Archie Sonic: An Introduction

 I don't remember a lot of my early childhood, but there is one memory that will forever stick out in my mind. I don't know how old I was (maybe 7 or 8), but I do know where it happened: in a Books A Million in Paducah, Kentucky. I was visiting my grandparents for a few days, as we often did at least a couple times a year, and my grandpa took me and my siblings to BAM one afternoon because frankly, I was destined to be a nerd from birth. I walked to the very back of the store, and I immediately focused on one thing, a single comic book that stood out from every other on the shelf: 

I didn't know who that weird-looking Metal Sonic was, why Knuckles was pink, or who that weird red guy in the corner was, but I knew one thing. This book had Super Sonic, and more importantly, it had Vector, my absolute favorite Sonic character at that age, and so it was destined for me to have it. Little did I know that this would be a canon event, turning a simple childhood hobby into a lifelong obsession. This wasn't your average, everyday Sonic... this was... ADVANCED Sonic.

Or at least, Archie Sonic anyway. "Sonic Advance" is a whole other thing, and not one I particularly care too much about (although I did play my fair share of Ultimate Flash Sonic back in the day for anyone who remembers that- PEAK 2000s nostalgia).

Anyway, if you're coming onto this blog with even a passing knowledge of Archie Sonic, there's a tagline you've almost certainly come across even if you don't remember it: "Welcome to the Sonic comic universe- a world unique and beyond what you know from the SEGA games! Where Sonic and the heroic Freedom Fighters work to save the world from the forces of evil!" As I would very quickly find just in this book I picked up, "unique" and "beyond the games" doesn't even BEGIN to describe it. I opened this book and I was hit with THIS:

And THIS:

And THIS:

Needless to say, I didn't understand even a third of what I was reading, but when you're a small child and you don't entirely know what to make of this new, weird thing in front of you, your imagination runs wild trying to make sense of it all. This truly was a world unique and unlike any I had ever seen, and I simply HAD to know more about it. Especially when the "Mecha Sonic vs Mecha Knuckles" story shown above (Mecha Madness) ended on a nasty cliffhanger, and proudly advertised the exact book I needed to find in order to get the rest of the story:

I went back to BAM the second I could in order to find this book, and lo and behold, there was an entire SHELF dedicated to this comic, with Sonic Archives, Sonic Selects, and Sonic Saga Series, and the crown jewel, the Archie Sonic Encyclopedia. The rest, as they say, was history. 

Unfortunately, it would be just a couple of years after I became obsessed with this comic that certain real-world events would make collecting it much harder, and the universe itself that I had grown to love so much would be wiped almost entirely, starting from scratch. And to add irony to injury, the person responsible for all of this was also the same man who wrote the very first issue collected in that Sonic Select book that started me on this path in the first place. If you know Archie Sonic at all, you already know who I'm talking about: Ken Penders.

But as a kid, I didn't know any of this stuff was going on. I didn't even know there was a reboot until I picked up the very last Sonic Select, which happened to contain the story that started it off. I was incredibly confused and upset to see this world I loved changing for seemingly no reason, and it was only after going online that I found out about the behind-the-scenes drama that triggered this disaster. It made me extremely sad, and it would be only the beginning of an increasing series of disappointments I would have the more I learned about Penders, both from looking at his work with a more critical eye as I got older and from what I learned about him just in general.

Still, I persisted. I continued to collect the older stuff whenever I could, even as I was getting to the point where I was noticing problems with it that I hadn't when I was younger. I also gave the reboot universe a shot, because despite my frustrations, it still had a few of the characters I had grown attached to, and I wasn't just about to let them go. I got myself invested in the incredibly long-winded, weirdly paced adaptation of Sonic Unleashed, watched them set up a solid foundation for this new world, and just when it was going somewhere- oh. It's over. The whole comic. Forever.

To Sega's credit, they did try to soften the blow by announcing the new IDW comic the very next day, so we knew Sonic comics weren't dead, but it wasn't enough for me. I knew that the Archie Freedom Fighters were nowhere to be found in the games (YES I know about their Spinball cameo, but it's not canon and also that game is complete garbage, so it doesn't count). I was almost certain that this IDW book, seemingly sticking solely with the game universe, would never feature them, and the thought of losing the last of what I had from Archie was incredibly devastating. Sadly, I was proven right within months; as Tarkin might put it, the last remnants of the old comic had been swept away.

It also didn't help that this was around the time where the Sonic franchise as a whole was at probably its single lowest point in terms of online reputation. The Sonic Boom franchise had just crashed and burned, Forces came out to mediocre critic scores and one of the worst stories of any Sonic game, and just a couple years later we had that awful first movie trailer that still lives in infamy. The only "success" was Sonic Mania, which just reinforced the idea to people that Sonic should have stayed in the 90s and every time he tried to be "unique" he was destined to failure. The fact that the single most unique Sonic universe I knew was fully dead, and IDW would quickly prove to not be a suitable replacement (as it was entirely canon to the main games, and thus, not its own thing), made it seem like Sonic as a franchise was on its deathbed.

                                           Still cannot believe this line is real

Things have turned around for the franchise since then. The movie was fixed, and went on to build a successful, solid trilogy. The games improved significantly and went back to telling interesting, dynamic stories again. Sonic Prime was... a thing. (Sonic has always been kind of bad at making TV if I'm being honest, so the fact that Prime was watchable at all was actually better than I had expected.)

But to this day, there has never been anything quite like Archie Sonic to me. The more I've learned, both about the book itself and the extensive behind-the-scenes history involved in its production, the more I've come to realize it is a truly different beast from almost any other kind of media I've encountered. Some of it is bad- REAL bad. And some of it is about the best children's entertainment you can find. And a solid chunk is right across the middle. But no matter the quality, one thing is certain: this book is WEIRD. And that's why I'm writing this blog. To let you know all my thoughts about this great, terrible, one-of-a-kind fever dream of a comic.

I'm going to try and write a review for every single issue of this book across the entire run, from the main book to all the spinoffs and crossovers, to give you a full rundown of what makes this book so special to me, and to hopefully also be a platform to engage with people and be able to share my personal life experiences and worldview along the way. Because ultimately, that's a big part of why we tell stories in the first place: to connect with the people and the world around us, and to share our experiences.

This isn't going to be easy. Some of these comics during the first half are REALLY terrible, and as a small confession, I haven't actually read every issue front to back, so some of these will be a first-time experience. We'll travel through Gallagher puns, a near endless number of Echidnas, and so many half-baked, terrible love triangles that you'll need a flow chart just to keep track of them all. And all of this will be accompanied with art that fluctuates wildly in both quality and style from story to story and issue to issue. But when things get rough, there's just one thing we all need to keep in mind: Issue 160 will be here eventually, and Ian Flynn will come save us all. 

In the meantime, as Sonic himself would say:

Brace yourself. It's going to be a wild ride.