2016 is Sonic the Hedgehog’s 25th Anniversary and I’ve been around since (almost) the start, in celebration of Sonic lasting so long I’m going to be posting a Long Look At Sonic the Comic issues 1 to 100, my favourite time period on one of my favourite comics and one of my favourite things about one of my favourite things – that’d be the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise- and this is that Long Look At.
Welcome to my Long Look At
Sonic the Comic 1-100 my imaginary chums! Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic is
genuinely one of my happiest childhood memories, every fortnight I would
receive a new issue, at Christmas my mum would keep the
Format
The format of a UK comic is
undoubtedly something we need to cover as it’s completely different to what the
Marvel and DC faithful are used to1, and it’ll also help give a
better understanding of how the stories work and why I’m recapping them in the
parts that I am, and why recapping them is more complicated than it should be.
A standard British comic is a magazine sized publication that is almost always
an anthology series, with multiple comic strips in each issue, Sonic the Comic
is unusual in that it only features a small number of strips – usually four –
about 5-8 pages each, and has no 1 to 2 page comedy strips. Even the serious
adventure comics of yore – Battle Action Weekly, Victor, Lion or Valiant would
have some 1 or 2 pagers. In the beginning Sonic the Comic only devoted 1 strip
per issue to Sonic’s world – the opening strip ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’, while the
rest of the book was filled with multi-part adaptations of other Sega games
(Shinobi, Golden Age, Streets of Rag…) but the Sonic feature turned out to be
the most popular – amazing, in a comic called Sonic the Comic too, who’d’ve
thought – so gradually strips set in the Sonic universe began to dominate the
title. The first Sonic spin-off strip, ‘Tails’, began in issue 16 and the book
continued on in this format - having ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ and one other
spin-off strip (‘Tails’ ‘Sonic’s World’ or ‘Knuckles the Echidna’) – up until
issue 47 when original character Captain Plunder received his first solo outing
and a complete reversal of format had set in – from a Sega magazine with 1
Sonic strip to a Sonic comic with one other Sega strip… maybe, and it was
usually Decap Attack.
This format remained up
until issue 133 when the rot started to set
in the final strip of each issue was used to reprint an older strip (though
always Sonic-related), With issue 155 it became 2 reprint strips per issue and
in 157 three strips per issue putting us right back where we started with just
‘Sonic the Hedgehog’, the lead strip, telling new tales of Sonic’s world,
albeit this time surrounded by reprints of his past glories I didn’t want to
read rather than adaptations of great Sega games I did. This switch to reprints
was due to Fleetway’s idea of a ‘five-year reader cycle’ (your readers change
every five years as they grow out of the book) and they did it to their other
big series Buster as well, funnily enough neither Buster nor Sonic the Comic
are still being published. The last original ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ strip ran until
issue 184 but they continued to beat the dead horse up until issue 223 as an
all-reprint book, yes I’m still bitter about this. We will only be covering the
Sonic universe strips (with one or two semi-exceptions).
Oh, and UK comics are also
published a lot more frequently, or were back when we had a comics industry,
StC was fortnightly (or bi-weekly if you prefer) though a lot of our most
iconic series (The Beano, The Dandy etc) were/are weekly publications.
The Millar Issues
Possibly by accident, StC
maintained a format of having two main writers for the Sonic strips – for most
of its life these were Nigel Kitching who was the Main writer for ‘Sonic the
Hedgehog’ and ‘Knuckles the Echidna’ (as well as Captain Plunder strips) and
Lew Stringer who was the main writer for ‘Tails’, ‘Sonic’s World’ and
‘Amy’/’Amy & Tekno’ (which is pretty much just what Sonic’s World developed
into) as well as writing shorter sets of ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ strips, though
there was a brief period where it was Nigel Kitching (on ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’)
and Mark Eyles (on ‘Tails’ and ‘Sonic’s World’) and Lew Stringer alone. HOWEVER
for the first 17 issues the main writers were actually Nigel Kitching and Mark
Millar – yes, that Mark Millar, the man behind such stretches of horseshit as
Civil War, Kick Ass and Clint was Sonic the Comic’s first main writer,
responsible for the strips in 2, 3, 5, 11-13 and 15-16 and ‘Streets of Rage’,
something I’m sure he’s immensely
proud of (note: I know for a fact he isn’t). I’d take him being so dismissive
of having worked on something as ‘lowly’ as Sonic the Comic as just another
example of his utter knobery but it could also be sheer embarrassment at some
of the work he turned in - have you seen the image floating around the
interwebs of Tails being attacked by bacon? He wrote that2.
His work is typified by:
·
Elements appearing
out of nowhere (even in one of his best stories, The Green Eater, Terra-bot’s
weakness isn’t really y’know, foreshadowed).
·
Moments of awful
dialogue (“Rave! Rave! Rave! All Night Loong!” yes Sonic, rave)
·
laughably stupid
things (in Robofox, which granted was his first story, Sonic puts on sunglasses
and actually says “I’m Sonic – I sort things out” but then there’s the Hidden
Zone having a bridge right to the Emerald Hill Zone – that was well hidden –
and drunk troopers and then I want to punch him).
·
Sonic being an
absolute douchenozzle.
I mean that last one, while
StC Sonic will always be a bit of a dick he does seem to be a particularly huge
penis under Millar; being rude for no reason (he insults a Flicky while the
Emerald Hill Zone is MELTING in Green Eater for fuckssake) and coming across as
bullying to Tufftee and Tails. I could be a little more forgiving, it was early
on in his career and he was often lumbered with some truly terrible artists –
his strips with later semi-regulars Casanovas and Mark Hadley are undoubtedly
the best reads so it does seem that the amateurish scribblings of the likes of
‘Lost in the Labyrinth Zone’ or ‘Robofox’ may have had some effect (but then
some of the best work Carl Flint would ever turn in couldn’t save ‘The Hidden
Zone’ so maybe that’s bullshit), I could be forgiving but it’s Mark Millar – so
I won’t, what you give is what you get and if you want to act like a prick
Mark, I’ll act like a prick to you. Luckily his strips have no relation to the
tight continuity and the continuous narrative that will be woven between the
Sonic’s world strips post-issue 18, so much so that I’m not actually going to
go into them outside of this part, thus I do want to just look at undoubtedly the best of the Millar strips: ‘Double Trouble’ (Sonic Strip, issue 13) which is my pick for ‘best underrated Sonic the Comic
story’.
It’s not too surprising it
works though really, because the whole concept is the only concept Millar does
nowadays - because it’s the only thing he can pull off, the Millar Meme that is
“what if ______ was a cunt”; Double Trouble taking it to its most farcical
point and proving that that meme really is funny because it’s true, the concept
of Double Trouble? ‘What if the
extra-life box from the Sonic the Hedgehog games was a cunt’. I kid you not, The Extra Life, made by Kintobor before
he became Robotnik (more on that to come), tricks Tails into releasing him from
‘The Box’ (a TV Monitor from the games) and wreaks havoc on the Emerald Hill
folk, even being a match for the real Sonic before Tails traps him back in the
box (and Sonic kicks it into outer space, but with Millar’s personal politics
I’m not surprised he didn’t boot it into the sun). It’s just a good little
one-and-done story, it doesn’t feel rushed and the threat feels very real – and
it’s the only Millar issue where Tails doesn’t come across as a moron. It’s
also the first work by StC semi-regular Mike Hadley (who’s admittedly still
finding his feet, Tails is ginormously fat in one panel) – speaking of Hadley
and Millar it’s also worth checking out ‘The Green Eater’ (issue 15) despite
what I’ve said about it for some really atmospheric Hadley art (a speciality of
his).
These Entries
Starting with Part 2 I will
be working through the comic, with my usual Look At mix of recapping of events
and personal thoughts, I’m not sure why I’m compelled to do this but if I start
asking such existential quandaries of myself I may stop watching Diamanda Hagan
videos and that will make me sad. Initially this will be quite simple with just
the ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ strip and then just ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ and ‘Tails’
running in each issue but it will soon grow more and more complex and dividing
up what we cover in each part won’t be as simple as splitting them up by issue
numbers.
We’re also going to have to
stop occasionally and look at the StC spin-off material – it enjoyed a meagre 9
issue poster magazine series Sonic the Poster Mag, three summer specials and
one Knuckles the Echidna 1-shot, the stories in which are all cannon and two
actually directly connect to ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ strip stories.
And then there’s Pirate
STC…
So bear with me, hopefully
it’ll all make sense as we go along, next
up we have a look at a short run that would define the book for over 130
issues as we meet Nigel Kitching, Richard Elson, Super Sonic, Omni-Viewer and
see the Origin of Sonic.
1 though they do resemble their Golden Age comics of the 1930s and 40s a little closer, not that most people read those – hell, DC doesn’t even have a Golden Age anymore, or do they now #Rebirth has happened? Maybe it they stopped revamping things I’d be able to keep track.
2
It’s from issue 5’s ‘Lost in the Labyrinth Zone’
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