Sonic the Hedgehog Archie Comics... and the greatest crime done to a work of fiction. · 4:25pm Jul 9th, 2015
Today I'm doing something different. Instead of commenting on anything related to any of my stories (most of which are crossovers, giving me a wider range of topics to talk about), I wanted to talk for a minute about my favorite comics series. Or rather, what it used to be.
I'm sure that while many of you hadn't heard of those comics, you've head about Sonic the Hedgehog. An anthropomorphic hedgehog, the main hero of a game series, who for some reason can run at the speed of sound, who battles Doctor Eggman. Doctor Eggman, who is more of a comidic character rather than a villain, so in games that supposedly care about plot, there are various other enemies. I said "supposedly". Why? Because the games have no coherent story. Not really at least. Sure, some are sequels or prequels to others, but if you were to compere every game of Sonic together, you would see that most of them could be treated as completely stand alone universes. And it can be even more said about the Sonic's cartoons. Which in my opinion, all but one sucked. And the name of that one was Sonic the Hedgehog (I know, original), better know as Sonic SatAM.
Imagine a mixture of Star Wars and Terminator, throw in antropomorphic animals, and bam. you get this show. But why do I mention this, if the topic has the word "comic" in it? Because the Sonic's Archie Comic story, the world, and characters, were basically the same as in that show. Except where the show lasted sadly only for two seasons (there's a season 3 fan web comics, though), the comics have been going on for over 20 years! To this date, it had over 274 issues, and that's not counting all "spin-offs", like Sonic Archives, Knuckles Archives, and Sonic Universe. Throughout those many years, this comic had introduced more complex storylines and characters than any Sonic game. Like, for instance, Sonic's freaking parents!
Oh, and you might call it cliche, but the fact that the main character's father is a badass in his own right is awesome! Anyway, it also has separate universes, like this Scourge, who prior to his... mutation, was known as anti-Sonic, and came from the world called anti-Mobius (later Moebius). Oh, and "Mobius" is the name of the world/planet Sonic and the rest live on. But those weren't the only characters. Princess Sally Acorn, who you can see in that opening, has an entire family in the comic.
Though granted, since the story starts 10 years after the villain took over the entire kingdom, families are broken and it takes time for them to meet again. Oh, and who is this villain? Julian Kintobor of the House of Ivo, better known as Doctor Ivo"Eggman" Robotnik, or even more simply, Doctor Eggman.
Contrary to his character in the games and tv show, in the comic he is pure evil (and insane). After he had took over 10 prior to the start of the series, he roboticized every Mobian, changing them into robots, and even after it becomes impossible, he "legionazises" them, plainly surgicaly attaching cybernetics to them and replacing flesh. His grows more insane as the story went, to the point that he became sort of a Joker of this series. No really, he's sadistic and scary and has a sense of humor.
http://en.sonicscanf.org/comics/sonic-universe/37/#15
There's a lot of more characters, with a lot of story (they even thought up the history of the world, and even had a short side-story "Mobius 20-30 years later"), so if I were to post a picture of every more important ones, it would take a while. So I will just finish this part with Knuckles' family, the Brotherhood of Guardians, and the Dark Legion.
Oh yeah, Knuckles isn't the only echidna in this version. His people aren't extinct (well, until issues 240-something, but even that's complicated). One of the many sub-plots of this comic series resolves around the story of Knuckles' family, the Brotherhood of Guardians and the Dark Legion. Hundreds of years ago, two brothers, Edmund and Dimitri, came up with the idea how to decrease the power of the 12 Chaos Emeralds that made the Floating Island fly, so that they could return to the surface. Their motion to carry this plan out was denied, but Dimitri didn't listen... but the plan backfired, and he absorbed all the power of 11 of the Chaos Emeralds, becoming a demigod of chaos, Enerjak.
http://en.sonicscanf.org/comics/sonic-the-hedgehog/180/#4
He was actually the third incarnation of Enerjak, but that was revealed and went nowhere hundreds of issues later. Anyway, his god powers and arrogance made him desire to rule their people, and he was imprisoned. His son was obviously not happy, and amongs those he and his followers blamed was Edmund. Soon, after near rebellion, they were banished to another zone, and Edmund's son became the first Guardian of the Floating Island, while Dimitri's son became the Grandmaster of the Dark Legion. It's an awesome story that shaped the life of Knuckles, and gave the readers fascinating stories and characters (and fights!) to enjoy.
That and 3 next pages
Oh, and it gave Knux a girlfriend
Everything was fine... until it all went down the drain...
This comic series was great. Story was captivating, characters complex and identifiable. It even often presented difficult topics, such as death, sacrifice, love triangles, break ups... fear and prejudices, warfare, democracy and its flaws (resulted in an obviously evil guy becoming the king). During the last 30 issues that I read, the events became so dramatic, so complicated... and then they literally pressed a reset button on it all.
Storywise, Dr. Eggman had launched a Second Genesis Wave, rewritting the universe (for the second time, actually, but Sonic fixed it previously), and made a crossover with Megaman comics. However, Sonic and Megaman won, and as Sonic was about to use Chaos power to put things back in order on Mobius, Eggman attacked, and it caused their world to shatter (like in one Sonic game, where the world is like Outland from WoW) and the history of the univrse got changed.
However, they wrote that peace of crap because of the legal suits one of their previous writers/storyboard artists, Ken Penders, had been firing at them, taking issue with how his characters (the ones he had created for the series) were being used, and so on. It resulted in having those characters completely writted off. And yes, I focused so much about echidnas earlier because they all got written off in the new reality!!! I loved all of those characters, not just the echidnas, but all the others that also got erased. They weren't in any games or shows, they were only in this comics. So to me, Ken Penders had committed a comic genocide. Sure, he says that he plans to have those characters in his own new comics called "Lara-su Chronicles", but a) it's been years, and b) well, look at this:
On March 5, 2014, Penders announced on his Twitter account that his characters were no longer echidna but Echyd'nya, an alien species. Penders stated reasons for the change was that he needed to make some adjustments to broaden the audience while making certain longtime fans get answers and resolution and because of the difficulty he has seen with people pronouncing the word echidna.
I hope I am not offending anyone, but since I am a foreigner, in whose country the "ch" is pronnounced differently, and had no problem to pronnounce "echidna" since I was a kid, I am convinced that Ken Penders must be not right in the head. I mean, overlooking this shit above, why was he so adamant to take back his characters from Archie's comics? I know it was caused mostly because of the game "Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood", who Ken Penders considered to borrow a lot from his ideas, but still, having his characters be taken from the comics is probably the worst option possible. Now, if he would try to get new sponsors for comics or job from new publisher, he cannot point at Archie's Sonic Comic and go "Those awesome characters are mine".
I understand that he had to defend his rights as a writer, but he won't gain my sympathy. Not now, nor ever. He killed my favorite characters and the entire comics for me. I hate him.
Ian Flynn, currently main writer for the comics, isn't much better. As I had mentioned, there were many fascinating plotlines in the ending days of the Sonic Comic prior to remake, and they all went nowhere. The stories weren't concluded, they were simply deleted, and the whole story reseted. There was no resolution for anything; for Sally being roboticized, for Antoine suffering terrible injury and nearly dying on the line of duty, his wife Bunnie losing her cybernetics and leaving everybody to become a spy in Eggman's forces, Naugus possesing Geoffrey St. John, all echidna being banished to another zone by a vengeful asshole who was introduced 20 issues earlier as a good guy (though it was obvious to me that he planned something bad)... and it all just ended.
But the worst thing? Sonic and Sally are no longer a couple, nor are they in love.
Their relationship was almost one of the fundaments of this series. They were at one point practically engaged, until they broke up (Ah, the famous SLAP of the 134th issue...), and hadn't got back together until 90 issues later! Only for tragedy separating them, and just as Sonic got her back, the universe was reseted and remade, and they are just friends. Because SEGA would prefer if their characters weren't romantically involved, and Ian Flynn dislikes when fans ship characters. GUESS WHAT A*****E! THAT WON'T STOP US!
Now the story and the world resembles more like the one from games. Which I hate. If I were interested in that, I would play the f***ing games. Some I like, but they are nothing compared to what the comic series used to be.
This video below is what inspired me to finally voice my frustration about this. It's about a guy missing the old times, when people would comment under videos of SonicComicWorld, until his youtube channel got removed. Watch it, and if by some cosmic coincidence some of you used to know the guy, have talked with him via those youtube comments, I'm sure he would be happy if you'd send him a note. I sadly wasn't one of those people, as I had learned about SonicComicWorld after his youtube channel and all videos were removed.
I won't lie, I nearly cried.
If I managed to interest those of you who had never read this amazing series, on this website you have all the issues to date. F*** the publisher's rights to receive money and all that. They don't deserve it after the crime they had committed.
I considered writing a fanfic where I would start from the Genesis-Wave and set things right, but I cannot do comics, and other formats wouldn't do justice. If somebody knows a good fanfic like that, let me know, I will gladly read it.
I hope you liked my little rant
Edit: Since some of the images for some reason are no longer showing, I provided direct links under them.
Wow, that's deep man. Everything seems to be ruined these days.....
Boring
3222926 You do realize that any like-minded fan of the series who will stumble upon this will and has no idea why you wrote that will downvote you?
Oh please no...............I don't want to be downvoted
Help me Adam ;P
3222943 Who is this "Adam"?
Is he your God? Cause he sounds awesome.
3222955 Nah. Actually he's pretty lame
I personally think that when a writer chooses to sign a publishing deal with an established Universe, the writer does not get the final say in the use of the characters. I understand all the work put into the characters but in the end, the characters are not the author's per say but the publisher's/universe's. This is especially relevant in Universe's that have multiple authors writing in the Universe. The publisher/overlord has to make sure that everything fits together in a sensible, canonical flow. While it is unfortunate that this sonic author had his characters rewritten (that's what I got from your explanation), he has to accept that there may be a change in the direction that publisher wants to go that still holds his stories cannon. Granted a publisher should not drop the Retcon hammer often since this will cause authors to not want to write in the universe anymore.
On to talking about sonic though: I remember the saturday morning cartoons. They never could catch my eye for some reason even though I love sonic especially Sonic Adventure for the dreamcast. Super sonic in 3d is too good.
3222958 You know, I heard Gods have power to remove internet comments, you might wanna be careful
3222973 ;P
Also to all who read this it was all in good fun between friends^^......not the part about Sonic being boring that's still true^^
3222982
Yep, she was joking, that guy Adam really is a God.
Oh, and don't pay attention to her comment regarding Sonic, she just doesn't like the franchise in general and hadn't read the comics.
3222992 Nah he's not ;P
Because it is boring ;P
Huh. I knew the Penderscaust was bad, but I hadn't realized it'd totally torpedoed everything I loved about the comics. Now I'm kinda glad I never caught up with what I've missed since I stopped reading in the middle of the Mega Man crossover...
Dave: Hey when are you going to update Rebirth of the Damned? *smack* OW!
Grann: SHUT UP he's talking about something that matters to him, he'll update it when he's ready.
Dave: Sorry.
Yea, I've been reading these since issue #140 and got caught up thanks to YouTube. I'm a huge Sonic fan and the comics WERE the only thing keeping him relevantly cool ever since his games started to... you know. But, ever since they rebooted the universe, everything's been dull and childish. I mean, I'm still reading them, but online. They currently aren't worth my money.
I heard that Ian's gonna put the universe "back together", and I intentionally thought that was gonna be after the current Megaman cross-over; but NOOOOOO. He still needs time establishing the new universe!
But, hey, apparently Ian's releasing the drafts of the old universe called "Lost Hedgehog Tales" for the old and dedicated fans. If you don't know about it, here's a link: http://www.bumbleking.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7231
The writer said an I quote, he was "Tired of the shipping wars"
Also at this point I can't decide whether to blame the fans or Sega for Sonics rap sheet.
So I stopped caring
Some read DC. Some read Marvel. Me? I read Archie's Sonic.
I knew it was convoluted, but that was kind of it's charm. It was SATAM evolved.
And I slowly drifted away as the comic aisles stopped carrying it.
And to learn this. I knew something was going on, as they suddenly changed EVERYTHING...
But this.
How can Ken Penders sleep at night knowing his greed and spite have ruined the very thing he built?
He literally decided one day he wanted and deserved a bigger piece of the pie and declared almost half the cast his personal copywrite protected property.
And for what? A stupid knock off comic? He ruined a comic franchise for his own unknown and unwanted series.
Ruin a wedding just for a single slice of cake.
And all because Archie couldn't find that standard document ALL comic book companies use and have used to prevent THIS VERY THING.
He had to have signed it or something like it, I mean Archie has been in comics since Detective Comics was a thing, they wouldn't have missed that kind of thing back in the 90s, it would have been attached to his Terms of Employment...