Archie Sonic Comic Reviews: Introduction

As a kid, I was obsessed with Sonic the Hedgehog. I don’t know why. I can’t remember why. All I know is that the character and the world he inhabited was fascinating for me. One aspect, especially, captivated me. The Saturday Morning cartoon show, known by fans and henceforth as “SatAM,” became my favorite thing ever. The show premiered in September of 1993, which means I must have been around six years old when I first saw it.

Why the show fascinated me so much is a question I created this blog, back in 2010 and rarely updated since then, to answer. I could read into it. The show, about a group of rebels fighting against an evil empire for control of their own environment, appealed to the budding anti-authority, left-wing commie in me. Maybe the stark divide between heroes, on the side of nature, and villains, on the side of industry, spoke to me. Maybe I was just happy to see my favorite pop culture character running around in animation. Maybe I was a baby furry and thought Princess Sally was hot. Who knows?

But I’m not here to talk about SatAM.

As a seven year old kid, I wasn’t entirely aware what “cancellation” meant. So many of the shows I watched ran forever in syndication. The still new Cartoon Network provided my young brain with reruns of shows from the seventies and eighties. The idea of something leaving the airways forever wasn’t a concept I easily grasped. All I knew is my favorite hedgehog was on TV every weekend. And the next weekend, he wasn’t. I don’t even remember seeing the cliff-hanger the series ended on at the time. All I remember is wondering what the characters were up to. I wanted to see the adventure continue.

At the time, my sister, who is a decade older then me, was dating some nerd. He worked at our local comic book shop. One day, he brought over two issues of the “Sonic the Hedgehog” comic book published by Archie Comics, issues 17 and 18. My mind exploded. There was Sonic, along with Sally, Bunnie, and the rest of the crew, having new adventures and continuing their fictional lives. SatAM wasn’t on TV anymore but my favorite characters lived on.

I was elated. I already knew how to read but I think those comics taught me to read, if you understand my meaning. I grabbed them as often as I could. I had a subscription at the comic shop for a while. Some years down the road, I even had a by-mail subscription. Mostly, I remember picking the series up from the comics rack at my local Waldenbooks. Ironically, that tiny comic shop has outlived Waldenbooks and other big chain stores by many years.

The series has had many ups-and-downs over the years. The quality has varied wildly. I think my fandom for the series ran its hottest during the post-“Endgame” arc, when it seemed like things were really changing for the first time. During the doldrums of the Bollers/Penders years, when Sonic (who was actually Anti-Sonic) was screwing around with a bunch of different women, I nearly dropped the book. But I could never bring myself to stop reading. The Archie Sonic series has been a part of my life for twenty years. Things would just be weird without it.

When I first started this blog, before I abandoned it, one of the things I really wanted to do was go to the beginning of the Archie series, re-reading all of it. ALL OF IT. All the mini-series, one-shots, and spin-offs. All 283-plus issues of it. I plan to re-read all of these and review them all, hopefully bringing some sort of insight to the various changes the series has gone through over its unprecedented run.

Is this crazy? Yes. Am I committed to do it? Yes. Will I see the project through to its end? I have no idea. Will Hedgehogs Can’t Swim end up going back to not being updated in a few weeks? Probably. We’ll see. Through it all, maybe I can figure out why this series means so much to me.