“Too many chili dog references?”
Sonic The Hedgehog #109
Archie Comic Publications (June, 2002)
COLORISTS: Josh & Aimee Ray
EDITOR: J.F. Gabrie
“I Herd It Through The Pipeline”
WRITER: Benny Lee
PENCILER: Ron Lim
INKERS: Andrew Pepoy & Pam Eklund
LETTERER: Jeff Powell
Mina The Mongoose & Princess Sally: “The Crush!”
WRITER: Karl Bollers
PENCILER: J. Azer
INKERS: Andrew Pepoy & Pam Eklund
LETTERER: Jeff Powell
Knuckles The Echidna: “Reunification” finale
WRITER/LAYOUTS/INKS: Ken Penders
PENCILER: Dawn Best
LETTERER: Vickie Williams
Three stories and only one of them is anything close to interesting. Trying to shove that many stories into a normal size comic is going to lead into not having the time to do most of the right. I can’t even call one a “main story”. The cover story has Sonic, Rotor, Bunnie, and Sally going to the arctic to free Rotor’s heard from the hypnotic control and destroying Robo-Robotnik’s oil drilling operation. The style comes out of early Sonic The Hedgehog comics right down to the chapters breaks, way too many for the page count. The only interesting thing is that Sally can hear the Sword Of Acorns, how they break the spell, talking when nobody else can. The character models are also really off for the Freedom Fighters. I can tell it’s them but the style isn’t every accurate to Sega or what Archie was doing to this point.
Maybe if the second story wasn’t here there’d be more time to be interesting, but that wouldn’t explain the tone of the first story. This one, closer to what the series evolved into, is just Sally trying to explain Sonic to a lovesick Mina and learning the kiss wasn’t mutual. So why is Sally helping Mina? Were they trying to write Sally out because she was never in any games (until a recent virtual card game)? It’s really a pointless story if the comic is trying to go back to the old format where gags mattered more than characters. Also learned that Mina is a mongoose, not a hedgehog. Given her character model she looked closer to Sonic so I assumed hedgehog. I had to fix the tag, but I currently don’t feel like going back to the other reviews to see if I need to fix it there, so know that this is when I realized my blunder since her debut.
Knuckles has his arc concluded, as he takes a shot meant for Dimitri, Jani-Ca learning that Remington wasn’t shoot at Knuckles and isn’t responsible for his death. After stopping a couple of rouge Dark Legionaries from killing everyone, she returns home where her mother is forced to reveal the truth: Knuckles IS alive, Jani-Ca probably was in an alternate timeline, and in this one the ultra-powerful Knuckles was corrupted by his power and became the new Dark Legionnaire leader. This is closer to the story Penders tried to do once he secured the rights for everything he added to the Archie Knuckles lore and pretty much broke Archie’s Sonicverse as a result. Might have been interesting if the comic had more time.
Unless my collection is STILL misordered this is the last Sonic comic I bought for years, returning at the same time the Sonic Universe spinoff title started. I can see why. I don’t think I enjoyed a single comic I’ve read during this period. Hopefully the next period will be better, but I know why I dropped that one after the Mega Man crossover. I’ll be reviewing the comics I got prior to this site, and revisiting at least the early comics since the later ones are already properly reviewed from when they came out. That will end my current physical comic collection, so I need to see what I’ll be doing on Wednesdays once all the catching up is done. Prepare for another time skip in these reviews, then going back and forth between Sonic Universe and Sonic The Hedgehog.
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