Just a day at the beach.
Sonic The Hedgehog: Triple Trouble
Archie Comics (October, 1995)
COVER ART: Patrick Spaziante & Harvo
COLORIST: Barry Grossman
COVER COLORS: Heroic Age
LETTERER: Mindy Eisman
EDITOR: Scott Fulop
Sonic The Hedgehog: “Tttriple Tttrouble!!!”
WRITER: Mike Gallagher
PENCILER: Dave Manak
INKER: Harvo
Tails: “Submersible Rehearsal”
WRITER: Mike Galagher
PENCILER: Art Mawhinney
INKER: Rich Koslowski
Knuckles The Echidna: “First Contact”
WRITER/PENCILER: Ken Penders
INKER: Jon D’Agostino
An accident during Robotnik’s experiment causes a chaos emerald to be split in half. One shard embeds itself in the Floating Island and makes its way to that Chaos Emerald, which will cause an imbalance and destroy the island. As Knuckles deals with that and the mysterious Ancient Walkers, Sonic goes after the other half, which has created an unstable zone area, but is attacked by Nack The Weasel, a bounty hunter hired by Robotnik. He goes after the second half only to get taken out by Knuckles, who (eventually) works with Sonic to save the Island while the Walkers take the restored Chaos Emerald.
Not having played the game I still don’t think this is a good adaptation considering it seems Sonic goes through the whole game (or at least multiple levels of the game) in two pages and this is a Sega Game Gear game. Instead it feels more like a story inspired by the plot of the game, which is at least a good story.
In Tails’ adventure Rotor builds Tails his own submarine, but Princess Sally orders Rotor not to fill the crankcase with oil, essentially making it a huge bath toy. It seems kind of strange that she’d allow him to build a functional submarine but keep it unusable because she thinks Tails is too young. Not surprising the youngest Freedom Fighter is insulted but when a seagull covered in oil comes to him for help, Tails cleans him off and uses the Sea Fox to uncover the source of the oil, a Robotnik badnik named Octobot who is roboticizing the undersea denizens. Tails defeats the villainous machine and save the undersea animals.
This means I have the comic in the wrong spot in my collection. That’s easily fixed and I like that this opens Tails into having his own adventures. (There’s even a Tails solo game I wouldn’t mind playing to see if they did a good job with giving him his own game.) Sally’s reasoning is kind of dumb but it allows the plot to happen I guess. Sadly Tails doesn’t get his own series like Knuckles does, just a miniseries this is meant to help set up and a storyline in Sonic Universe down the line. Still, a good solo outing for my favorite Sonic character.
The Knuckles story is also set-up for his own miniseries. The mysterious Archimedes is back and secretly leads Knuckles to some leftover robots on the Island. Who he is and why Knuckles can’t see him is part of the hotheaded Echidna’s training. Sadly this one isn’t as good as a solo story as Tails’ story as it’s just laying the mysteries for Knuckles’ miniseries.
Through the questionable adaptation, odd reasoning to move the plot along, and clearly just set-up, it’s a good book overall.
BW Media Spotlight 