30th anniversary baby.
I'm going to write some slightly self indulgent crap.||
For about ten minutes since I started writing this post I‘ve been trying to think of some non-saccahrine or ’cringe' inducing way that I could talk about how Sonic is somewhat important to me.
To open with the normal cliché, I grew up with Sonic. Importantly to me, I grew up in the United Kingdom with Sonic. In the UK Sonic had it‘s own comics and these comics after the first 30 issues had their own long form storytelling. It had it’s own characters and defined it‘s own mythos for some of it’s inhabitants, but the writers of of “Sonic The Comic” were never really told ahead of time what they could and could not do, with their only reference originally being the Sonic Bible. These 20-30 page, Chewits packets bundled, issues used to show up every fornight as treat to me from my father.
The most commonly discussed element of this is Super Sonic being evil, something that was built over the comic with them splitting into two entities and Super Sonic living as an amneisac, kind hearted individual before eventually fusing again with Sonic just on the eve of the comics demise,
Alternatively there is the time Knuckles got really high on spores and hallucinated dinosaurs being angry with him.
This was all being published by the same company that did Judge Dredd, and even had industry professionals (regardless how you feel about them) Mark Millar write a few stories.
Looking at what Sonic has now a days these are largely laughable but my childhood brain spent so long trying to draw the connections between SatAM, Sonic Underground, Sonic from the Ladybird books, Fleetway Sonic, Archie Sonic, Sonic games and all the time wondering “So is Kintobor actually relevant to any of these? Why is Sonic old?”.
However, what Sonic means to you is dicated somewhat by the media you are most familiar with Sonic in. His myriad of television shows that rebooted his character over the years, be it the aforementioned SatAM, Underground or even X might have been someone's first exposure to it and his effectiveness as a cross media character is what has managed to keep him so prevelant even in the years where his license was admittedly struggling. This is why, even if his next games aren't great, the movies will keep him going for better or worse.
Before the pandemic began I attended the Sonic Adventure Music Experince (SAME) in London, the queues ran out of the door. I had been going with a friend but he had pulled out due to a family situation, so my wife humoured me, and next to me in the queue was a young man who had made his way down from Edinburgh - I asked him what his favourite track was and what he was hoping to hear and he proceeded to give me a laundry list, from games I hadn‘t even played in the period where I considered myself “too cool” for Sonic. Even games he acknowledged he didn’t enjoy he steadfast told me that he at the very least enjoyed the music and seeing the hundreds of people standing in front of me as I went in, I feel it speaks to it's lasting appeal.
This event was largely fan organised as well, the link above is for a kickstarter which was used to fund it. A room full of people singing City Escape was a treat too.
Anyway, it‘s good to see a new classic collection with S3&K in it coming out and I’ll probably play the Colors remaster. I think I just wanted a reason to talk about Sonic the Comic again.
read sonic the comic. it‘s mostly garbage but there’s some good stuff buried.