#idw sonic issue 76 spoilers

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

Cinematic Parallels

[that-guy-sleepy-miles]

Your honor,

They're the cuties ever.

[lemurballing]

issue 76

[moosh2727]

IDW ISSUE 74 LIVE REACTION!!!!

no jet in this issue sadly and spoilers ahead 💚

overall literally the first page is so funny, i love seeing the chaotix especially their office etc, AAAAA I LOVE CHAOTIX

i love detectives (my fav anime psycho pass is literally abt them) and seeing a classic trope being used with them fit so well

LMAO i didn't expect that but at the same time it's perfect

espio really needs some time to shine in the spot light and i think they did it perfectly with this bit

is it just me or is idw comics looking more and more like official sonic art, yknow like the ones you see on merch? bc like i REALLY love it, they look less squishy stylised like the way earlier ones

sonic is so silly LOL

"bad cop/worse cop" 💀

LMAO AND THE BIT CONTINUES

charmy is so underated i love him

i never expected vector to say hot diggity like goofy in mickey mouse clubhouse but that somehow works so well, the dramaticness of this entire

"THE BOARD!!" this whole issue has been playing out like a funny detective comedy and i love it

awww silver's garden is wrecked :<

this is going to fuel so many silver x blaze shippers omgggggggg /pos

awwww they're so cute together! /p

THEY HAVE SUCH A FRIENDLY DYANAMIC OMGGG

THE AMMOUNT OF SILVER x BLAZE IN THIS ISSUE IS INSANE OMG I LOVE IT

i don't even ship them but now im considering

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW BLAZE IS SO SWEET!!!!!!!!

so silly omg

woahhhh

tails is so cute, his serious face is so silly and i just wanna squish him /pos

anyway ima stop it here before i reach my limit for posting images! this issue has been fun and i think i may change my way of posting these! Please buy or read online the sonic idw comics, they're so worth it 💚

[skojukebox]

IDW Sonic 76: Tying Knots

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Lots of spoilers for Issue 76, don't read this if you haven't read that yet!

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The entire Mimic-Duo plotline was something I was content with for a long time because, for most of it, it seemed so easy and obvious what they were doing with it: you were taking a group of characters who were still attempting to ground themselves and learn to get along, and introducing someone who plays on distrust into the mix. Lanolin, who is having a rocky time with the perils of being a leader, is bamboozled. That is the obvious part of things that people pick up on in this story. 

Something that perplexingly falls to the wayside on surface level reading, particularly by younger readers for whatever reason, is Whisper’s side of this as a character with an arc revolving around relearning to tolerate and trust others. It’s part of what makes Mimic such a perfect villain for her; she is being confronted with a character who literally makes trusting anyone a dicey proposition. The Diamond Cutters as a narrative device for her is less about “Whisper relearns how to make friends” and more “Whisper learns how to trust again”. It’s kind of powerful, even a little daring for a silly comic about funny cartoon animals going on adventures. I think it’s what ultimately made her one of my favorite characters. Whisper got me back into Sonic because of this!

The Mimic infiltration seemed like a perfect plot point for both of these two goals. It’s basically like, the ultimate team building exercise. A deceitful bad guy plays a new leader desperate to prove herself and a tough lady with deep trust issues against each other. It worsens and becomes even more interesting with the Clean Sweep sweepstakes because Whisper actively begins to lie to Lanolin in order to lone wolf things. She even takes Tangle along for the ride! It actually got spicy there for a second. But even with that, this stuff is like… Super basic? Yes. It’s the kind of situation you would see in a Friendship is Magic episode, which would end with a gentle reminder to be good to each other and talk things out with your friends. That was what I was expecting.

 But as the Sweepstakes plotline went along, problems kept mounting. For several arcs now the comics have felt like it was laying out plot points with a fair degree of intricacy and foreshadowing. But in the back half of the arc, a lot of things started to mount which I would call at best snap decisions and at worst “tying knots”

“Tying knots” is a very understandable urge a storyteller gets while putting out a serialized tale with a lot of moving pieces. People become impatient, or lose focus, and your carefully laid plans start to look more daunting to pursue. There is an impetus to just patch things up as quickly as possible, especially when stuff is not being immediately received well. So rather than continuing onwards to an inevitably satisfying conclusion, you just tie off those plot threads into a messy little knot of an early ending and go “good enough.” There were several things that reeked of this at the tail end of the arc (looking at you “Clutch knows things about Surge”), but for the sake of brevity, the worst one was Duo being revealed as Mimic.

The reveal itself is bad. Like, it’s funny! That’s undeniable! But it’s still really bad. It was a plotline that IDW was running for literal months across multiple arcs, and they had it end with a throwaway gag of him accidentally having his phone on speaker. This was a clear case of hole-filling; they had run up against a wall where they either didn’t know where to take it anymore or no longer felt comfortable stretching it out, and they just pruned the plotline. They cared so little they made the reveal a preview page, which pissed me off pretty bad when I just got it randomly tweeted to me by the official account as a spoiler, but that’s beside the point.

That was dumb and definitely the most flagrant case of going “fuck it lets get this over with,” but I honestly think the character who was failed the most by the plotline was Lanolin, because this plot does not end with a message about characters realizing they need to communicate better, or that teamwork makes the dreamwork, or really… Any discernible message or moral?

It ends with Lanolin prostrating herself and announcing that she sucks ass for two issues, profusely apologizing, and none of the characters she is apologizing to even reacting to anything. She apologizes for being fooled by the character who also fooled everyone else for like a year. She apologizes for being lied to by Tangle and Whisper. In response to this, Tangle makes fun of her capability to do something, and Whisper ignores her and says she wants to shoot Mimic in the face because she… Learned nothing from this, and I guess was right all along. You can’t trust anyone except Tangle. She’s just right back to her static state of “I want revenge, I'm a badass.” Like… What was the point of anything she’s done over the past year of comics at all? 

I don’t really care about the Diamond Cutters being broken up. Okay, I do, it’s sad and I liked them! It might be temporary, who knows. It’s a comic book, stuff comes and stuff goes eternally. But like… Holy hell, what a failure on multiple levels for that subplot. It makes Lanolin look like a sadsack, it makes Whisper actively unlikable and regresses her character, makes the message of the whole thing such winning ideas as “it’s okay to lie to your friends” and “you better not ever fuck up”. and makes me feel like I just wasted months being invested in the original cast of this comic at all.  

It feels like a truncated and confused ending to an arc if I am being generous, but less charitably like a panic redirect, or even editorial interference. After aaaaall those months of carefully set up, deliberate pacing and foreshadowing, it just kind of gets wound off into nothing and we merrily jaunt off to something else. This is a very, very good example of why if you set out to play the long game for something, you should keep your patience intact, because I guarantee trying to put a slapdash taped on conclusion to it because it’s not quite as well-received as you might have initially hoped will just make a mess of things.

I’m not usually too critical of IDW. In fact, I liked some of the other stuff going on in this issue and will continue to follow the glacial pace of my current favorite comic! But… In summary: bad taped together conclusion with an even worse moral. The bad guy basically won, which is not only very un-sonic-y, it’s also treated with zero gravity. Very poor, slapdash, and left a bad taste in my mouth. Do better, guys!

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

Okay, so I wasn't considering it until #76 confirmed the disbanding of the diamond cutters and that the main center of the restoration needs rebuilding, but this really means that Surge and Kit's apartment from the 2024 annual is actually a new room?

Compare their room in the restoration from Sonic the Hedgehog issue #69 and the 2024 Annual.

The light levels of the two rooms aside, the "curtain" in the first image being a single panel, while the one in the second image is two. The room on the right is visibly smaller, with the bunk bed perpendicular to the wall, versus the one on the left being parallel. There are visible differences in the bunk bed frames and bedding. There's a lack of a glass coffee table in the restoration bedroom on the left. Etc etc.

While we know via #76 that there are other branches of the restoration, so it's not impossible that Surge and Kit ran there for support, given how distanced they've been from Restoration affairs since #75 I'd almost endeavor to say that their apartment from the annual is theirs.

As in...I don't know how they'd get the money for it for sure (maybe Kitsunami does odd jobs for cash when there's no hero work to be done?), but they really may have ponied up and gotten themselves their own apartment to live in in the city. Honestly no matter which is the case probably the sweetest thing to me is that they continue to choose to live together and sleep in bunk beds despite how small the room is. They...really don't want to leave each other's sides, do they?