Right from the get-go you know this is gonna be ugly.  Not only is Mike Gallagher STARTING with a fight scene, but Harvo's artwork is...well, it's painfully bad!  What looks like a collection of random demons, mutant toads, and pastel-colored Taz wannabes are, in fact, platypi who are looking to beat up on Sonic, Tails, Barby and Walt.  And our heroes aren't looking too good, either!  The inking is some of the choppiest I've seen since "Guerrilla Thriller" (Sonic #45).  Wombat Stu and Guru Emu get to watch the action from their own skyboxes.  Mercifully, said action is over in less than a page as the platypi are defeated and Sonic spin-dashes Stu and Emu out of their cages.  Walt then remembers how confused the fans were after Sonic #50 so he and the DFF supply two and a half pages of exposition to bring the readers up to speed:
     Long story short: while cleaning up after the destruction of CrocBot, Duck "Bill" Platypus freaks out and starts playing Che  Guevara with other platypi as he and his troops trash the crater clean-up site.  Things get to the point where other Downunda folk abandon the project.  Stu and Emu get captured by Bill.  Sonic and Tails show up.  There's the aforementioned fight.  End of exposition.  The group then takes off after Bill.
     After hacking their way through the dense growth of names of fans who wrote and sent artwork (including four Aussies who must be laughing themselves sick at this story), the group finds itself in a rubber raft they got from...somewhere...floating down a river.  Sonic and Walt are about to experience a personality clash when they clash (again, for half a page) with another group of badly-drawn platypi.  In fact, page 8 is a showcase of just about every artistic failing in this story.  The platypi are unpleasant to look at.  Barby looks even less like a koala than usual thanks to Harvo's drawing her with human proportions.  Worst of all, Sonic and Tails suddenly look as if they'd each gained 30 pounds and it's all settled at the waistline.  The hedgehog has suddenly turned into a pot-bellied pig!  Haste is the ONLY possible explanation for this kind of sub-par art seeing the light of day.  The layout is interesting, and gives new meaning to the term "splash page," but the execution is all wrong.
     Equally wrong is the course of action Sonic takes on the very next page.  In order to scuttle the croc-borne platypi, Sonic spin- dashes across the water despite the fact that according to the so-called "character bible" (everybody say it with me now) SONIC CAN'T SWIM!! But this hasn't stopped the writers so far.  I don't know why Sega even bothers putting out a character bible and being such sticklers about Sonic not displaying emotion in public, when it's clear that the rest of the document is more honored in the breach than in the observance.
     Rounding a bend in the river they see some kind of tiki hut that "MUST be Duck 'Bill's' hideout" [emphasis mine].  This is only page 9 of a 12-pager, after all, so we've got to wrap things up.  They come upon Bill in conversation with nobody, and then he passes out.  They lift up a trap door and discover...no, it's not the Tell-Tale Heart.  Unless it's inside the torso of CrocBot.  Knowing he's on the next-to-the-last page, CrocBot moves right into the Villain Blabs His Head Off scene: thanks to a diode implanted in Bill in the course of "Down and Out in Downunda" (Return of the King special) and a little post-hypnotic suggestion, Bill had been acting at CrocBot's command to drive the Downunda Freedom Fighters away from the crater so he could reconnect the Croccer to a power source and later reassemble a ComBot for him to do some Downunda dirty work.  CrocBot starts to speak ominously of the coming of the "bunyip" when Sonic pulls the plug and confiscates him for no particular reason, thus ending one of the LONGEST copy blocks I've seen in a Sonic comic--or any other comic, for that matter.  I don't think Sonic wants to use him as a hood ornament on the plane.
     For the benefit of those of you who haven't yet surfed the Web using the keyword "bunyip" here's a brief overview: The bunyip is indeed, as Barby mentions on page 12, "a mythical monster from aborigine culture."  This makes me wonder how they define "aborigine," since "Southern Crossover" left me with the impression that the echidnas were the first Mobians to settle Downunda before they got the Floating Island to float, but anyway.  The bunyips are fierce creatures who live in or near bodies of water in isolated stretches of wilderness.  They're built like wombats but they're supposed to be as huge as rhinos, weighing in (by one account) at two tons, and they have flippers for arms and legs.  They make dreadful bellowing noises during the night, and are supposed to drag unsuspecting people under the water to their deaths.  Yet as early as the 19th Century there have been Australian children's books in which the bunyip is a wise and gentle creature.  In at least one recent story a bunyip is displaced from its water hole by the encroachment of civilization.  It's been theorized that the bunyip may have actually existed but became extinct, surviving only in legend.  Well, Freddie DID ask out loud whether anyone thought this could be the basis for a story.  Just doing my part to inform the electorate.
     Sonic and Tails then take off as Sonic comments that Walt was "jealous of the way Barby was hitting on you, Tails!  That koala cutie digs you, buddy!"  Aside from the forced feel of the dialogue, was anyone else sort of creeped out by the spectacle of the zaftig (and definitely postpubescent) Barby making possibly inappropriate overtures to a fox who's supposed to be only ten years old?  Doesn't say very much for the studliness of the local males.  Still, that puts Tails ahead of Sonic in the romance department just now.  The hedgehog appears to be content to let Tails go through puberty ahead of himself while not giving Sally a second thought.  If the comic were to cease publication tomorrow, I'm sure Sega has already written the hedgehog's epitath:

And a quick re-examination of the story confirmed that this Barby-Tails development had NO SET-UP WHATSOEVER!  Despite the absence of any such undercurrent in "Southern Crossover" (which was the last time the two got together) we're now supposed to believe that Barby's got the hots for Tails?  I didn't see it.  I also didn't see any of the "jealousy" reflected in Harvo's artwork.  If Walt was honked off at anyone, it was at Sonic for hedgehogging the limelight.  All in all, this was one sorry piece of work.
     Harvo's Apology: as if to prove he really CAN do good work when he's not under pressure, there's a black-and-white study of (from right to left) Sonic, Sally, Tails, Knuckles, and...er...someone or other.  Not only are the lines much cleaner than in the preceeding story, this represents the ONLY canonical appearance of Sally in this issue.  Then there are the two non-canonical appearances of Sally on the Fan Art page: Shannon Marie Haskin does a nice anime-style rendering of Sally and Bunnie (who's been absent from the stories for far too long, IMHO), and there's Stacy George's rendering which also shows Sonic with a facial expression beyond the usual handful we've been getting lately.  And why are both the fight-oriented pieces of fan art from Texas?

     Sonic and Tails fly through some bad weather which is really Naugus.
     That's it.
     This story gave me a bad sense of deja vu.  The last time I'd seen work this prefunctory was back in Sonic #31-33, when each issue featured a two-page "Knuckles solo story" which were also exercises in marking time.  Once again, the story behind the stories is far more interesting than what got published in the comic:
     Archie had just inked a major distribution deal with a non-comic book store outlet.  Part of the reason the deal went down was the prospect that Archie would start running Knuckles solo stories.  However, the first series of Knuckles stories, "A Sense of History," was scheduled to begin running in #31 and the deal wouldn't kick in until #34.  The solution: have Mike Kanterovich and Ken Penders draw those uninspired two-pagers for #31-33 literally at the last minute in order to live up to the promise of Knuckles solo shots, and delay the REAL story until #34.
     I got the same uneasy feeling from this story.  It says a lot more about Naugus than about Sonic and Tails, who are literally reduced to being a couple of talking heads because they never get their kiesters out of the "Winged Victory" (and, of course, in another instance of bad continuity there's no sign of CrocBot--I dount that they stored him in the overhead luggage compartment).  There's really no story here, except to remind us how formidable Naugus can be.  The best that can be said for it is that it's a mood piece.  And we have no clear idea yet of how Steve Butler will portray Sonic and Tails once the action shifts to land.  Whatever else this story accomplished (and it didn't accomplish much), it cured me of Don Bluth Syndrome.
     Ever since the GREAT job of writing Karl Bollers did on "Running To Stand Still" (#54), I've been cutting Karl a LOT of slack.  I didn't want to believe it when he didn't sufficiently develop the farewells in "Back To Basics" (#57)--Sonic leaving his parents AND his girlfriend should have brought the house down and been enough to carry two dozen pages with NO flashbacks, thank you; instead, the farewells were handled in the most offhanded, soulless manner.  It was sort of like wanting to cut Don Bluth some slack for such atrocities as "Rock-A-Doodle" and "Troll in Central Park" because of the great work he'd done in the past on "Secret of NIMH" and "Land Before Time."  I'm afraid Karl is going to have to prove himself all over again.

     Like Mike Gallagher in "Outback Gut Check," Ken apparently feels the need to wake up the audience after the last couple of issues.  So he almost succeeds in getting Geoffrey St. John and one of his beaver operatives, Fleming, killed in an explosion.  Fleming decides to call it quits.
     Geoff reports this to the King who's getting yet another check-up from Dr.r. Quack (who, as Mark Lungo put it, has the most convincing dialogue in the story).
     Sidebar: when Ron Bauerle met Ken Penders at a comic con in Buffalo, New York, Ken explained that the relationship between King Max and Dr. Quack is supposed to parallel that between Capt. Kirk and Dr. McCoy on the original "Star Trek" with Quack being able to tell the King unpleasant truths to his face.  Ken had better do some tweaking of the character because so far Quack has demonstrated that he has as much backbone as a jellyfish.  He basically played along with Snively in "Endgame" and was a mute audience to the King while he rambled on about the Source of All in "The Living Crown" (#58).  At this rate, if Quack ever DOES have the occasion to tell off Max, it'll seem as out of left field as Barby's affection/lust/whatever for Tails in "Outback Gut Check."
     Geoff is then told to "assemble a strike force of no more than five agents capable of covert assignments inside foreign territories."  Things start out promisingly enough when Geoff catches up with a chameleon on the Floating Island.  The chameleon's name, according to the story draft, was "Valdez"--was he named after the character in the 1970 Burt Lancaster western "Valdez Is Coming" or the site of the huge oil spill?  Maybe Ken's rethought the name since then, because he doesn't mention it in this version).  Geoff more or less forces Valdez (or whatever) to come out of his own retirement.  After that, the recruiting drive breaks down along with the story continuity as Geoff signs up...Wombat Stu.  He's looking much better than when he was drawn by Harvo, but it's hard to think of what talent would recommend him to St. John--aside from his ability to wear a John Deere cap.  Stu says that things have been quiet since CrocBot's defeat.  I know that Ken wrote this apart from Gallagher's work on "Outback Gut Check" so he can be forgiven for saying that things have been quiet.  Still, it makes a mockery of the book's continuity.
     Just as bad is Geoff's recruiting of Hershey, who seems to be holding down a desk job in the Mobian Recovery Administration.  Hardly the place to showcase whatever talents she might have for covert operations.  I also noticed (and immediately disliked) Geoff's telling her he'd square Hershey's being drafted into Covert Ops with Sally.  Since when has Geoff played straight with Sally for five minutes at a stretch?  He's probably the only creature on Mobius who's more anal-retentive than King Max.  By this point I really wanted to see someone tell Geoff to get bent, but that's not going to happen in the next issue when his recruitment of Heavy and Bomb will round out the team (like Ken wasn't too heavy-handed about THAT development in the story's last panel).
     When Ken sent me this story in script form some months ago, I remember my reaction at the end of it.  It consisted of two words: "Yeah, so?"  Geoff (one of my least favorite characters) recruits a bunch of mopes to do something or other.  I thought then (and still think) it would help to know what they were being recruited for.  I've probably been influenced too much by the structure of the old "Mission: Impossible" TV series, which starts out with the premise/mission ("should you decide to accept it"), THEN we bring in the rest of the team and showcase some gadgets and red herrings before moving on to The Sting itself (basically, EVERY episode was an elaborate sting of some sort).  But in light of the intense set- up of "The Ultimatum" (#60) this story is about as compelling as a limp dishrag.  It's a situation made even worse by the fact that I KNOW what the mission is going to be, and that premise will be HUGE!  But Ken has chosen not to lead with that.  Pity.
     Sonic-Grams: a rather generic cover for #62--it'll be interesting to see the finished product.  Also interesting is the fact that the name of the locale in the cover story has undergone a change.  In the preview copy the place was listed as "San Salvador."  Someone must have stumbled upon an encyclopedia or gazetteer and discovered TWO real-life San Salvadors: an island in the Caribbean, and the capitol city of El Salvador.  Knuckles #15: I assume the specks on the cover are Mobian bees bent on avenging Mello's death.  And NiGHTS #4 finally bows.  Two letters and 4 e-mails: someone expounds on "Maurice" but doesn't mention Steve Miller's "The Joker" or explain just what exactly "the pompatus of love" is.