Save Me, Sweet Nostalgia!

Ironically, I haven't drawn Sonic the Hedgehog in probably several years.

So, I’ve been doing a lot of studying lately while on the path toward making myself a fully certified librarian. A lot of studying does not entirely mean a lack of time to read, however! Recently, I’ve been going back through a wonderful digital collection of one of my favorite comic books back from what I was a kid: Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog.

Goodness this brings back so many memories...

Now, you should probably understand: I am a ridiculously huge Sonic fan. Comics, games, toys, shirts… if it had Sonic’s face on it in the 90’s, I probably owned it or was at least begging my parents to LET me own it. Heck, I’ve even got this really weird fist-sized ball that’s shaped like Sonic in the middle of his signature spin move. The spines are like fingergrips, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world to throw around one of my childhood icons like a  football.

Sonic’s comic series was no exception when it came to my fandom as a child. Sonic comics were the first comics that I ever owned or seriously read. I’d glanced at Spider-Man or X-Men stuff, but they just always had these big beefy guys on the covers with arms as thick as my thighs, and it never really grabbed me. When this one kid brought forth a Sonic the Hedgehog comic to me, it was like my brain exploded. I asked to borrow issue #03 to take home, and it was a no small feat to get me to return that issue to its owner. In no time at all, I had a subscription to the comic that ended up lasting for years and years to come. As my subscription started with #14, I even ordered the back issues to make sure I was completely caught up, including the pilot three-issue miniseries. When it came to comic books, for about four or five years, Sonic was it for me.

I kept a solid subscription until about issue #63 or so and stayed subscribed to the Knuckles comic for a little bit beyond that, but not much. The comic now is at or past #290 as of this writing (Actually, there is currently some concern about the comic being cancelled soon), and is noted as being one of the longest running Western comics in existence.

Clearly, I had good taste as a kid… Or so I thought.

You see, as I was reading through these old comics, working my way up to the point where I stopped as a teen to see what lays beyond, I was struck by a terrible realization:

These were not very good comics. In fact, some of them were, frankly… kinda bad.

I mean, yes, they were kids comics and many of the plots weren’t terribly deep because people in the media had this strange idea that children weren’t interested in dramatic story-telling or didn’t have the attention span to keep stories straight for more than thirty minutes, give or take commercial breaks. Even so, as I look back now, there were some serious problems with how the comic was presented, both in story and in art. In the art department, the comic switched artists at an insane rate. At the time, I didn’t know better, but it’s apparently not common to have the art style of your comic radically shift from issue to issue, or even from story to story within the SAME issue. Yes, style shifts are a thing and many artists come together to create any comic, but when your reader sees the characters looking like a Saturday morning cartoon in one issue:

And then looking like an attempt to draw Japanese anime in the next:

Oh Sonic... Why does your head look like a pine tree?

Then you’re going to have some reader confusion. Even for the artists, I can’t imagine this was terribly easy. Archie would bring on so many different artists that I think the art genuinely suffered due to the artists not having enough time to get familiar with the characters or setting.

There's so much wrong with the proportions in this panel,
and yet it's still endearing to me!

However, I can generally forgive goofy art. The artist above, Sam Maxwell, is one of my favorites and did really fun and expressive work in other issues, even if his art was often very silly and strange with proportions. What is much harder to get through is bad writing, and it was going through the later earlier issues where I remember why I stopped reading the Sonic comics.

I want you to look at this series of panels below:

 

Don't worry. You haven't missed anything.

So, if you haven’t read the comics, you probably have NO idea what’s going on here. Of course, you haven’t read the comics, so that’s fair. Let me explain to make it a bit more clear: A mammoth from ancient times came across a mystical Chaos Emerald and had it somehow implanted in his chest, giving him immortality. Now, thousands of years later, he decides to put on a cape and take over the world. He blasts our local heroes with Chaos Emerald energy to kill them, but they’re okay because they happen to be holding on to 50 magic rings that they somehow found in a portal on their way to fight him. They beat him down pretty badly but Mammoth escapes to the Chaos Emerald chamber in the floating island (you knew we were here already, didn’t you?) and tries to take the Emerald to increase his power (I think?) and then some techno-babble mystical goobledy-gook happens and… he’s an emerald now. Rather, he’s *inside* the Chaos Emerald and powering it even further, and the heroes really don’t know how this happens, but they’re okay with it.

Got all of that? No? Yeah, that’s the problem.

They built up to this story here and there through several issues, but even when this issue came as the ‘payoff’ for all of the build up, I had NO idea what was going on when I first read it as a child. After reading through it again with a much more advanced and literary-focused mind as an adult, I can safely say that I *still* have no idea what is all going on here. The story feels like a mess and the art doesn’t really convey what’s going on terribly well and, worst of all, it just doesn’t feel like ‘Sonic’. Of course, don’t get me wrong, I will be the first to say that I loved the characters in the comic and loved seeing stories that were outside of Sonic himself, but this came so far out of left field that I felt like I was reading a different comic.

Nowadays, the comic is much improved. Writing and art is much more consistent and the characters, though changed and having lost some of my favorites (*shakes fist at 'The Writer Who Shall Not Be Named'*), are still fun and excellent designs. I’m only starting to just scratch the surface of the more solid writing in the series now, as I’m at issue #71, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the rest.

So what’s the point of this write-up? Well, first, I wanted to share with you one of the most influential media experiences of my youth that helped to form me as an artist and lover of anthropomorphic media. It’s thanks to this comic series that I sought out other stories with all animal casts and tried my hand at making my own, and I am eternally thankful to it. Second, I wanted to also share the experience of looking back and taking off the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and realize that, even if something positively influenced us and left an incredible and lasting impression on our literary conscious, it’s certainly not without flaws. We can become stronger and more mature readers and writers when we can start to realize the differences between good and bad storytelling, even in the things that we love.

So what about you readers? Do you have any nostalgic cartoons or books that just haven't stood the test of time? Or do you have any favorite/least favorite memories from the Sonic comics yourself? Feel free to share!

Until next time, happy reading all!

-Chammy

Currently reading:

The Pursuit by Janet Evanovich (A Fox and Hare novel – and yes, that IS what drew me to check it out. I freely admit this)