Sonic Super Digest: Issue 5

Sonic Super Digest: Issue 5
Publication Date: November 2013

In 2011, the Archie brass realized they had published a shit ton of “Sonic” comic stories. The comic had been running for practically twenty years, by that point. Including all the various spin-offs, that’s a lot of hedgehog tales. So Archie cashed in. In October of that year, they started publishing “Sonic Super Special Magazine,” a quarterly full-sized magazine comprised primarily of reprints of old stories. The next month, the company launched “Sonic Super Digest.” This series was also primarily devoted to reprints but the book’s were pocket-sized and were published bi-monthly.

Digest-sized reprints have a long history at Archie. I can recall, as a kid, seeing digest collections of old Archie – as in the company’s perpetually teenaged mascot – stories on magazine racks at grocery stores. I imagine the “Sonic” reprint collections served a similar purpose, to reach out to audiences outside of comic shops. The ideal situation was probably a bored kid picking up a digest or magazine at a book store, shopping center, or pharmacy. The stories would hooked them, leading to new subscriptions and digital back issue purchases. I guess this strategy worked, as Archie continued to publish the digest and magazines until they realized you can’t re-publish old stories without paying residues to their writers.

With them mostly being made up of reprints, I don’t normally feel the need to talk about the magazines or digests. However, starting in 2013, Archie would begin to slip new stories into these books. The first of which was “Sonic Jump,” from Digest #5. The story begins with Sonic wandering Green Hill Zone, when he spots Eggman up to his old tricks again: Gathering up defenseless animals for presumably nefarious reasons. Sonic smashes the Doc’s Egg-Mobile but the doctor escapes by flying upwardly. Sonic leaps off the zone’s floating platforms, attacking Eggman again and again, until he finally relents and lets his people go.

If it isn’t immediately obvious, “Sonic Jump” is another video game adaptation/advertisement. This time, Ian Flynn was called upon to adapt the mobile game of the same name. Remember that time, when stuff on your cellphones were going to revolutionize video gaming? I guess you can blame the massive popularity of shit like “Angry Birds” or “Candy Crush” for that. While extremely popular for a time, and undoubtedly still profitable, most mobile games being lazily designed garbage or “freemium” scams led serious hobbiests to abandon mobile gaming quickly. (As of this writing, free-to-play games with pricey add-ons like “Fortnite” are what’s currently popular. Some other fad might have eclipsed that by the time this is actually published.)

The video game “Sonic Jump” was an endless vertical platform jumping fest, in the vein of “Doodle Jump.” (Though the original version of “Sonic Jump,” released for T-Mobile phones, apparently predates it.) As you’d imagine, that set-up leaves little room for story. So the comic book “Sonic Jump” revolves around a hugely simplistic series of events. The height of this one’s tension involves Eggman using a force field to rotate rock debris around his ship. Naturally, Sonic just smashes the shit out of this as well. The plot is all-but nonexistent and the characters are reduced to their simplest versions. Flynn does throw in one moment of decent banter, when Sonic and Eggman criticize each other for their mutually predictable nature. That made me chuckle a tiny bit.

This five page advertisement does have one other thing going for it. The artwork is pretty nice! This story was drawn by Jennifer Hernandez, who previously penciled several “Off-Panel” stripes. Hernandez would quickly graduate to regular comic stories and is currently working on IDW’s “Sonic” book. She shows a lot of talent. Her character work is bright and cartoony. Her sense of action is decent. Hernandez’s stuff looks similar to Tracy Yardley but is rounder and cuter, perhaps more anime influenced than Yardley’s American cartooning style.

As for the rest of volume five of “Sonic Super Digest?” Like I said, it’s mostly reprints. The book contains a mixture of old stories and newer ones: “Olympic Trials” from “Sonic 242,” “Way Way Past Cool” from “Sonic 26,” “The Day Robotropolis Fell” from “Sonic 37,”  “Heart to Heart” from issue 237, “Foundation Work” from issue 238, “Fairytale” from 153, the last part of “Endangered Species” from 246, and “Hide and Seek and Destroy” from the 2010 FCBD special. All of them are identical to their original forms except for the “Endangered Species” installment, which edits its dialogue slightly to remove further references to Ken Penders’ ideas.

Aside from that, the digest contains a few uninspired extras, such as colorable versions of old covers or “pin-up” art, which is just title-free versions of other old covers. Unless you really want to read the new story, there’s no reason for long time Sonic devotees to look at this. “Sonic Jump” is barely worth a look either, ranking around a [4/10], maybe a [5/10] if I focus solely on Hernandez’ artwork, on the old Hedgehogs Can’t Swim scale.