messing around, they have this power so why not use it? Shame that thinking didn’t occur during Perfect Chaos. The Super Knuckles sprite I made myself, re-colouring the Knuckles sprite sheet using Paint Shop Pro 7 but I had to go through every single sprite and change his shoes back to their normal colours because I just faded and tweaked the colour scheme of the whole sheet because I didn’t know how to do it manually and that took A LONG time to do. Notice that Super Sonic has crackling energy around him, but Super Knuckles doesn’t? It’s because Super Sonic is more powerful, that’s what that crackling energy effect means. Action Scenes are pretty bland again, but the blurring, explosions and the fact that it’s Super Sonic and Super Knuckles Vs Metal Sonic and Mecha-Knuckles makes up for it…

Sonic and Knuckles have a little fun with their counter parts and damage them badly, rather than just finishing them off (this is mainly because the awesome Metallia sprite sheet had a missing arm effect in it and I wanted to show it). The insert Action Scene is pretty good, showing an abrupt destruction of Metal Sonic and the escape of Mecha-Knuckles, which I wanted because I wanted to move away from Metal because I had kind of had a Metal Sonic overkill so far (despite the fact that I wanted him to be Eggman’s right hand man) and I decided to put some more focus into the Mecha-Knuckles instead, which opened the door for many quips between Sonic and Knuckles regarding the frequency of Metal Sonic and Knuckles’s dislike of being copied. There’s that dust effect fading off Sonic and Knuckles to show their powers fading, I kept that all throughout the series because I kinda liked it.

The monologue over the scenes here was made up on the spot by me and not in the script; I felt like the re-Robotisation of the Island needed something to make it more emotional and have more impact and this helps a little. All those Crystal Island backgrounds were made by me to show an infusion of metal left over from Eggman’s rule and organic life restored by the Freedom Fighters and, as the wave sweeps the Island, we see this organic life being overtaken and transformed, and each person becoming a Robot, oh and Spikes having his little cameo again.

Continuing the spread of the wave, we see more of the backgrounds I made, some of them are similar to backgrounds seen in Tales Of Shadow #2: Marooned, and some of the Mobians are trying to escape the wave but they can’t and they all, effectively, die, because, if you noticed, no animals ever pop out of the Robot or Badnik casings, they’re mechanical like the Robots in SATAM and were just transformed into these Robots, unable to be freed except by being busted into scrap metal. And, indeed, welcome back Egg Island, the first time I used the Sonic Advance 2 picture to show Egg Island, mainly because the Flickie’s Island shot is so damn big.

Whew, emotional stuff, we close with the dramatic “all hope is lost” monologue.

OVERALL

LONG! Damn, this part is long, but that’s not a bad thing really, it just had a lot to cover and I like it well enough, because it shows us that Sonic and the others succeed in getting the Rings and awakening their powers and even destroy Metal, but then, in a flash, they’re discouraged because all their hard work to restore Crystal Island is wiped out as it is turned back into a brand new Egg Island. Aren’t you just desperate to see what happens next?