Sonic Comics were WEIRD (ft. My Friends)

*CORRECTIONS:* -At 12:45 we assumed that the entirety of issue 131's main story was pencilled by Ken Penders, but it was actually pencilled by Steven Butler! (Also the cover was moreso drawn by Spaz, and inked by Penders)

As Cybershell once said about Sally the Acorn, "did Sally singlehandly make countless people go down the dark and twisted road into becoming a furry? well, there's really no way to know for sure.. But the answer is of course, definately, 100%, absolutely, Yes."

They couldn't have just given Charmy a son named Charmy II and have him be the goofy one? Makes sense for him to name his son after himself since he's royalty.

Fun fact: A few years ago, Penders took to Twitter to lament about a cut storyline in the comics. He had apparently wanted to write a storyline about Sally Acorn losing her virginity to the character Geoffery, stating that “Sonic is fast, but Geoffery was faster in that department.” But wait, there’s more! Sally was canonically 16 or 17 pre-reboot and Geoffery was 21. Meaning Penders wanted to write a storyline about a teenager losing her virginity to an adult in a children’s video game comic. Do with that information what you will.

As a kid, the issue where Tails and Sonic fight was like, earth-shattering to me.

Archie is the wildest comic, but shoutout to Fleetway where there’s a short story about Tails almost reenacting the JFK assassination

My favorite thing in the entire Archie comics is the fact that there's a baby Echidna named fucking KNEECAPS.

"Knuckles departed last month" is the greatest caption since "Poochie died on the way to his home planet"

The fact Ken was ever part of this series is bizarre. The man had zero interest in the games themselves, and kept wanting to kill off Robotnik as the villain. The reason Knuckles' plotlines (and his spinoff comic) were so weird was because Ken was using Knuckles as a vehicle to tell his own sci-fi alien story. He wasn't allowed to touch certain aspects of Sonic, but since Knuckles had so little character in the early days, Ken was basically given free reign with the echidnas (and why Sonic often took a backseat in stories penned by Ken. Hell, he was in charge of the Sonic Adventure adaptation and wrote in some bs about Knuckles actually being the one to stop Chaos!) After he was canned and Ian was brought in, 2 things happened; 1)Actual content from and references to the game series skyrocketed. 2)Ken retooled his echidna concepts into the sci-fi alien story he'd always wanted to make. He has been at this for close to 15 years now hand has yet to produce a single issue of content.

The Archie Comics is simultaneously one of the best and worst things to happen to Sonic.

Would've loved to see the guys' reactions to Knuckles' dad microwaving him as a baby

I was legitimately thinking “permanent brain damage” was the best long-term solution, and that it made perfect sense. Now, I can’t look at myself in the mirror.

Explaining the lore of the Archie Comics is like explaining the FNAF lore to your 8 year old cousin

Archie Sonic had things like a cartoon bee overdosing on a hotdog laced with family-friendly LSD and Charmy being left brain damaged to the point he regressed into a child. I swear this comic had something against bees

Two notes about the Ken Penders situation: 1. Archie comics has a history of mistreating their artists, including rewriting character dialogue that include any mention of the artist's name. Ken only really won the lawsuit because Archie lost his contract, and he got to keep the rights to all 3 million reskins of knuckles. 2. Sega released a game called Sonic Chronicles: dark brotherhood on the Nintendo DS, and the main storyline is about a secret civilization of advanced echidnas that plans to dominate the earth, and one of the characters was a female echidna that rebeled against the empire to help the heroes. Ken had an entire storyline on his run in the comics that had a suspiciously similar story, which resulted in another lawsuit where he hoped to gain some of the games profit. Unfortunately, the game was one of the worse performing games in the franchise, so the pot of gold he was seeking out became just a thimble full, so he just dropped it. After the Archie lawsuit was won, Sega cut ties with Archie, and set in place a new set of rules so Ken doesn't try to pester them again. Among these rules include, but are not limited to: no mention of the characters from the Archie run (so Sally and the Freedom fighters will never appear in any other official Sonic media ever again (edit: so those characters are actually owned by Sega and not Archie, so that's my mistake)), Sonic losing, and Sonic crying. If there was anything I'd like to say directly to Sega or Penders, I'd tell Sega to loosen up, because Sonic is one of the most popular characters ever conceived (and Ken wouldn't really have much ground for another lawsuit anyway), and Ken should move on and let go, because there is more to life than one job he did back in the 90s.

Salty having the title of "Official Ken Penders Ratioer" is the best news I've heard all day

Whoa!! My fan art is in this issue!! Quinton here from jacksonville Florida!!! Lol that was sooooo long ago!

Archie was borderline nonsensical at times

About the "Tails: Enemy of the State" issue, Sonic also sorta kinda tried to help keep Tails' parents as political prisoners to uphold the monarchy. Yes really. This was also only like a few months after Tails met them for the first time in his life because they got abducted by aliens when he was a baby. This comic was wild.

the idea of a bunch of bipedal sonic wolves coming out of the forest to eat knuckles’ corpse is so unbelievably funny to me I don’t know why