Sonic 1991 Origin Comic Scan (from Superman Blackout #4)

I've never understood the compulsion in the West to explain Sonic's blue color and stylized spines, and I doubt I ever will.

 

Good work! It's nice to finally have some hi-res scans of these.

But wow, the art is rough at any resolution. Was it inked with a dull stick?

It's so weird. A large, bipedal, talking hedgehog who can run hundreds of miles per hour? No problem! But he's BLUE? That warrants an explanation!

 

The more I think about what's going on with Robtnik in the second panel, the more bizarre it gets. Did he just crash for no reason aside from out of pure RAGE? Did he just try to Egg Viper into Sonic but fail? Did his wrecking ball get stuck in the grass and he followed suit?

Answers on a postcard please...

 

Ah, such an influential comic. This thing practically set the franchise's standards of bad localization changes and lazy western art that can't decide whether Sonic is supposed to be sporting a mohawk or not...

 

The art looks terrible. I would have HATED this as a kid. Great kitsch, though! Thanks for the scans.

 

I find this comic oddly charming, in it's own way. It's kind of interesting to see how the American Sonic was really ULTRA RADICAL™ way before Sonic Adventure, when in Japan the focus was more on making him look cute.

 

Early Japanese Sonic was quite hardcore too. There was Madonna in the early Sonic 1 concepts, that promotional Sonic 1 manga that depicted him as a fanged rock star whose audience included a bunch of anime babes in skimpy getups, and the OVA that gave him an aloof and uncute personality. I believe it was mostly the Japanese merchandising that emphasized the cute aspect.

 

Pretty sure I've got a mini issue of STC #1 (postcard sized) somewhere, might try and dig it out...

 

Sonic 1, 2 and CD also kind of did that, I feel like they started trying to make him look more cool with the new sprites he got in 3.

 

I'd say CD also attempted to de-emphasize his cuteness and make him cooler or more aggressive, with his permanent frown on the Japanese official art (contrast with previous games' artworks) and FMVs, the infamous "I'm outta here!" game over, and possibly the hidden DJ illustration.

 

I remember this - it was a preview issue of sorts, wasn't it? Can't remember exactly what was in it, but it was smaller sized than a regular issue, had the same cover as #1... I'm pretty sure the Sonic strip was truncated too, so you had to wait for the full issue to see how it ended? Might be misremembering that last bit, though.

 

The StC mini mag was included with one of the Sega mags of the time wasn't it?

I remember a rival publication being quite scathing of it...!

 

I believe this is a condensed version of this comic:
http://info.sonicret...omotional_comic)

 

I think the URL you linked is a bit brok'd, try this one. :v:

Although blimey, reading the full comic is a head-scratcher. Robotnik seems to match Sonic's speed both in-vehicle and on-foot! They really didn't put as much emphasis into Sonic's speed as you would've thought they would have done back in the day.

 

It wasn't until years later that I realized Robotnik was supposed to be wearing glasses. Or at least, he was supposed to be wearing a lens on each eye.

But not this comic, or most Western illustrations.

 

I loved the demonic-hollow black eyes of all the western art at first, but I must confess when I saw Eggman's face close-up in Sonic 3D Blast for the first time, I saw the glasses and I thought "Oooh, that actually makes sense!"

Now looking back, the original western Robotnik looks odd to me, and AoStH Robotnik seems to have aged a lot better for some reason!

 

Same. I initially accepted the black eyes, but started loathing them after being exposed to the Japanese design.

Come to think of it, it's interesting that Sonic 3D Blast went with the Japanese design despite having been developed exclusively for western markets by (for the most part) non-Japanese devs, with Japan skipping it (except for the Saturn version, which came out 3 years later). Did the franchise start moving away from localizations earlier than 1999? I recall the help files for the 1997 PC versions of Sonic 3D and S3K using the Japanese character art in the profiles, even though the former never came out on Japan. In addition, S&KC featured the Japanese storyline in the manual and help file in every region, and its US box art had a rather Japanese-looking Sonic, despite said art being exclusive to that region.

 

The Saturn era was about the time when they started moving away from design localisations. Sonic Jam for example used the same artwork for the box art for all three regions (Well the character art anyway, all the backgrounds were different), and Sonic R, another western developed game, used renders that were more consistent with the Japanese designs.

As far as a design timeline I guess it'd probably be something like this:

1990 - 1993/1994 - Initial US design (Mohawk spine Sonic, Black void eyed Robotnik)
1993/1994 - 1996 - 2nd US design (No more mohwak but still American stylized, AoSTH Robotnik)
1996 - 1999 - Japanese designs but Eggman was still referred to as Robotnik

 

Ah, makes sense. Games had adopted more detailed graphics by 1996, so the design discrepancies between western art and in-game graphics would have become far more evident. Add to that the fact that Sonic Jam, which included has a myriad of artworks, as well as the FMVs, was about to come out the following year. No way they were recreating all that content, and cutting it would have meant removing nearly all of the facilities in Sonic World, severely crippling the game's extras. They probably realized that keeping region-specific designs was no longer worth the trouble.