Sonic the Hedgehog IDW Comic Megathread

It's the Fiscal Year of Shadow, clearly.

 

Don't know about these anti-IDW types but issue75 is one of the worst they've done so far, everything got rushed.

 

I've got to reason the arc over again, but I don't think I enjoyed this as much as Battle for the Empire.

 

Humble Bundle is currently running a sale on the Sonic IDW comics.

12 bucks gets you the digital releases of 30th anniversary collection, Volumes 1-8, Scrapnik Island, and 2 mostly redundant volumes.

 

Got around to reading issue #75 today. Not bad on its own, but compared to the last big milestone arc this one came off a bit flat. I still need to reread the whole thing, but my memory is telling me that most of the opportunities for big moments didn't lead to anything.

Spoiler: ramble

Mimic's identity is finally revealed, not through Tangle and Whisper's probing, or Lanolin's own deduction, but by complete accident. And then he just leaves, with the actual consequences of that getting buried for "later" (per Tangle). Hopefully that actually does come up in the following issues. The Mimic minisode in the annual was really good, but I thought that was a sign that his arc in the main book would go somewhere.

Sonic's whole moonlight as the Phantom Rider mostly gets glossed over once the stakes raise. Considering that it fits the themes of deception and trust as seen with Mimic and Clutch, I was hoping that all of those beats would come together somehow. Maybe they still will.

Surge and Kit have dropped the pretense of friendship, riding off into the distance and threatening to beat Sonic some other time. I thought the decision to have them just... reappear all buddy-buddy had potential, but that whole saga seems to have had no lasting impact on them or anyone else.

Compare this to issue 50. Surge and Kit were still figuring out their dynamic, and they both had moments of interplay (and crises of identity) with/against their counterparts, Sonic and Tails. They also had a complicated relationship with Starline, but in #50 he was busy going up against Eggman, who he was still simping for right up until Eggman revealed he'd been playing him all along. Meanwhile, Belle and Metal Sonic were working out their shared legacy as creations of Eggman, complicated by the fact that Metal kept trying to kill her. On top of all that, there was the looming threat of Eggman corrupting the planet, playing off Surge's self-conception as an experiment gone wrong, making her wonder why Sonic spares him when he causes this much damage, reinforcing the "Sonic Cycle" philosophy that was Starline's whole deal. All of those themes and relationships had been building throughout the arc, and when the time came for the double-length issue, they paid off. The game characters didn't change much, but everyone else either learned something about themselves, showed an element of their personality that was latent before, or died.

This most recent arc's stakes seemed like they were going to be similarly character-driven, but they ended up getting mostly shafted in the climax, in favor of the physical/action-based danger of the ship crashing and other smaller fires to put out. None of that is bad, but when the comic has already shown a similar level of immediate danger before, and delivered a bunch of character drama at the same time... then that becomes my benchmark going forward.

I do think this arc had a good amount of good, small moments. ("Eggstreme Gear" still makes me chuckle.) The quality floor remains relatively high. But I kind of expected the big arc finale to have more big, impactful moments.

One thing that does feel like a significant development is the Resistance base being destroyed. As we get further away from Forces, it feels less and less relevant. It also frees up Jewel, Lanolin, and the Diamond Cutters to potentially be in more interesting places going forward. There are definitely enough plot threads set up in this issue (what does Eggman need Clutch for? Who took the Chaos Emerald? etc) that could pay off in interesting ways. But are they going to pay off? Or are they going to linger through most of the next arc and then fizzle out again?