For years, I had heard things about the Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog series. People always spoke about how dark and edgy it was, and how it had overly complex storylines. I was very curious, particularly as I enjoy dark stories about light-hearted characters and am quite a Sonic fan. Recently, I finally got around to read it. Knowing there are so many of them, I read the first twenty-five in one chunk.
What was particularly surprising to me was the fact that, at first, it was very much one of the most slapstick interpretations of Sonic the Hedgehog that I’d come across. It was full off fourth wall-breaking joke, silly puns, and was generally just a series of very low stakes adventures for Sonic and his friends. I actually found a lot of them quite funny.
Generally speaking, they all deal with Sonic and friends (the Freedom Fighters) coming up against Robotnik in some form or another, but it slowly started to get more interesting – which is good, because it otherwise would have gotten old fast. One story showed countless different versions of Sonic from throughout the multiverse – one of which was an evil character called the Anti-Sonic (who become a recurring villain). Another saw Robotnik and the Freedom fighters somewhat on the same side as the came up against an alien foe.
Some of the comics are adaptations of the games too. Of course, back when this comic was coming out, the storylines of the Sonic the Hedgehog games were much more vaguely defined, meaning that they were still somewhat open to interpretation and it’s interesting to see how the writers on the comic interpreted things a differently to the mainstream interpretation you see in the modern games.
Speaking of which, I enjoyed the expanded cast of characters here, like Sally Acron as the leader of the Freedom fighters, Rotor as their tech guy, Bunnie a partially robotised rabbit character, and Antoine as a kind of stuck-up comic relief (who I think Sonic is actually kind of unfair too). Tails is also there, but he’s the only regular Sonic character that fans will recognised from the modern-day cast.
My absolute favourite aspect of the story, and the thing that was closest to being ‘dark’ or ‘edgy’ was the introduction of Sonic’s Uncle Chuck and his old dog. These characters were captured by Robotnik and turned into robots, which I thought was really sad and works well as a motivation for Sonic, while also serving to show that Robotnik really is capable of doing some pretty horrible things.
As a Sonic fan, I definitely enjoyed what I read of this comic and I will be reading more in future. I’m quite optimistic about the storylines I have yet to read and I think this is a pretty good start to the series. My only real criticism is that the fat jokes about Robotnik didn’t really age so well.
Rating: 8.2/10
