Sonic News

Slate magazine has put together this color spectrum of cartoon characters, which drew in some comic book characters as well.   
 

The original (and more interactive) article is here

Since this is my first blog post, I thought I’d share with you why I joined this humble website. As you can clearly see, I’m a fan of Venom and all relating symbiotes. What you probably don’t know about me is that I’m also a fan of the true blue hedgehog, Sonic. I have noticed that the Sonic fan base on this site is severely lacking, but I like writing about things I enjoy. If enough Sonic fans, like myself, notice this blog and ask for more Sonic the hedgehog related stuff, who am I to deny them their entertainment? But don’t leave yet symbiote fans! My first Blog will be about a Sonic character based on Venom and how he relates to the new person to dawn the alien costume, Flash Thompson.

 

So who is this silver, metallic turtle you ask? And how does he relate to the current Black Ops Venom? To answer this

 question we must go back… to the beginning. God, that sounds so cliché doesn’t it?

“Flash” Thompson is known throughout the world as the bully to Peter Parker, aka Spider-man. I’m not going to lie, I hate Flash with a passion I’ve always seen him as a bully, and through teenage experience, I hate bullies. Flash was also a huge Spidey fan which of course is ironic. Peter often “reminded himself” that he could easily beat down Flash and gain the respect he deserves, but “With great power comes great responsibility.” Now on with the turtle, Tommy Turtle, was a pretty minor character in the Sonic comics, but like Flash and Mac Gargan, he became popular when he became “Venom.” With Tommy’s experience, he was actually the Peter Parker in the situation. If you don’t know it already, Sonic can really be a douche sometimes. Sonic is all about speed, and Tommy being a turtle is all about… slow. Princess Sally, Sonic’s “girl” in the comics, really liked Tommy despite what Sonic thought, Liz Allen anyone? Tommy finally got fed up with Sonic and challenged him to a race. If you ever heard of the tale, The Tortoise and the Hare (which I’m sure you have), then you know how the story ends. Sonic gains a new found respect for Tommy and they become friends, but it doesn’t last. The next day the evil Dr. Robotnik, most know him as Dr. Eggman, invades their home land, and Tommy is thought to have been captured and “turned into a robot.” Sonic has found Tommy 11 years later, but all is not well. A character named Sleuth “Doggy” Dawg (I know…. I know…) has lured Sonic into a trap aaaaaaand…. (see right panel).
 

 
Tommy sacrificed himself to save a person he never really knew before he disappeared; if that’s not friendship I don’t know what is. One can’t help but think of Flash’s sacrifice to save his platoon in the war. He took several shots in the legs and ultimately looses them, his reason for his sacrifice is because it’s simply what Spider-man would have done.

A fake robot version of Tommy, this “Infiltrator,” would become Sonic’s friend and try to kill Sonic in his sleep. This robot would also gravely injure Sonic’s robot father who almost died because of his injury, the robot would be defeated by Sonic and his father would be healed, or “fixed up” because he is a robot haha. This particular story came out in 2004 along with the contradictory “Venomous” story in Marvel Knights Spider-man in which Eddie Brock “hangs up” the costume and sold it to Angelo Fortunato, but would abandon him and stick with Mac Gargan. This was the first time that I thought of Tommy possibly being a Venom character. Attacking Sonic’s family similarly how Eddie Brock once operated.

One issue later we find out that the real like the legit Tommy is still alive, Sonic rescues him without explaining how he survived and he spends his time on the “Geek Squad” of the Freedom Fighters.

Now here is when it gets interesting. The Geek Squad is examining some nanites they have obtained from Dr. Robotnik. Tommy, being the soft-hearted guy that he is, believes the nanites are alive, but the nanites are unresponsive. Everyone gives up and leaves Tommy alone with the nanites. Tommy cries and a single tear activates the nanites and… (read left then right panels)

 

 

As soon as I read this for the first time I thought to myself: “They aren’t doing what I think they’re doing are they? Oh god I think they are.” I believe like any person that is a fan of two things, you love it when they come together like crossovers, this wasn’t technically a crossover but I was overjoyed. Flash with the whole: “Lieutenant Dan you ain’t got no legs,” thing embraces the Venom symbiote, despite truly knowing the true damage the symbiote can deal on a person, so he can walk and feel like the person who encouraged him to sacrifice his legs to save his platoon, Spider-man. Both of these characters are able to sprout in that Tommy can now fly and Flash can walk again and all seems fine and dandy.

To understand what happens to Tommy to send everything down hill, you need to know about one other character, the AI known as ADAM. ADAM is Dr. Robotnik’s AI son who has caused many problems to Sonic and the gang over the years, even things under his father’s giant pink nose. When his father ultimately finds out about his son’s doings, he has him destroyed, but ADAM is no fool, he finds one last place he can download himself into.  
 

 
 
 
 

ADAM is able to take over Tommy’s symbiotic nanites and control him using Tommy as a host. Like Flash, Tommy is originally able to control his symbiote but loses control unleashing the true monster. ADAM simply wishes to please his father, problem is… Dr. Robotnik thinks his son is insane. ADAM uses Shadow the Hedgehog and Tails to summon all the chaos emeralds in the universe so he can rule the known universe, and yet his father still doesn’t accept him… tragic. That father/son relationship does remind me of Eddie Brock and his journalist days, all Eddie wanted to do was please his father and when he supposedly hit gold with the Sinner Eater story, his father rejects him for hiding a murderer’s identity. Sure Flash has a bad relationship with his dad but… eh… Eddie’s story seemed more relevant. Sonic shows up…ADAM speaks in 3 person… wait 3 person? AWESOME! Sonic is forced to fight one of his best friends being possessed by a villain he has been facing for years. Of course this is similar to Peter having to fight one of his best friends as Venom, difference is… Peter doesn’t know Flash is the new Venom yet. ADAM knows Sonic could never kill Tommy so he uses this to his advantage and Sonic tries to lighten up on the fighting. With all the millions of chaos emeralds around them, Sonic turns into Super Sonic and ADAM turns into….Super ADAM? Dr. Robotnik frees Super Shadow and Super Tails who take care of the chaos emeralds… but that’s not important is it? Tommy is able to gain control of the ADAM nanites and sacrifices himself to rid of ADAM once and for all. Looking back on the way Tommy’s life ended, will Flash come to the same fate? Its only a matter of time before Peter finds out that Flash is Venom, and after that… then what? Will Peter hesitate to defeat the symbiote knowing Flash is wearing it? The Venom symbiote has tortured and terrorized Peter’s loved ones for so long and at this point I don’t believe I wouldn’t mind to see it, along with Flash, go out this way. I have expressed that I dislike Flash, but seeing him sacrifice himself would be the ultimate proof of him wanting to be hero. I am sure that anything like this will not be happening anytime soon, but I am accepting Flash as a well put together Venom throughout each issue, thanks to the sacrifice of Tommy Turtle.

Well that’s it! My first blog! I would love to know what you think, and I hope to write many more to come. I didn't have enough room for all the photos but I am uploading them if you are curious. I already have an idea for the next one but I do listen to requests. So, thanks for reading this!

Okay, so almost everybody knows Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and Thor, but does anybody know Sonic the Hedgehog, the fastest thing alive, the one-and-only blue blur? Sure they do, they play the games. Does anybody read the comics? No, people prefer the Flash. Well, let me tell you what your missing. First of all, 2 series. That's it. StH (Sonic the Hedgehog) and SU (Sonic Universe). Read that, and you know everything that's happening on Mobius. Now, what is Mobius, you ask? Mobius is our planet after an alien race known as the Xorda basically destroys it. It repopulates with 3 main races: Mobian, the human-like animals of Mobius, and the primary race. Sonic himself, for example. Overlanders, the evolved incarnations of humans. Dr. Eggman, for example. And last is the now mostly extinct Robians, the robotiziced Mobians. Robians were replaced by legionized people recently, or Mobians that are partially robotiziced and brainwashed as a member of the Dark Egg Legion. If I were to name an example, you would've said "who's he/she?", but I'll say that Sonic's father is a Robian.  
So what's this comic about? It's about the continual adventures of the fastest thing alive and his friends. There's adventure, action, mystery, romance, and even little educational values (but don't let that throw you off). In this continuity, Sonic has more friends than in the games, but also more villians. Aside from Robotnik and his succesor, Eggman, there's the traitorous lackey for Eggman, Snively, the evil wizard Ixis Naugus, the evil Sonic, Scourge, and many more.  
So do yourself a favor, and next time your at your local comic shop, spend 3 bucks on the newest issue. You won't be dissapointed. 
(Note: For more information on Sonic and his friends, check out the following websites: 

• The Mobius Encyclopedia:   http://archiesonic.wikia.com/wiki/The_Archie_Sonic_Wiki
• The official Sonic the Hedge-blog, hosted by the writer of the comic, Ian Flynn: http://www.archiecomics.com/blog/sonic/
• bwrosas' YouTube channel, a channel mostly dedicated to the user's opinions on both Sonic comics and games: http://www.youtube.com/user/bwrosas#p/a

Like I said, you won't be dissapointed.)

Who read issue 225?! I seriously wonder what the death egg does this time! AND WHAT IS UP WITH THE WORLD TURNING WHITE! IT IS SO ANNOYING! 

Although this post JUST appeared on my personal blog today, I wrote it a couple weeks ago before reading the various comic issues I've reviewed on this site.  Another future blog post will followup on what I talk about here.

Recently I was thinking about cataloguing my comic books.  Recent family events convinced me to get on with it and so I spent all weekend putting the information into the KDE collection database Tellico.  It had lots of useful fields to fill out, so I figured I was probably only going to do this once and so I may as well do it correctly.  I entered in the names of the writers, pencillers, inkers, and so on.  And I learned some interesting stuff.

 

I collected comics during my middle school years.  I had bought some books here and there before that, but the nearest comic shop was kinda far from our house.  It was in middle school when I finally had enough weekly allowance money to collect some titles and they were available in the magazine rack at the Incredible Universe, a Best Buy-like store, which we visited at least once a month.  So for a three year time-span I collected comics.  Then I discovered girls and my allowance had to cover the costs of taking them on dates and to cheap dinners, so comics had to go.  Recently I’ve been catching up on some of the big comic book events I missed in the intervening years like the excellent Batman Story “The Killing Joke”.  And my wife has even gotten into the Buffy Season 8 comics.

It was fun going back over the books and skimming them as I put the data in.  There were ads for TV shows, movies, and products long gone.  And I realized that lots of the titles were puns or references to literature that I didn’t understand at that age.  In fact, when I get to an entertainment lull (when I run out of video games to play) I’m thinking of going back through some of the books to see what I didn’t get as a kid.  I was a really bright kid who read above my age, vocabulary-wise, but there are certain jokes you can only understand when you’re older.  I’m also thinking of going to the local shop and buying some books around the Onslaught story-line.  I was avidly collecting books in that story and then some well-meaning church jerk told my mom that magic the gathering was Satanist and that they were playing it at the Comic Shop.  So I was never able to finish the story.

I was always more of a Marvel guy than DC Comics.  This is proven by the fact that I have over twice as many Marvel comics as DC Comics.  And I wouldn’t even have that many DC Comics if a relative hadn’t given me a bunch of comics as a present.  Partially it was because I related a lot more to the mutant, outcast theme of the Marvel universe.  A lot of the heroes in the Marvel Universe had their powers thrust upon them.  And the X-Men even took this further and made it a metaphor for puberty, a metaphor I was at the perfect age to understand.  And the X-Men also represented minorities to me.  By contrast, the two DC heroes I knew – Batman and Superman were completely different.  Superman was an alien who, depending on the writer, was a Mary Sue.  (Proof: So many writers have a hard time writing for him in our cynical post-1970s world) Batman had no super powers – he just chose to be a detective.  In fact, where most of the Marvel characters – good or bad – had their powers thrust upon them, in the DC universe that only happened to the villians – especially in Batman’s Rogues Gallery.  It was the reason they went mad.  I was also exposed to more Marvel cartoons at the time than DC.  I can’t remember if I was exposed to Batman: The Animated Series at this time or if I saw it later in life (either in reruns or first-runs), but my main experience of Batman was the old Bam-Pow Adam West Batman that used to play on cable TV.  If I’d known what Batman had become in the 1980s and early 1990s, I think I may have really been into Batman.  I know I’m attracted to Batman as an adult because his fiction is the most “real”.  He’s just a detective with a knowledge of martial arts and an unlimited bank account.  While most super heroes are fantasy – many, many dissertations have been written on super heroes as our modern mythology (replacement for Zeuss, et al) – Batman is closer to science fiction or a slightly more technological present.  I think my dislike of DC Comics was also partially because they appeared to be written for a slightly older audience and so it didn’t appeal to me as much?  The example I always liked to use was this Superman comic I had where he gets home and this mermaid is in his bathtub, naked.  She is covering her breasts with her arms in the universal symbol for “if this was rated R, you’d see my breasts” rather than having a clamshell bra or something.  As far as I can remember, Marvel never had those types of fan service shots during the time period I was reading (mid-1990s). They were clearly pushing the envelope on what they could get away with a little harder than Marvel.  So maybe more of the plotting went over my head and so I was bored.

I was really into the Sonic the Hedgehog books after the way too short-lived Sonic series on ABC.  Unlike the dumb one on UPN and the current one, it was pretty serious and dark for a Saturday morning cartoon.  That’s what I appreciated in Anime at the time – a refusal to say that cartoons had to be kooky – they could be serious and not just for little kids.  I even had a subscription to the magazine for a while so I didn’t have to depend upon finding it at Incredible Universe.  So I thought I’d have more Sonic books than anything else, but actually Marvel beats it by twice as much.  However, I did have more Sonic books than any other specific Marvel franchise.

Speaking of franchises, I rediscovered one thing that annoyed me about the comic book industry back then – I’m not sure if it’s improved since then – spreading out characters over a bunch of books.  I had to use the keyword field of Tellico to accurately count how many Spider-Man comics I had because there was Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man, and Spectacular Spider-Man, among other books.  The positive way of looking at that would be that it allowed the publisher to continue a story without waiting for a whole month to pass.  The cynical way of looking at it is that it forced you to collect three different books (or more) a month just to keep up with what was going on with one character.  And that’s assuming you only followed one character!  For an industry ostensibly aimed at kids, that’s an expensive proposition.

I always considered myself to be a Fantastic Four and Spider-Man guy.  I loved Spider-Man’s witty quips (which I really missed in the latest movie trilogy) and his personal tragedy.  With Fantastic Four, Thing was also quite witty and I loved the love-hate relationship between Thing and The Human Torch.  I always considered Dan to be the X-Men fan.  And he bought most of the X-Men books and we’d reach each others’ books every month.  But, to my surprise, I actually have just as many X-Men books as I do Fantastic Four books.  And not many more Spider-Man books, actually.

I know my collection is too small to make any informed inferences, but inputting the data made me think of the creators for the first time ever and it was really neat to see the same names repeated over and over.  And it was also interesting to see when they changed.  Some people tended to write for just one book for a while – which makes sense.  If you want narrative consistency, you don’t want tons of different writers.  (Especially since that can lead to confusing retcons and so on) However, some people like Richard Starking seemed to do the lettering for all of Marvel’s books.  And, later on, he either left Marvel or started doing EVERYONE’S lettering.  Actually, a quick trip to Wikipedia shows that via his company COMICRAFT (which apeared next to his name nearly every time) expanded to provide lettering and fonts to nearly all the comic companies.

It was also interesting to see how the books rose in price along with inflation.  The cheapest book I have is marked as 65 cents on the front.  Then I have a few at $1.00.  When I was in peak comic book buying mode, the agreed upon value for the books was $1.50 with special issues nabbing $2.00.  DC Comics appears to have been ahead of the trend with their books costing $1.95 before Marvel came to that same price point.  I wonder how much new books cost nowadays.

Going through my comics definitely piqued my interest in the medium.  I’d like to explore some more of Alan Moore’s books.  And I’m always vacillating on whether or not to get Neil Gamain’s Sandman.  I’m also curious about how the Super Hero genre has evolved.  I know in 1997 Marvel relaunched their franchises with more modern origins due to the fact that most people my age and younger don’t relate to the atomic age, the Cold War, and all the tropes that go along with that.  But I’m curious more about how they’ve evolved the genre as a whole.  I know that Watchmen came out in the 1980s, but those types of disruptive, deconstructionist works of art tend to take time before they ripple through the industry.  They clearly had an impact on some of series by the time I got to them (Batman, for example), but have they continued to evolve or are costumed super heroes just as ridiculous as ever?  Also, would I be able to enjoy the books by the older companies as an adult?  I know a lot of the indie stuff is adult or adult enough that I can enjoy it – but what about the Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and so on?  Would I find the plots to unrealistic to be able to suspend my disbelief as an adult or would I find them as fascinating as any modern sci-fi or fantasy book?

I'm blogging now hmmmm... what should I write about? .............................................. ummmmmmmmm.................................................................. AHA! i really think characters like Bunnie, Antonie, and sally should be in the current Sonic games.It will make them more interesting. 

he is awesome

http://www.tssznews.com/2010/10/08/archie-prevailed-in-penders-copyright-case/
Remember that Ken Penders had made a copyright claim on his characters? well now he decided to drop this now and now read the news at the top now.