It’s more about how you have to read it that makes it strange.
Sonic The Hedgehog #50
Archie Comics Publications (June, 1999)
LETTERER: Jeff Powell
EDITOR: J.F. Gabrie
Tails & Amy Rose: “In The Beginning”
Why is the back-up feature at the start of the comic? I’ll explain when I review the main story, but it’s playing into the gimmick for said story, which thankfully didn’t include this one outside of placement.
WRITER: Ken Penders
PENCILER: Art Mawhinney
INKER: Jim Amash
COLORIST: Barry Grossman
“Retro Activity”
WRITER: Karl Bollers
PENCILER: Steven Butler
INKER: Pam Eklund
COLORIST: Frank Gagliardo
Amy brings Tails (well, he flies her there) to meet Jeremiah and the works of his grandfather, Kirby. Tails starts to read from a book by Kirby chronicling the early days of Mobius, how the Echidnas started civilizing first, but thought their knowledge too dangerous to share with the other anthro races, while the “human” Overlanders were just too violent. And so a squirrel named Alexander brought the other races together as a multicultural society in Mobotropolis, and agreed to be their first king.
I like seeing Amy and Tails hanging out. I don’t ship them, partly because she still has a crush on Sonic and partly because I remember what Archie did to age her up to where she was in the games. However, they have the potential to be really close friends, which is going to be ruined. As far as Penders’ attempt to explain after over 70 issues the history of Mobius is commendable, but in hindsight will be a losing situation for everyone.
On to the main story: Our strange satellite user is at it again. This time he uses a “time beam” to draw Knothole Village back into proper time alignment, but after that time will go crazy and destroy the planet. With Sally and Sonic’s parents among those trapped in Knothole as time goes backwards, Nate comes up with a way to use a Super Emerald to boost Sonic’s speed enough to draw the time beam away after Knothole realigns with space/time. The effect alters Sonic’s “Super Sonic” form to match each environment he runs through, and the final effect alter’s Sonic’s appearance, adding buckles to his shoes and changing his eye color and quill “hairdo”.
Yeah, this is just an excuse to fix Knothole and draw Sonic less like his DIC design (seen in the SatAM show, the syndicated series, and Sonic Underground to something closer to the games, and it won’t be the first alteration we’ll see to make that line-up happen. I can deal with that, though frankly the DIC design does match the Sega Genesis and Game Gear games.
What bothers me about this story is the way it’s written, and this goes into why the back-up feature is first and the letters column is at the beginning of the book rather than the end. The story is not told linearly. Instead, if you read in the usual order time keeps going into flashback from Sonic saving the day to when the satellite first fires the time beam. It’s not consistent either, so you can’t really read through from the “end” of the story to the beginning. You’ll have two or three pages of the story, then it flashes back to some minutes earlier. It makes for a very annoying read for a gimmick that really doesn’t play as well as intended with the plot.
Too bad, because it could have been an interesting story, and thus the back-up story is more interesting than the main story despite being a few pages of Tails reading a book to Amy after she brings him to the library. Somebody should have thought this gimmick out better before using it.
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