“Yesterday’s” Comic> Sonic The Hedgehog #72

“Great, reruns.”

Sonic The Hedgehog #72

Archie Comics Publications (July, 1999)

LETTERER: Jeff Powell

EDITOR: J.F. Gabrie

“I, Robotnik!”

WRITER: Karl Bollers

PENCILER: Steven Butler

INKER: Pam Eklund

COLORIST: Frank Gagliardo

Tales Of The Great War: “The Shot Heard Round The World”

WRITER: Ken Penders

PENICLER: Art Mawhinney

INKER: Jim Amash

COLORIST: Barry Grossman

In our main story, Rotor leaves to find his family. Before leaving, he and Nate bring television, called “telecrates”, to Mobius so King Acorn can deliver a speech to his subjects. (It’s how England got television, I think.) The signal is interrupted by a pirate broadcast with a very skewed history of the late Robotnik’s subjugation of the kingdom…but if he’s dead, who is that calling Snively a traitor for sabotaging the Ultimate Annihilator?

As you can guess, there’s not much story here to review. It’s all a heavily biased look at Robotnik’s history, and anyone who saw it, even if they didn’t know the real story, could tell the narrator was full of it. Oddly, the flashback uses the scene from the SatAM cartoon intro where Robotnik’s ship passes over Mobotropolis, but the narration sounds like it came from the syndicated Adventures version of Robotnik. I’m not sure why Rotor is off the cast, except that he and Nate together are a bit redundant as the “tech guy”, but this is hardly a decent sendoff to one of the main characters and I’m not sure why they created Nate if he makes Rotor redundant. I mean, it’s not like a comic book has to worry about actors leaving.

The back-up story is also quick to review. Tails and Amy begin reading about the early days of the war. A Mobian prince comes across an Overlander boy out target shooting. The prince tries to stop his new friend from shooting a bird, but thanks to his not knowing how guns work ends up accidentally shot. The Overlander kid panics and runs off, but it’s not what the prince’s arriving father sees.

It’s not a bad idea for how the war started. I’m not sure who gave a kid that age a handgun (he looks maybe 12), or it makes sense as to why Mobians don’t use gun-shaped weapons (Bruce Wayne this isn’t), but otherwise it’s a fair idea for how things went south for the talking animals and the humans.

Overall this mostly sets up the next phase of the Archie Sonic comics and gives us history of how the war started, and does both well enough.