Been poking around for some Comic Books to test out this new reader program thing, and was surprised to find that the old Saturday morning Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon I remember from my childhood was apparently still going, in comic book form, 15-odd years later. I checked it out for the sake of nostalgia, and found that it had aged pretty well, and the recent stuff wasn't actually a terrible read. They seem to have avoided the shark-jumping and angstfest that became the game series, but had still given the characters and their stories some welcome depth. I found this blurb both a bit funny, and surprisingly sad:
For the first time, I actually felt a tiny bit of sympathy for a character who has seemed, through his various incarnations, to be little more than a flat, maniacal villain. Later on, after his descent into madness is complete, the authors also took the chance to slip in a few in-jokes and references, which made me grin too.
Holy shit. I used to think I was the only person who had ever at any time given a shit about that comic. The "shark-jumping and angstfest" was not avoided, and it did not age well. Back when the cartoon itself finally ended, Sega hired co-director Ken Penders as chief-editor for their then-new comic. By his own description, he spent twelve years doing his best to copy the 1970's Marvel comics he grew up with and give jobs to his wannabe-comic-people friends. I picked up an archive of the comic online, from the turn of the millennium and it was literally unreadable. Like, Awful Webcomic unreadable. And supposedly Sega hated it because it didn't even live up to their standards of quality, and survived as a brand by some miracle a business college could do a course study on.
Around 2005(?), Sega fired Penders and most of his core staff, and replaced him with Ian Flynn, a Goon who for years made his own crappy notebook-paper Sonic fancomics on the Internet. He supposedly knew real industry people who fronted him some writers, and for art hired a bunch of jukebox heroes off DeviantArt like Jon Gray, Jay Axer, Matt Herms (who colored that page, and whom I've met, awesome guy), and people emulating them.
Raging furries one and all, but it kinda comes with the territory.
I can't speak to the quality myself, but the stuff that comes up on /co/ from time to time is certainly good looking and well written. I've tried reading a few issues, but Flynn is famous for tying up loose plots at the expense of humor or interest, so I have no fucking clue what's going on. But hey, I got to ramble some of my weirdly specific experience with shit no one cares about, so thanks for the post.
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 16272836 times)