Sonic the Hedgehog IDW/Current Western Comic Megathread

C'mon, dude. If two random bird characters (that most people don't even remember exist) being gay bothers you, I think the problem is on you and not on the writing team.

 

Also like…what’s the issue, honestly? How does two side characters being gay really affect your enjoyment of the book? If you think it’s irksome that LGBTQ+ representation has “gone from 8 to 80”, imagine how they feel about the proportion of characters in media that are straight (hint: it’s a fucking lot of them)!

 

It really doesn't matter since Sega seems to be hell bent on not allowing any kind of romance or love in the Sonic series. Also I don't really care about the sexual preference of some birds so it really doesn't affect my enjoyment of the series and it shouldn't affect anyone else's either.
Good for the people that do care about it though, glad they have something to connect with.

 

So what you're saying is... we asexuals are finally getting representation!

I'm joking.

 

Truth be told, I'm not even reading the comics, so I shouldn't even comment on it. Not fair to those reading it and not worrying about it.
As I said, the change in global perception of diversity and inclusion may've been a bit too fast to me.
So far it hasn't been bothering me anywhere bad, but I'm always reading/hearing this story or that story got LGBTQ+ representation.
I want to be open-minded about it, but deep-down I may still be a bit old-fashioned and struggling with changes ^^"
And this when I barely worry about a character's ethnicy or skin color getting changed in a story...

So yeah, don't mind my misguided opinion on the matter. My bad.

 

I mean…it happens. I used to be the same myself when I was a teenager and change can be uneasy, but at the end of the day it represents huge steps forward to portray LGBTQ+ people respectfully in media because it greatly helps to normalise their existence, especially among young audiences. Takes a lot to admit where you’ve gone wrong, though, and being open minded is the way to go.

 

Nite also appeared in the 30th Anniversary Special during the Sonic Learns To Drive story. The artist of the story Mauro Fonseca drew a classic version of him inspired by Old Man Owl from the OVA, but SEGA decided not to use the design unfortunately. So now Nite just looks exactly the same in the Classic era and the Modern era.
Source: https://maurofonseca.tumblr.com/post/660451912933621760/sonic-learns-to-drive-some-thoughts-in

Spoiler: Final vs Early art

 

Do love that Saturn Logo microphone he has. I might look into a custom made of my own one day.

 

Not to be a horrible pedant about a dumb joke made like a page ago but it's been brewing for a while and I've gotta say... it kind of bugs me when people try to treat Surge as a replacement/discount/IDW version of Scourge when they are literally not even the same character, at all. Obviously I know that was not the intention of the joke + it should be noted that this absolutely isn't directed at anybody in particular but I see it around a fair bit and it bothers me, terribly.

Their character concepts are entirely different - Scourge is, at heart, a deconstruction of the "what about an alternate universe... where everybody's moralities were FLIPPED!1!11!!" trope that is so pervasive and yet so terribly uninteresting 90% of the time. Frankly, I'd go as far as to say his character is... well. a bit flat, from a purely in-story perspective. He's mostly just a jerk. Obviously there's a bit of nuance to it (his relationship to Fiona and whatever the heck was going on in that one backup issue with him & Jules immediately comes to mind), but mostly his goal in life is to be the biggest schoolyard bully and face 0 consequences for anything he does (it's really funny and I love him terribly for it) and that's really just about it (you could make the argument that he was kind of set up to fail by virtue of being born into Moebius which is really not conducive to becoming anything else (though frankly I think he would've just been a jerk anyways I think he really is just that kind of person) + the FASCINATING questions of morality and free will that arise as a result of Moebius' existence BUT I will spare you all the lengthy diatribe). Nonetheless, Scourge becomes a much much more fascinating character on a meta level. It's the question of "what if the AU version of the character actually hates the fact that they're the discount version of somebody else?" The reason he hates Sonic so much is because he hates the fact that he's considered a derivative of him by literally the universe itself. He's not his own person. So he tries to be the literal opposite of Sonic to break free from that, but ultimately ends up leaning into his universe-designated position as "Anti-Sonic" as a result.

Surge, on the other hand, is... not that even remotely. She's an entirely different person - yeah, based off of Sonic, but frankly she doesn't seem to have too many hangups on that in particular. She's not angry at him because his existence invalidates her own - she hates him because he's an extension of the world she blames for wronging her. He could've killed Starline & Eggman and prevented her life from being ruined, but he didn't. She's not out for revenge because she's an incredibly shallow jerk who wants to kick children down slides on the playground for fun, she's out for revenge because she's an incredibly traumatized individual whose lashing out at the people she blames for her current state in life. I could go on but I think you get the point - Surge is a much more nuanced and interesting character on a story level, but not so much on a meta level because that's not what she's supposed to be. She's not even the same character in the most bare-bones concept. Which is good! I'm glad they're not making a discount Scourge in IDW because that would be, frankly, incredibly lame. (edit: completely unrelated but now that i'm thinking about it surge arguably has more in common character-wise with fiona than scourge... something to ponder about later. its like . like surge is the abrasive attitude & color scheme of scourge combined with bits of fiona's backstory and parts of her relationship to eggman/sonic and. this is super irrelevant but im thinking about it now. hm. ok back to the topic at hand)

I feel like conflating the two is really a disservice to the both of them and honestly I feel like all of this could've been avoided had they simply not given her the name Surge. It's a cute homage and I wouldn't mind it inherently, but I feel like the problem becomes that Surge is always going to be compared against a character to which she really shouldn't be, because they're... two entirely different characters. Again, I'd like to reiterate that this isn't targeted at anybody in the thread, I've just been stewing on this for awhile and finally gotten the opportunity to soapbox a bit.

 

At their most basic, Scourge and Surge are just two more in a long line of evil Sonics. They're going to inevitably be compared to each other.

Look how many people still give Shadow shit for "replacing" Metal Sonic as the main evil doppelganger, even though both characters serve entirely different purposes.


Shallow interpretations are inevitable with a series as popular and well known as Sonic.

 

Honestly I just don't really agree that Surge is being overshadowed by Scourge in discussion. The most I've seen them brought up as similar is my own joke (which I made way back when Impostor Syndrome was first announced) and people bringing up Surge as a response to people who want Scourge back.

 

Honestly, I think it’s for the best that SEGA vetoed the classic Nite design. He doesn’t look like a classic version to me, but another character altogether.

 

That’s…extremely reductive. If you don’t like them that’s your prerogative but to say they’re the same is just objectively incorrect. If you think they’re the same for being “evil Sonic knockoffs”, you must think Metal and Shadow are the same, and Shadow and Knuckles are the same, and Sonic and Tails are the same and so on so forth.

(Obviously I’m being facetious but my point is that to say they’re the same pretty much foresakes anything more than their most basic attributes.)

 

Eeeeh, kinda. Loner rival with a mysterious past, friends who keep pestering him and getting him caught up in their shenanigans, dutiful guard to what they've promised to protect, both are 'needle' creatures in Japan...

 

That is indeed part of my point. It’s often said that Knuckles is the Piccolo to Shadow’s Vegeta, and I think it’s a fairly apt statement, but yet further proof that these characters are so much more than their surface level archetypes, as is also the case with Scourge and Surge.

Scourge is a bully with daddy issues who’s beef is that he’s a derivative of Sonic due to the way the Archie multiverse works. He will screw over everyone and everything to get what he wants and there’s no room in his heart for anyone but himself.

Meanwhile, Surge also feels as though she’s living in Sonic’s shadow, but due to somebody else’s insane designs that resulted in her past being stolen from her and not even knowing who she’s meant to be. She’s a terrible person but she’s also seriously hurting for valid reasons. Furthermore, she’s beginning to show genuine compassion for Kit and isn’t acting to raze the world just because she can like Scourge wanted to, but because she feels she’s justified in doing so because of the wrongs wrought against her.

 

I give the extra context on the link, but just for any onlookers in this forum- it's important to note that SEGA didn't actively refuse the design, but rather, due to the tight deadline, I just drew him like that directly on the page and hoped SEGA would understand why I drew him differently. They either didn't or just didn't want to deal with approving a new design last second, and therefore asked me to draw him with the existing approved design.

edit- making the difference clearer- it's not that they were offered a classic design and refused, it's that they were offered a page where a character was drawn drastically different and asked it to be corrected, because the design was never pitched as a design

 

Wonder how they'd react to someone who has a majorly different art style that tends to make the characters seem bigger doing the art for an issue and doing something similar.

I don't doubt their ability to catch something like that, but it'd be interesting if it slipped by.

 

People who have a surface level understanding of these things aren't looking for the nuances in these characters.

So they're just gonna judge the superficial stuff and call it a day