Sonic Super Special: Issue 3 - Sonic Firsts

 
Sonic Super Special: Issue 3 – Sonic Firsts
Publication Date: November 1997

These days, it’s very common for popular comic series to collect their issues in trade paperbacks. For a while there, the comic industry was counting on the popularity and sales of trade collections to save the industry. This is a habit that really picked up in the nineties, right around the peak of Sonic’s popularity. Despite this, Archie was very slow to catch onto this trend. They released the original “Sonic the Hedgehog” mini-series in trade in 2003. It wasn’t until 2006 that Archie started publishing the series in collected, chronological releases, with the “Sonic Archive” series. These days, there’s at least three on-going series of paperback collections, printing stories in color, black and white, from the distant past and the recent present. All of this is excluding digital reprints, which is the real future of comic book publishing.

Today, those older stories are very easy to find. When I first started reading the series, the only way to read those older “Sonic” stories was to dig up the original comics. That’s why the publication of “Sonic Firsts” was a big deal to me, back in 1997. Originally released as a proper trade paperback, loaded up with extras and goodies, the release was slimmed down for the third Sonic Super Special. It included the first appearances of Sonic the Hedgehog and the Freedom Fighters, Bunnie Rabbot, Super Sonic, and Knuckles the Echidna. In other words, stories from issue 0 of the original “Sonic” mini-series and issues 3, 4, and 13 of the on-going series. “Sonic Firsts” is how I first read these stories.

 
“Sonic Firsts” is not a perfect re-print. A few minor changes are made. Sally’s hair, blonde or brunette in the original printing, have been re-colored to the canonical red. Rotor, referred to as “Boomer” at the time, is called by his correct name. Other then that, things are the same. Instead of retracing familiar ground, writing new reviews of stories I covered just a few months back, let me take a different approach. Let me instead chronicle how these characters and their world changed between when these stories first appeared and when they re-appeared in 1997.

In “Don’t Cry for Me, Mobius!,” Sonic’s world is so much brighter and simpler then it was in 1997. Just the other day, when reviewing issue 54, I was noting how moody and complex Sonic had gotten. In this first appearance, he’s still a total joker, cracking puns at every oppretunity. Sally comes off as a comical straight woman, honestly a bit on the bitchy side. This is in contrast to the concentrated but conflicted leader she was, post-“Endgame.” Antoine, developing into an honorable solider, was the butt of Sonic’s pranks and jokes, remaining a wet blanket. Robotnik, a comic relief villain who posed little in the way of serious threats, was dead by '97. Rotor and Tails haven’t been changed too much, though everyone’s less sarcastic then they were back then. The story is awfully goofy. Though dated, Scott Shaw’s artwork is still appealing.

In “Rabbot Deployment,” Bunnie was mostly characterized by bad jokes about wanting to be a hairdresser. Thankfully, the book would drop that aspect of her personality quickly. Disappointingly, Bunnie still remains underutilized in the main book. She’s developed a romance with Antoine and has gotten a few stories to herself. Yet the defining Bunnie story still hadn't come along. Though a rightly beloved member of the Sonic’s universe, it would take a while longer for Archie to truly do anything with Bunnie. As for “Rabbot Deployment,” it’s still a very silly but mildly fun story. That scene of Bunnie dropping the BurroBot on its head remains amusing.

I’m not sure why Archie felt the need to high-light Super Sonic’s first appearance. Since “Lizard of Odd” first ran in issue 4, Super Sonic had only appeared one more time, in the “Super Sonic vs. Hyper Knuckles” one-shot. (Though his third appearance was just around the corner in issue 56.) In later years, Super Sonic’s appearance would signal that shit had gotten really bad. He was the nuclear option, a form so powerful that he was only called on when essential. UniverSalamander is such a silly threat that it’s hard to get too worried. Nevertheless, I still kind of like “Lizard of Odd,” just because its silliness is rather endearing. Super Sonic does boost Sonic’s already smug behavior to almost unmanageable levels.

Maybe the character that had grown the most since his first appearance is Knuckles the Echidna. In the time since “This Island Hedgehog,” Knuckles has gone from the sole echidna on the planet to having a girlfriend, a mom and dad, a bunch of grandfathers, an army of arch-enemies, and an entire city populated with his own species. Knuckles had also lost much of the gullibility that defined him at the time. Now, he’s far more cunning and confused about his world, though still pretty hot-headed. It’s not a high compliment but “This Island Hedgehog” is probably the best story in “Sonic Firsts.”

These days, “Sonic Firsts” is a truly antiquated artifact. If people want to read the first appearances of Sonic, Bunnie, or Knuckles, they can find the digital downloads on an app and have them on their computers, game systems, or phones in seconds. Back then, we relied on reprints like these to find the older stories. Are the older stories truly worth seeking out, for anyone but Sonic completest like me? Well, probably not. Yet just for nostalgia points, I have to give “Sonic Firsts” a [7/10.]