The "virtual paraside" material that had in previous issues served to obscure various pieces of full-page artwork has, in this issue, been reduced to a five-line caption box.  This is entirely forgivable.  I feel a little less at ease about the prominence of the names of Archie Comics and Sega in the same box.  It probably means nothing, but it feels like a reminder that this is THEIR comic now and we'd better get used to it.  Those of us who got into Sonic via the TV series can consider ourselves warned.
     After the ambiguity over Julayla's species made evident in "When You And I Were Young, Sally" (Sonic Kids special), I've decided that continuity errors will find their way into the comic book, like it or not.  So I'm not going to make a big deal of the fact that the Winged Victory has suddenly become a single-seater biplane instead of a twin seater, and that Sonic and not Tails is at the stick (compare this with the cover of Sonic #57, where Tails is the one in the pilot's seat).  It still makes for a great opening sequence where Sonic plows into a "stretch of trees".  Apparently only one tree is needed to constitute a stretch, and Sonic manages to turn it into kindling as the plane grinds to a halt.  To keep the story from sharing the same fate as the tree, some other Mobians show up in some vehicles left over from the Mad Max movies.  One of the critters is a one-eyed, hard-edged rabbit who reminds me a great deal of Bucky O'Hare; his name, as it turns out, is Jack.  I assume this makes him a One-Eyed Jack Rabbit (which has to be one of the most complex puns I've seen in a while).
     We then shift to the ramblings of Old Lightbulb Head, aka Snively (last seen in "Monkey Madness", Sonic #55).  His monologue reminds me of a passage from C. S. Lewis's religious fantasy, "The Great Divorce."  In one scene, a character describes Napoleon in Hell: the dude spends eternity pacing around alone inside a giant mansion, blaming everybody else in the world for his problems.  No wonder Drago gets a good laugh out of it, as well as Snively's attempt to pass off a cyst on his arm as a bicep.
     Back in the desert, Sonic and Tails's fame appears to have preceded them.  Jack starts telling Sonic about it when a group of roboticized Mobians appear on the horizon.  Just as Jack starts to bad-mouth them...
     We break for Fan Art.  Tanya Gauer manages to incorporate a certain amount of attitude in her drawing, but top honors go to the Echidna Afficionado for doing a drawing that actually has some wit.  Knuckles, blue is NOT your color.
     The roboticized Mobians then demonstrate their "opti-bursts" which is apparently something like what Gort was equipped with in "The Day The Earth Stood Still."  Primo film; rent it if you've never seen it.  While Sonic scatters the roboticized Mobians, it's left to Tails to supply the exposition and state that they don't seem like the friends and family Sonic left behind.  Sonic clears a path through the hostiles and they approach the mercifully-renamed Sand-blast City.
     In a manly effort to keep the story from being too linear, we spend a page in outer space watching some satellite deploy something or other as a mysterious gauntlet pushes a mysterious button...
     OK, folks, place your bets.  I've already had someone inform me that the aforementioned gauntlet looks a LOT like the one belonging to Robo-Robotnik ("Night of 1,000 Sonics," #19, "The Return," #22).  C'mon, people, we all knew it would only be a matter of time before Archie figured out a way to bring the Fat Boy back into the story line after his supremely ambiguous demise in "The Big Goodbye" (#50--subject to revision).  Robotnik, after all, IS a creation of Sega no matter what incarnation he might be in.  Of course, it's hard to tell based on one panel.  So, is this a red herring or foreshadowing?  And how many months before we find out his/its true identity?
     In Sand-Blast City, Sonic gets your basic hero's welcome.  I, for one, had feared where this story could have gone based on the earlier hype for it.  When the residents were described as a group that takes hero-worship a bit too far, I was afraid that Karl would turn this into a 1930s jungle movie--where the natives start to worship the White Gods Who Have Fallen From The Sky, that sort of thing.  Nice of Karl to prove me wrong.  What's NOT so nice is the fact that the city is under some kind of force field grid that keeps the roboticized Mobians out.  Anyone else think that's kind of mean-spirited?  Don't worry, you're probably supposed to feel that way.
     How I felt about the next page, though, is another matter.  OK, here's the entire page in a nutshell: Snively continues with his monologue while getting razzed by the other inmates (guest appearances by Nack the Weasel, Sleuth Doggy Dogg, Guerrilla Warfare, Predator Hawk, Flying Frog and Lightning Lynx, most of whom haven't put in an appearance since "Battle Royal").  Snively drops his nail file...and this opens all the cell doors?  I honestly thought that my issue was missing a page at first.  Karl had better explain this at some point because it makes NO sense right now!
     Back in Sand-blast City, Sonic is still sleeping off the night before as Tails realizes that they've been locked in.  Flying through an open skylight, he sees some of the locals getting ready to put the Winged Victory in mothballs for a few weeks.  Sonic, who has just joined the group (and somehow gotten out of that locked room in the process), doesn't seem all that concerned about leaving and asks what's going on.  Answer (sing it if you know it): There's a riot goin' on down in Cell Block Number Nine!
     So, we've got a prison riot, Sonic and Tails may themselves be unwitting captives of the Sand-blast Citizens, and Fat Boy just might be back in town.  I think it's safe to say that the cover story here has racked up some serious mileage.  Karl has a couple issues he needs to deal with (e.g., what the heck happened on page 13, and how the inmates are going to break out of the Devil's Gulag Island Volcanic Prison Type Thing), but I find I'm actually looking forward to this arc playing itself out.  The recent bloc of lame cover stories would appear to be over.
     This is Steve Butler's first "official" foray into drawing for the comic (last issue's 4-pager wasn't as much of a showcase as this story).  Steve is a comics veteran, so the art is good.  The question is: is it good Sonic art?  All I can say is: Works for me.  Nobody looks grossly off-model, the layouts are clean, and the point-of-view drawings don't feel like gratuitous showing off by the artist (c.f. Manny Galan's early work in "The Rise of Robotropolis, The Fall of Sonic" #38--at least Manny got it out of his system).  So I'm hopeful that Bollers-Butler will work as a collaboration.
     "Pro-art" poster: Knothole Freedom Fighters, sans Rotor.  Butler managed to get Dulcy dead on.  Sally, and (especially) Bunnie look a little off, though; can't say what it is about them.  And what's with the studded armbands?  The Clint Black headsets, I can understand.

     So far, Geoff has "recruited" Valdez the chameleon, Wombat Stu, and Hershey as secret operatives.  Actually, they all sort of more or less decided to go along with it, from the look of things.  Not a whole lot of moral agonizing on the part of this bunch.  So now there are two more members to add to the team.
     And here thet are, Sega and Archie's answer to C-3PO and  R2-D2: Heavy and Bomb!  Heavy looks like a retrofitted oil drum and, like 3PO, has all the language skills.  Bomb (whose first name, I'd like to believe, is "Cherry") is the more-or-less silent partner.  His vocabulary isn't as wide as R2's as he only appears to know two phrases: "Ping Ping Ping" [translation: "Duck and cover!"] and the self-explanatory "Ka-BOOM".
     It pains me to say this about Bomb, because Art Mawhinney has easily made him one of the cutest new character to appear in the book in some time, but he's also the most implausible character in the group.  He may work as a game device but I couldn't bring myself even for a second to buy into Heavy's explanation of his partner's resurrective powers: "He just transferred his artificial intelligence programming to another shell--ready to go until he blows!"  Given that Cheery Cherry (and that IS a cute expression on his face/shell/whatever) blows up twice in this installment, only to scuttle back into the frame a short while later, he'd have to have a number of "shells" following him around just out of sight, possibly strung together like a centipede (yeah, I know, that's another video game entirely).  It's the only logical explanation, since it's a fundamental rule that matter cannot be created the way Bomb seems to recreate himself after every detonation.  Bomb's very existence, in other words, is based on the fact that several laws of physics would have to be repealed to make it halfway believable.  Then again, we ARE talking about a comic book where Sonic was able to run on a handful of dirt tossed into the air during the "Endgame" arc.  Next time, Ken, leave the kakamamie physics to Mike Gallagher,  kay?
     Geoff starts out by trotting out a "Buffalo 397", which sounds like an in-joke: maybe Route 397 runs through Buffalo, I don't know.  Stu comments that that weapon wasn't standard Freedom Fighter issue, a fact which Geoff confirms.  Apparently only the secret service types get to use them...for all the good they did last time around.  Sonic accomplished more than the entire service did in the fight against Robotnik with just a pair of sneakers, but Geoff's light show was probably just his way of keeping a psychic edge over the new recruits.  From a catwalk, the group looks down on a bunch of furs apparently warming up for the next Animalympics.  I do think that the raccoon lass working out on the rings is cute.
     Not so cute is Geoff's way of starting training: he literally throws Hershey into the deep end of a pool occupied by a mechanical shark.  Things happen fast after that: Valdez jumps into the pool and feeds Cherry Bomb II to the shark while Hershey makes a break for it so fast she disconnects from one of her thought balloons.  Geoff goes into a spiel about teamwork and staying cool under pressure as Cherry Bomb III skips into the picture.  Geoffrey's speech about teamwork in the next to the last panel is, IMHO, a monument to hypocrisy, coming as it does from a character who for most of his career in the comic book has been freezing out Princess Sally when he hasn't been putting the moves on her (he managed to do a little of both in "Brave New World").  He then promises that the tail-kicking will continue until performance improves.
     It's a well-written installment, and Art Mawhinney's artwork manages to get past my distaste for Geoffrey.  I still find him to be seriously disreputable, possibly because he is, as the title says, "On His Majesty's Secret Service."  And His Majesty, in this case, is King Max, another character about whom "sympathetic" is the last word I'd use.  Personally, I'm putting up with Geoffrey until the plot swings back Sally's way next issue.  Speaking of which:
     The incorrectly-named "Sonic-Grams" (see below): promos for Sonic #63 (can Sonic and Tails leave Sand-blast City, what about the rioting prisoners, and why is King Max acting like such a butt toward his own daughter?); also Knuckles #16 and NiGHTS #5.
     And "in answer to unending reader demand" to know what the freak happened the first time, it's Sonic #50--The Director's Cut including "scenes scripted for the first version with no room to fit them in" and boy, is Archie sorry now that they didn't MAKE room!  I've been waiting for this one.
     Notice anything unusual about the facing page?  Yes, it's another NiGHTS ad.  No letters this issue, and no e-mail.  To hear Paul Castiglia, Archie is usually swamped with Sonic mail.  But this is the second recent issue of a Sonic-line comic (the other being Knuckles #15) that simply printed NO letters whatsoever.  I can't believe that people stopped writing, especially if "reader demand" for an explanation WRT Sonic #50 has been "unending".  I guess they've decided that the letters were expendable in their push to launch the NiGHTS title.  Probably the nature of the business.