Sonic the Hedgehog Comic

When it came to general comics like super heroes and action, I never really read that kind of stuff except for the tv or movie adaptations to them. So when somebody asks me if I knew about Batman and the different multiverse versions of him or something along the lines of that, I wouldn't be a good person to ask. Granted, whenever I went to a comic book or Barnes and Noble, I would skim through the comics to see what they were about. However, there was one comic I did read when I was younger that I absolutely loved and it was the Sonic the Hedgehog comic created by Archie comics.

You may be thinking that a comic based on the video game character would be a stupid idea. Well I thought that as well until I started reading it and then thought completely different about it.  The plot basically is about a group of humanoid creature called "The Freedom Fighters" that live on a planet called Mobius and they have to protect themselves from an evil anti nature fat scientist bastard called Dr. Robotnik. To help the Freedom fighters is a fast blue hedgehog by the name of Sonic who always finds some ways to thwart Robotnik's evil plans. At first, this seems like a perfect replica of what the games plot was about, but as soon as you start going through the issues, the plot gets a lot more complicated and more in depth about the world itself.

Yes, the characters from the game are there like Sonic, Tails and Robotnik, but a truckload of new characters are introduced exclusively in this series such as Princess Sally, a chipmunk princess who used to rule over a kingdom before Robotnik took over, Antoine, a stereotypical french coyote who guards the princess despite being cowardly (Really subtle about the French being cowardly Archie) and cyborg bunny girl with a western accent. These might sound like pretty goofy characters that you would see in a typical children's cartoon, but the way they flesh these characters out is quite impressive and all the backstory you see of these guys makes them feel like really people, or animals. I will say though that the comic sometimes introduced some shitty characters in the later issues when the first writer started to get a bit strange with the story telling.

There was one issue where Sonic was being blasted into space and then he ends up on a planet where these ant aliens are being attacker by giant bees or wasps and Sonic had to save them and then a couple issues later he meets up with an AI which he freed from Robotnik a long time ago who has now become some kind of space god and helps him get back to earth. But the craziest part is after that, the space god lands him on some kind of space courtroom where Sonic meets Tails's parents who somehow got into outer space.

There is some reason for why some of this stuff happens but I forget sometimes because the plot sometimes gets too complicated, I forget this a kids comic. Then later in the life cycle of the comic, somewhere after 225 issues, there was a dispute between the first writer and the new one where there was some kind of lawsuit which ended up having Archie retcon a whole bunch of stories and characters from before, therefore simplifying the comic.

But the reason I wanted to talk about this comic though. It shows that Archie took a character like Sonic the hedgehog and turned him into an epic tale of sci fi and fantasy with a whole bunch of insanity mixed in between. I know it's not for everybody, but I think it's worth looking at for the stories and the awesome comic book covers.

Web Comics

So for this post, I am going to describe all the webcomics I have read and what I think of them and the medium in general.

Ever since I got my first computer, I have always loved searching the internet looking for places to play games and look up interesting stuff. MY curiosity eventually led me to multiple sites which hosted comics you could read online for free.

 One of the first of them I read was one called Kid Radd which was a webcomic based on the life of a video game character who gets sucked out of a game and enters a worlds filled with characters who were also pulled out from there respective games and live a normal life without being controlled by human players. Think of it as Wreck it Ralph before Wreck it Ralph but somehow a lot deeper in terms of the characters and story telling. It was a sprite based comic, so everything was created in pixels and some of the panels were animated which I thought was very creative.

Later down the road, I discovered other kinds of webcomics that focused mostly on video game based humor like Penny Arcade and sadly, Vgcats. When I say sadly, I mean that I enjoyed Vgcats when I was younger but now looking back at it, I kind of feel ashamed. The humor is poorly done and the jokes are sick and gross just for the sake of it being sick and gross.

Penny Arcade on the other hand, still holds up pretty well and there are times where I found myself laughing at the strips really hard, especially some of the earlier issues. Granted, I haven't found myself checking that site anything soon recently, it's one of the more successful webcomics I read. I have met he creators once at a con, but they were kind of jerks, which is what other people said about meeting them. I suppose that's the way some people like to be, especially when they are incredibly successful millionaires like them.

There is a website I usually check out called The Bad Webcomic Wiki which consists of a shit load of terrible webcomics and this one guy reviews them all. I have to say, I did not realize what kind of horrendous stuff was out there until I saw this site. You even learn about the authors and you just wonder what in the fuck went on in their brains to create ungodly material such as this. There are some articles that are literally disturbing to read like for example, the Sonichu article which almost caused me to become blind and bleed out of my eyes.  It's like a damn David Lynch film, in fact, the history on the guy who made that comic is more fucked up than the lifetime of Robert Crumb. There are other memorable awful comics on there, but if you want to see the bottom of the barrel, there you go. Maybe a more appropriate terms is the bottom of the internet.

Anyway, there is a little more to me when it comes down to webcomics but I just wanted to talk about the ones I knew the best.