Sonic the Comic
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Sonic the Comic was a UK children's comic published by Fleetway Editions between 1993 and 2002. It was the UK's official SEGA comic and was released every fortnight at 95 pence, later rising to £1.35 before the final issue.
The comic would usually contain four stories, each usually following different storylines and being written and drawn by different writers and artists. In the earlier issues at least one of these stories would be about a different Sega game (see below), the most notable exception being issue #100, where the whole comic told a single story in four chapters.
The comic featured the adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and his motley crew of freedom fighters as they struggled to liberate the planet Mobius from the control of the evil dictator, Doctor Ivo Robotnik.
Details
Starting before SatAM was released, the comic later took inspirations from it. For example, Troopers were used instead of SWATBots, which had a renegade general called Brutus, who fought against Robotnik and Sonic at the same time.
Sonic the Comic had quite some other original characters like Johnny Lightfoot, Porker Lewis, Tekno the Canary, Shortfuse the Cybernik, and Captain Plunder. Snively was replaced by Grimer, an old green scientist that despite being pathologically loyal to Robotnik, left him by the last issue as he realized how insane Robotnik had gotten.
The Chaotix appear in StC. Nack the Weasel was once a member of the group, but he betrayed them at one point. In StC, Vector the Crocodile, Charmy Bee, Espio the Chameleon, and Mighty the Armadillo are the Chaotix members. Many other sub-plots and storylines have appeared in the STC comics, such as Tails' adventures in his hometown of the Nameless Zone, Knuckles' quest for his ancestors, Shortfuse's adventures, the exploits of Dr Robotnik himself, and Amy Rose and Tekno the Canary's adventures through time and space. There were even a few occasional parodies of other icons, such as the Marxio Brothers.
It is considered StC's game adaptions are better than the ones in Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie) as the writers strived to keep the stories as true to the games as possible. Fans consider the Knuckles' Chaotix and Sonic CD's adaptions, featuring the Brotherhood of Metallix, to be the peak of the comic. (Other popular long-running stories included the Super Sonic Saga, The Drakon Empire saga, The Shanazar Saga and the Floating Island saga, which depicted the events of the Mega Drive games Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic and Knuckles.) However, future adaptions drifted further away from the game's stories, to the point that their Sonic Adventure adaptation was vastly different from the game's storyline, which was mostly caused by SEGA not giving them ANY info on the game- Nigel Kitching has stated the only image they had of Chaos was a small, blurry JPEG of Chaos 0. After this adaption, thanks to Egmont/Fleetway's policies regarding the market and audience, the comic stopped having new stories and went into reprints (as the executives concluded that the audience was refreshed every 5 years.) This caused the comic to lose more and more popularity, until it ended in 2002.
Other stories featured were based on various other SEGA video game titles, which included:
- Shinobi
- Streets of Rage
- Kid Chameleon
- Eternal Champions
- Golden Axe
- Decap Attack
The face of the comic was Megadroid, a cartoon robot built out of Sega Mega Drive parts. He answered reader letters and acted as a liaison between the readers and the 'humes who think they're in charge'.
External links
- The original STC mailing list, frequently posted to by popular writer Nigel Kitching
- STC Online
- The Message Zone
- STC Wiki
- Sonic the Comic at The Sonic Zone (scans of early STC issues are posted every week)