In the “Chaos Knuckles” saga, the echidna turned green, gained the godlike ability to manipulate the fabric of reality, putzed around the series for a couple dozen or so issues, and then died. Knuckles was canceled in 1999, but Penders’s story was incorporated into the pages of the main Sonic comics. Remember: these comics were ostensibly aimed at preteen kids. This leads to a hospital scene in which an echidna doctor operates on Charmy and his insect blood spurts all over the place. There was also the issue where a friend of Knuckles’s ally Charmy Bee dies from eating a chili dog laced with “Lemon Sundrop Dandelion.” While investigating the LSD epidemic, Charmy and friends absentmindedly eat more of the tainted food and get high as a kite. Robotnik persecuting hedgehogs and echidnas. Several arcs would attempt to tackle the subject of fascism, which infamously led to Penders rewording Martin Niemöller’s “First they came …” to be about Dr. In the fourth issue, Knuckles was given a love interest named Julie-Su, whose soul had become linked to his the first time she laid eyes on him - this is apparently how echidnas mate in Sonic’s world. The Knuckles stories were just as weird as the mainline Sonic series. While it had almost nothing to do with the video games, this was the definitive take on the character for fans craving backstory on the character. The result was a heavily serialized story that slowly unraveled the mysteries surrounding Knuckles’s origins, his enormous family tree, his ever-expanding array of superpowers, and his heroic destiny. While Sonic was a hodgepodge of ideas from many different writers, sibling series Knuckles the Echidna (following Sonic’s longtime rival-turned-friend) was entirely the brainchild of Penders, and he had so little creative oversight that he got to write whatever he wanted. #Sonic #SonicTheHedgehog #VideoGames #Comics /TUrlfKdWz8- Daniel Karhunen December 5, 2019 At one point, future Spider-Man scribe Dan Slott parodied Sailor Moon and introduced an alternate version of Sonic who was an interdimensional cop - both within the span of a few pages.Īpparently Sonic the Hedgehog's middle name is "Maurice". Or perhaps you’d find a parody of Casablanca. One month, you might find a story from future Valiant editor Karl Bollers hinting that Sonic’s home planet of Mobius was actually a post-apocalyptic Earth. Except there was a problem: Sega wanted more.Īrchie’s various writers were left scrambling for new ideas. Robotnik was killed and the planet was freed. In 1997, writer Ken Penders attempted to send the series off with its 50th issue in the “Endgame” arc, a climactic finale in which Dr. Robotnik became a techno-fascist dictator, while Sonic belonged to a team of anthropomorphic freedom fighters creatively named “the Freedom Fighters.” But when SatAM was canceled after two seasons, Archie’s team thought the comic’s days were numbered. How did it get to this point? The upheaval all comes back to one influential contributor by the name of Ken Penders.Īrchie Comics’ Sonic the Hedgehog was a spinoff of a spinoff, its premise taken loosely from the 1993 Saturday morning cartoon of the same name (unofficially dubbed “ SatAM” by series fans), which itself is based on the video games. And the comics were weird: in an issue of Knuckles the Echidna from the era, an armadillo quotes Bugs Bunny and hoists a hospital bed over his head as he trips on acid.īy the late 2000s this series and its hundreds of characters would be at the center of a grueling legal battle, one that has sparked outrage in the Sonic fandom and forever changed the course of the long-running franchise. To many American children, Sonic and his friends now existed primarily as comic-book characters. Sega’s follow-up to its Genesis home console, the Sega Saturn, was a total bust, and both Sonic cartoons had been canceled several years prior. Sonic the Hedgehog reads a comic book that wasn’t the center of a perilous intellectual-property dispute.īy 1998, just a few years after Sonic the Hedgehog’s debut, the blue blur was in trouble.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |