What do you think of that strange American game, Sonic Spinball? It really feels like a relic of its time, for better or mostly for worst.
I mean, that's what it is lol. Very much a relic of its time and space, and it's got charm in that. I like the sonic sprites, very squash in a cute way. The general visual design is too grimey grungey to me- I know some of it reuses cut tilesets from Sonic 2, which is smart, but overall it's got that look more based on SatAM and pop culture depictions in the US of "sci-fi world" at the time and in doing so lacks the 80s visual pop I like in Sonic. But still, it's not terrible, probably the worst it does presentation-wise is the music. (shoutouts to the weird sequence of events of me wanting to test Paypal invoices so paying a friend for a sketch and that ending up with a lot of people associating Surge with the Spinball Options Menu Theme lol) I'm not super into pinball so the gameplay doesn't interest me much.
Its status as being canon is interesting because, and this is entirely me speculating, but I really feel it's down to whenever they built the internal documentation of Sonic canon, they just grabbed all the manuals released in japan as a baseline, and so Spinball kinda got dragged in almost by accident? That then had fun consequences such as Mobius being canon to the games, simply a separate planet- which I really feel was less an active "we gotta incorporate this element" choice and more just someone copypasting what the game's manual had of "this is planet Mobius, and Eggman invaded!"
In that big post I did about my not liking Archie, I talked about how distance to an object in a fandom context gives it the space to be seen purely as the object, and this game's a good example. It's a fun historical quirk to look at, an indication of the history of the developers at the time, an object to study in a lot of ways.
Bro, even if you don't believe me, I really don't care that you don't like it. Really. Also, I don't have Twitter lmao
What bothers me is the cowardice and the intellectual dishonesty.
Don't go "yeah it's fine i guess" when it's known you just border hate it. Have the balls to be direct, bro.
Also, don't say "I don't like this characters here, even tho a lot of people do like it is, so I'm gonna change it to my personal tastes and screw those people" when you and others still cry over when SOA did it to the games 30 years ago. It's hypocrite as hell.
("I really don't care, that's why I keep spamming you about it, and went spamming someone else about it, and etc etc!" come on, good on you that you've calmed down but calm down a bit more. You literally just sent another ask while I was writing this one. Just make a fake account to not reveal yourself and send me a direct message rather than this, come on.)
"It's known" then it's known wrong? I think it's by and large not a good comic, but it's also often not terrible. It's fine, mediocre, middle of the road, when taken as a full thing averaging all 300something issues and as an object in itself. I then often hate it as a Sonic product, in addition. These are two separate things that are able to be held at the same time, simple as. If I really hated it as much as "it's known", then I wouldn't have read basically the whole thing, would I? There's limits to hate-consumption of media.
As for the character change line you're so desperately mad about, I'm describing how characters aren't real. It's absurd to say "I hate this character and it's useless and unredeemable". Basically everyone hated Paul in the recent Spider-Man comics, but it's not like it's because there's some existing Paul somewhere who acted unappealingly- it's because of how he was written, and therefore it stands to reason if written differently, the reaction is different. People love Superboy Prime now. Characters are just combinations of accumulated writing and designs, so even in a comic that I think is often trash, there's no point in going "ew these characters are utterly impossible and irredeemable to use", so why not draw them when I feel like it? That's all I was saying.
And I don't think it contradicts the separate sentiment of "it's bad to change characters nilly-willy", especially within the wider argument I was saying of "it's reasonable that the authors of said characters would dislike those changes", which is relevant in that the conversation came about because of Sonic Team not wanting reprints of Archie Sonic. What do you know, sentences have contexts, thoughts have through lines, and when you're not just bad faith kneejerking, they're explainable.
I'll do you a favour and address another one you brought up originally in your tantrum. "Why do you attempt to associate Archie Sonic fandom with alt right chuds" I didn't. I said that that sort of pandering is why Udon was doing that pandering at all. Archie reprints are not happening, not any time soon (or at least not officially- go buy Ken's reprints that alter the art and make it useless as a collection, if you want), yet Udon's guy was openly going "oh we'll get the license, and when we do, we'll do the reprints, they'll be the best reprints", because he knew that'd get the attention of the fanbase. He was openly doing this exactly when some members of the fanbase were making a big furore about "oh they're adding trans characters to the comic now", harassing staff, getting big name grifters like Grummz involved. It doesn't mean "all Archie Sonic fans are bigots", it means "this specific discourse about Archie Sonic is being fanned cynically by people of that persuasion". And thus yes, I reserve to myself the right to, in those circumstances, roll my eyes, go "shut the fuck up", and like a random tweet that was saying "man this comic shouldn't have existed".
Follow your own advice now, and actually show you don't really care about this stuff. Stop crying in others' inboxes about it like I personally stole your mattress from under you.
If you want, at some other point, I'll outright ramble out a big post about my thoughts on Archie in more detail from memory, when it's not just as an answer to someone who goes "heh I don't care I don't even have twitter" then goes crying to multiple people about a tweet I liked
Bro, even if you don't believe me, I really don't care that you don't like it. Really. Also, I don't have Twitter lmao
What bothers me is the cowardice and the intellectual dishonesty.
Don't go "yeah it's fine i guess" when it's known you just border hate it. Have the balls to be direct, bro.
Also, don't say "I don't like this characters here, even tho a lot of people do like it is, so I'm gonna change it to my personal tastes and screw those people" when you and others still cry over when SOA did it to the games 30 years ago. It's hypocrite as hell.
("I really don't care, that's why I keep spamming you about it, and went spamming someone else about it, and etc etc!" come on, good on you that you've calmed down but calm down a bit more. You literally just sent another ask while I was writing this one. Just make a fake account to not reveal yourself and send me a direct message rather than this, come on.)
"It's known" then it's known wrong? I think it's by and large not a good comic, but it's also often not terrible. It's fine, mediocre, middle of the road, when taken as a full thing averaging all 300something issues and as an object in itself. I then often hate it as a Sonic product, in addition. These are two separate things that are able to be held at the same time, simple as. If I really hated it as much as "it's known", then I wouldn't have read basically the whole thing, would I? There's limits to hate-consumption of media.
As for the character change line you're so desperately mad about, I'm describing how characters aren't real. It's absurd to say "I hate this character and it's useless and unredeemable". Basically everyone hated Paul in the recent Spider-Man comics, but it's not like it's because there's some existing Paul somewhere who acted unappealingly- it's because of how he was written, and therefore it stands to reason if written differently, the reaction is different. People love Superboy Prime now. Characters are just combinations of accumulated writing and designs, so even in a comic that I think is often trash, there's no point in going "ew these characters are utterly impossible and irredeemable to use", so why not draw them when I feel like it? That's all I was saying.
And I don't think it contradicts the separate sentiment of "it's bad to change characters nilly-willy", especially within the wider argument I was saying of "it's reasonable that the authors of said characters would dislike those changes", which is relevant in that the conversation came about because of Sonic Team not wanting reprints of Archie Sonic. What do you know, sentences have contexts, thoughts have through lines, and when you're not just bad faith kneejerking, they're explainable.
I'll do you a favour and address another one you brought up originally in your tantrum. "Why do you attempt to associate Archie Sonic fandom with alt right chuds" I didn't. I said that that sort of pandering is why Udon was doing that pandering at all. Archie reprints are not happening, not any time soon (or at least not officially- go buy Ken's reprints that alter the art and make it useless as a collection, if you want), yet Udon's guy was openly going "oh we'll get the license, and when we do, we'll do the reprints, they'll be the best reprints", because he knew that'd get the attention of the fanbase. He was openly doing this exactly when some members of the fanbase were making a big furore about "oh they're adding trans characters to the comic now", harassing staff, getting big name grifters like Grummz involved. It doesn't mean "all Archie Sonic fans are bigots", it means "this specific discourse about Archie Sonic is being fanned cynically by people of that persuasion". And thus yes, I reserve to myself the right to, in those circumstances, roll my eyes, go "shut the fuck up", and like a random tweet that was saying "man this comic shouldn't have existed".
Follow your own advice now, and actually show you don't really care about this stuff. Stop crying in others' inboxes about it like I personally stole your mattress from under you.
Your art is very cool and you use lines very well! Your cover for issue 78 is one of my favorites.
I don’t have anything real to ask so uhhh what has inspired your art style most throughout the years (movies, games, old masters, etc)?
Thank you anon! I'm happy with how that cover came out. I'm burnt out on doing pastiches any further after this year, but that was a good one to kind of go out on. I don't know about using lines well- I consistently hate my own inking- but I'm glad people find things to enjoy on them.
What inspired my art style. Uuuh, sorry, I'm going to do this as a disorganised ramble (when don't I?)
As a kid, grew up on Disney Comics and Turma da Mônica comics. The Disney stuff I got was from Brazil, where they had their own production but also a lot of reprints from other places. So heavy influence from artists like Giorgio Cavazzano or Roberto O. Fukue from the Disney side, and some of the Mônica stories on the other side- they were all credited under "Mauricio de Sousa" so I don't remember specific artist names. I also, around this time, bought a gaming magazine at some point that had artwork from Street Fighter III- so without me knowing, I was now also being influenced by the likes of Akiman, Bengus, Kino Nishimura. I didn't read it as often, but I also really liked Astérix, so the art of Uderzo and the writing of Renè Goscinny. I was also very into the cartoons of Chuck Jones.
Getting more into being a teen, on Disney Comics I discovered Don Rosa- gave me a love of detailed backgrounds with things happening- I also read a lot of Quino- not just Mafalda, which gave me a lot of interest in drier more political kids writing, but also his political cartoons, with really good hatching and linework often- also Frank Miller, namely and especially Sin City, with the cinematic compositions and graphic design of the interplay of the white and black- I also got a few volumes of Dragonball by Akira Toriyama and a volume of Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, huge influences in cartooning, in mechanical design especially, and again in hatching and rendering. I also was gifted a book by Leiji Matsumoto, and of course he also designed the videoclips for Daft Punk's Interstella 5555, massive thing in my brain when I first saw One More Time. Around this time too, paying more attention to game art- Ken Sugimori's stuff in Pokémon, Naoto Ohshima and Satoshi Okano and other Sonic Team artists around the late 90s, the way they all did proportions, mechanical design, etc. Also, Neon Genesis Evangelion, FLCL, and The Animatrix- huge influences in mechanical design, and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto's character designs stuck with me between Eva, FLCL, Diebuster, .Hack. Also, Klonoa 2 and its art style of thick black outlines over soft rendering.
Also, I watched Kill Bill. Quentin Tarantino was one of the coolest directors ever- should not be a surprising opinion for a teen boy in the 2000s to have.
Around this time, I discovered the works of Osamu Tezuka by reading random books in bookstores. Obviously, massively important to me, especially Message to Adolf. I also discovered Battle Angel Alita by Yukito Kishiro- amazing mechanical design, background design, character design, everything. And of course, this was when Hayao Miyazaki was becoming big in the West with Spirited Away etc, and I'll mark Howl's Moving Castle as a particularly important movie to me again for its scenery and mechanical design.
As a young adult and late teen, got more into studying cartoons harder. Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse strips are an example of some really good rubberhose stuff I was into, although also just in general Ub Iwerks, Max Fleischer, E C Segar, George Herriman. You know, Betty Boop, Krazy Kat, Felix the Cat, Thimble Theatre. This will also not sound good but I'll be honest- John Kricfalusi's blog was huge to me. I learned a TON about cartooning from reading his blog. Ol' John K, of course, nowadays more known for being a statuatory rapist, so a lot of people will cringe at me mentioning him as an inspiration or teacher in some way- but it is what it is. You can get most of what I learned from his writings by reading Preston Blair's animation books instead.
Anime-wise by this point, Hiroyuki Imaishi was huge to me- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Panty and Stocking, Dead Leaves, Abenobashi. Through him started looking at his influences, and discovered Go Nagai, which went really well with my looking at old artists like Tezuka and Matsumoto. I also discovered Mitsuteru Yokoyama and Shotaro Ishinomori, at first taking them as just "more Tezuka-like stuff to study", but Ishinomori in particular deserves more attention than that. Go Nagai, of course, also a master in his own right, and through him I found Ken Ishikawa, of Getter Robo fame, and while I felt Go Nagai was better than him in the 70s stuff once you hit the late 80s and the 90s, Ishikawa was a master. Also around this time is when I probably read anything by Masamune Shirow for the first time, which felt like a continuation of Yukito Kishiro and Katsuhiro Otomo aesthetics. I should also point out around here, while I've mostly just been pointing at more recent pop culture masters and aesthetes, I was also big into Alphonse Mucha and his art noveau imagery with thick linework and soft rendering- probably not coincidentally, the same things I'd liked in the game Klonoa 2.
I also in high school first watched, projected in a wall of a castle, the German movie Metropolis by Fritz Lang, and it just became my favourite movie ever. It also got me to watch other old movies like that, and I figured I also really liked FW Murnau's Nosferatu and Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
I was getting very into drawing into certain online communities, and some of it did influence me too. In specific, there's an artist that went by "3-Angled Blue". His stuff might just come across as edgy risquè 2000s internet nonsense, but when you look carefully, you might realise not only is it skillfully drawn, it's one of the most influencial artists of the past decades- so much of internet culture "memes", especially in the 2000s and early 2010s, was built on edits of his work. Gave me a good feel for how good shapes and good variation of thick and thin lines can make simple art very appealing.
At some point here, I saw a note in Sonic Retro that The Protomen were releasing an album called Act 2. I listened to it, and Act 1, and it was amazing.
Around young mid 20s I got into Yoshiyuki Tomino's stuff- Gundam etc. Not always into the designs- I don't like most Gundams visually in terms of the mech designs- but the writing is really something I'm into, often. Of course, I was already into Hideaki Anno since I was an early teen, having watched Evangelion when I was like 11, but rewatching it around this time cemented it for me, and I also got into other works of his like Gunbuster and Nadia. On Western Media side, I looked at some Franco-Belgian stuff I'd looked over, such as Hergé's Tintin, finding a lot of value in its ligne-claire style, but also the rough and sketchy Lucky Luke linework and caricaturing of Morris, which I also found very similar to the cartooning style of Monkey Punch over in Japan, drawing Lupin III. Around this time I also paid more attention to European artists like Mobius and Enki Bilal, their aesthetics going well with what I'd been primed with from Otomo, Kishiro, etc. I also get super into Yasuhiro Imagawa's works and adaptations of older manga- Giant Robo the Animation, Shin Mazinger, and especially Tetsujin 28. This is also when I would've discovered Masaaki Yuasa, who was being popularised by his anime Ping-Pong the Animation but I found him through his anime Kaiba, one of the most heartbreaking shows I've watched. Around this time, also, I watched Otomo and Rintaro's Metropolis movie, the 2003 adaptation of Tezuka's old manga, which had a lot more elements of the German live-action movie mixed in.
Speaking of, around this time I finally watched the 80s recut of Metropolis, the German film. You see, said film was nearly lost media for the longest time, and a lot of its footage lost. The version I watched in high school was the best reconstruction at the time (there's since been an even more extended reconstruction after most of the remaining scenes were found in a film copy in Argentina), but whenever looking anything about the movie, I kept seeing info about an 80s recut, that had less footage than the version I'd watched which was more recent, but also had some colourising applied to it and an 80s synth soundtrack. It sounded absurd to me so I never touched it, until curiosity won me over after the release of Daft Punk's album Random Access Memories- you see, said album has a track dedicated to a musician called Giorgio Moroder, and that's the artist that had done that 80s Metropolis. So I figured sure, let me watch this- and it blew my mind in its coordination of sound and music. Huge fan.
Also somewhere around the early 2010s or late 2000s I watched Doctor Who for the first time and got big into Doctor Who. Throwing that in out of nowhere. Also Studio Ankama's Wakfu.
In terms of American comics, around this time I started reading heavily Alan Moore's work- especially League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which affected how I conceive of the collective work of culture and the public domain. Every time you see me draw a public domain Mickey and imagining him coexisting with dunno, a public domain Felix, you can thank me reading LOEG. Oh, and around this time too, I listened to Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of War of the Worlds, an amazing album. I also got very into some of Grant Morrison's work, especially All-Star Superman; therefore, worth mentioning the artist Frank Quitely. Artistically, artists like Cliff Chiang, Darwyn Cooke, Bruce Timm, Shane Glines- often DC artists with a cleaner more stylised graphic look than the 2000s overdone realism of cape comics; also Mike Mignola's Hellboy.
We're getting close to the present. I got really into Yoh Yoshinari's work with Studio Trigger, leading me to rediscover him in general, especially his work with Tezuka's characters. Got very into ZUN's Touhou series, though moreso the works of fan groups and people, IOSYS, Beat Mario, etc. The Touhou comics of Moyazou are huge to me in that regards. Aiobahn +81's themes for the game Needy Girl Overdose have been a constant looping hymn in my head for a few years now. Death Grips and Neutral Milk Hotel are meme music picks that're memes because they get recommended because they're so good. I repeatedly admire Bastien Vivès for doing art with really rough sloppy linework that nonetheless is somehow amazingly appealing, a skill I wish I could learn; by the same token, Tatsuki Fujimoto has similar appeal to me. I've generally been enjoying the trend in recent manga, I think often caused by wanting solid appealing kind of fast work that can be posted on social media, of solid underdrawings served with sloppier linework that just gets the job done and doesn't distract- I recently read nearly all of Tamifull's How do We Relationship and it was a delight; a couple years ago I read Takatsu Makoto's Season of Alabaster and it basically gave me a crisis that my art was nowhere near that good that broke me for a few months (if you're ever wondering why I was supposed to draw the full IDW Sonic Fang Miniseries but could only draw one issue, that was part of it).
A few years ago I watched Mamoru Oshii's Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer and it jumped into being one of my favourite movies ever. You might find it weird it took me so long to name him, but tbh while I watched Ghost in the Shell 2 as a teen, his GiTS movies didn't appeal to me as much as Shirow's manga did, so I kinda ignored him. I started appreciating more some more western animators such as Milt Kahl, really solid stylised stuff over at Disney; and the writing and designs of Jay Ward, although I'd also liked the Pink Panther ever since I was a kid and liked it's stylised cartooning. In western comics, Garth Ennis wrote some of my favourite stuff such as Fury MAX: My War Gone By and Punisher MAX. I also read and became enamoured with Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo. Just recently I read through Ryukishi07's Umineko: When They Cry visual novel, and while there's a lot I could point at I didn't like in it, I also really loved a lot of other things in it, so.
Dunno. There's probably a ton more I could mention here, but this is already way too long. I hope you can extract some useful stuff from here!
Not that anon, but they kinda have a point with that previous ask. The grammar is a bit messy, but it's not hard to decipher what they mean. That said, they did come off as aggressive and I can understand why you wouldn't want to directly address their accusations. lol
I mean, I think their point isn't that valid, but I do get how you'd get to said point, and would be willing to talk about why I disagree. It's why I keep going "shut up, calm down, and try again without all the seething".
Not even out of me being offended or accused or anything, but because if I can't trust anon to be able to understand what I wrote enough to not just immediately flood my inbox with angry replies, then I can't trust any further response would be understood either, meaning time replying is wasted.
If, on the other hand, the responses are reasonably made, I can trust it's a reasonable person worth discussing with.
If you are so stupid to not understand what I said, you'll probably won't get it, even if I drew a diagram for you. So, yeah, I won't bother.
I'll just say that:
A) You just saying that is "incoherent" and "absurd" and "non-sensical" doesn't mean it's all that. It's just that you are, again, so stupid (or dense) that you can't understand it.
B) Me being bothered or angry doesn't mean that I'm less or more right. Very chud "emotions don't care for facts and logic" point of you, huh?
C) I was the one who made the ask to Bobby ;)
yes, it was extremely obvious you were. the way you're now trying to feud here, sending emoticons, etc, makes it clear you're the same sort of person to feel the need to go tattletale to a poor unrelated blogger who, reasonably, just went "stop doing this". What did you think would happen? She's a reasonable person.
As for everything else, you are showing yourself to be so angry you're being unable to read what I said, responding at basic surface level readings of specific words causing you to kneejerk rather than understand what's being said. That's why it's incoherent and absurd, it's things like you going on a diatribe about Yuji Naka out of nowhere when I was talking about, for instance, Hoshino, the creator of Metal Sonic and Amy, who's still working in Sonic Team. You're angry at me, you're seething I'm a "JP purist", and you know people think Yuji Naka is evil, so you just jumped at the chance to stitch that to what I was saying. Yum yum, yummy words you're putting in my mouth. That's why the response you got was "don't be daft, here's a stupid image in return, try again when you've cooled down".
And also stop acting like this is a high school group and you've got to go tattle to other people. Grow up, someone in the industry doesn't like the comic you apparently love so dearly, it's not an insult to you (no matter how much you want to not understand why I brought Udon up). My only hope here is you're not the poor sod that also went demanding answers of me on twitter on an unrelated tweet, because that kid seemed a lot more reasonable, just confused.
Here's another image for your troubles. Go wash your face and scream at a pillow and if you want to try and actually have a conversation, do so later in a cohesive way. I'm sure if you re-read things, not in bad faith, and actually try to understand them, you'll have things to ask about that aren't just a tantrum. Otherwise, you'll futurely just have the asks deleted and not even get a reply to be smug about.
"you might dislike them in a story, but it's clear that if the story was written differently, you might like them. This design might not be to your liking, but you can imagine how if changed like this or like that, it might"
Mmmm... That makes me remember the difference between Sonic in USA and Sonic in Japan in the 90's...
But wait, you constantly throw shit at the redesign and constantly say "it's an affront to the original vision" 😲
So it's good to change the OG version lf characters people like a lot for something you don't like and bad when it's something you don't like? Hypocrite.
oh man, four quick succession anon asks, each more incongruent and absurd, clearly written so much in anger that they make no sense (like, what're you even trying to say here?)
picked this one in particular to reply to because it struck me the most emotional in an absurd way (seriously, what are you trying to say here?), but yeah, all four get the same response, which is try if you want to write something coherent and not just angry screaming, and I might give more answer than the above and the below
you dont seem to like archie sonic very much, but you still have tons of fan art made about he fredoom figthers over the years, why is that?
The direct context for this ask is likely the fact I liked a tweet dissing on Archie Sonic and the person who tweeted it, who is apparently fandom-rot-brained, is gloating about having had that like to fight online fights
The wider context for that is the tweet was in response to Udon's Director of Publishing baiting people into complaining about Sega for not allowing reprints of Archie Sonic, after him baiting people a couple years ago into supporting Udon getting the Sonic license instead of IDW, promising he'd reprint Archie Sonic, with no awareness of the actual relation to licensor, and midst the usual quasi-political baiting (it's no coincidence a lot of people that were happily going along with his fantasy of "we're totally gonna get Sega's Sonic license and reprint Archie Sonic" were the sort of fan who complains "IDW is just lesbians and trans". Side note, Udon just announced they're making a Street Fighter x Kamen America crossover comic!)
I think in that context, I'm well enough in my place to roll my eyes at another round of "but Archie Sonic, evil Sega" and therefore throw a like at a tweet that just went "this comic should've never existed".
Gonna ramble a lot more to actually answer you, after a text break, but I wanted this immediate context clear and in the open. The TLDR is "I think the characters and comic are fine on their own, but I hate the place they take on the cultural zeitgeist and their influence in this franchise in specific".
In the 1970s, there was this weird period of Wonder Woman comics where she was redesigned to have no super powers. She was now normal-looking, wearing modern fashion, living in a Chinatown urban setting fighting street criminals with martial arts and the help of a mystical master named I-Ching.
Obviously, most Wonder Woman fans are not particularly kind or warm to this take on the character. However, you don't really see active hate to it. The reason should be clear- it's 50 years ago, it was seen as a failure so it's not influencing modern takes on her, it's overall just a historical curio. So there's a distance there that allows fandom to take it as just that. A historical object to look at and ponder, "hmm, what state was culture in for this to have happened, what does it reflect, etc".
I want you to imagine, though, it somehow instead happened in 2010. And Wonder Woman's comic is trying to move on from it, but there's a series of fans still insisting they want current Wonder Woman to be weird unpowered kung-fu Wonder Woman, and as time moves on there's a whole chunk of other fans who're just young ones, and don't know anything else, and social media keeps showing them images of kung-fu Wonder Woman and they're confused and trying to understand if that's Wonder Woman. And new Wonder Woman comics are still heavily influenced by kung-fu Wonder Woman, the way she's written even in non-comic projects where she's supposed to be her usual self she's suddenly being a big kung-fu fan in stuff where that was never a thing and maybe where in the past she was actively written not liking that.
And now also imagine that somehow, while Wonder Woman's owned by DC, there was still a group up top that called a lot of the shots on her that were actively directly connected to this IP at an artistic and emotional level, not just dispassionate corporate suits. Maybe apprentices of Marston, the guy who created WW. And despite them existing, and their personal relation to this stuff, they're stuck seeing on social media people go "AAAW WHO CARES, DC DO KUNG-FU WONDER WOMAN". And maybe new writers and artists are coming in trying to make new material but there's fans online, 90% of the time from the same country, going "OK BUT ARE YOU DOING KUNG-FU WONDER WOMAN". "Where's I-Ching?" "I don't want to read your work, I want reprints of Kung-Fu Wonder Woman".
I would hope this comparison was as subtle as a truck?
Archie Sonic, in a vacuum, as a historical object, with distance to it, is interesting. I even like it at times. I find the early cheesy corny material charming enough in its way as a representative of a style of 80s Americana humour- and side note, if you like that stuff, you should read Marvel's ALF comics or DC's Captain Carrot, both of which by a lot of either literally the same people or at least people in that circle and with similar tastes and influences. I find the turn it takes into serious silver age nostalgia Chris Claremont-influenced storytelling interesting enough, I find the way it parallels Archie TMNT definitely interesting in how it paints the zeitgeist of things. The evolution to sharp attempts at anime-pandering, etc. The way it grows more insular into itself, what the 2006-onwards run lets us see and know of the fandom of the time, the weird ways despite that in which it connected to the zeitgeist (you know they did the Secret Freedom Fighters as a response to the Secret Avengers?). Particularly with Ian loving to do references, it becomes a map of "what's the milieu of nerd spaces at this time" based on what got referenced- youtube poops, forum memes, dialogue lifted from Pirates of the Caribbean.
And, seen in a vacuum, one can also attach to elements of it, rather than just study them. Characters, for instance, are rarely foul entirely by themselves- you might dislike them in a story, but it's clear that if the story was written differently, you might like them. This design might not be to your liking, but you can imagine how if changed like this or like that, it might.
Archie Sonic, in a vacuum, could be comparable to something like Sonic Underground or Sonic the Comic. Something to look back on, to study, look at, learn from, even enjoy on its own terms.
Archie Sonic is also not in a vacuum.
That distance from 70s Kung-Fu Wonder Woman that affords it the detachment required to take it just by itself as opposed to a bad idea to address the influence of? It doesn't exist for Archie Sonic. No one is out here demanding Sonic the Comic elements in the games- but Archie Sonic elements are somehow actually appearing in the games. Sonic's not calling Tails a pixel brain, but he sure is saying Let's Do It To It.
That distance doesn't exist, so it must be made. Normally, the simple passage of time would ensure that- but we're what, 8 years to Archie Sonic dying, and it's barely existing? The fact that a lot of its creators then moved to the next comic, the fact the internet allows an easy flattening and reading of Archie Sonic as if it's current, with easy piracy or youtubers or tiktokers talking about it. That generation shift where a new generation is able to see it as an element of the past isn't quite happening, as it's still too relevant.
It also ties itself to wider discourses. The fact there was access to a podcast of the head writer for years means a lot of behind the scene information that then got circulated around in the fandom in a game of telephone distorting, evolving, changing. Thinking of the way Danny couldn't write a page where Mecha Sonic cries through Sonic, a fun twist and way to depict a sad robot character, without people going "OMG THE MANDATES??? HE TRICKED EVIL DUMB SEGA INTO ALLOWING SONIC TO CRY????". No, there's no mandate about family, there's a rule about a random licensed comic introducing family, which is obviously different from the head production team making the main stories of the franchise making that choice. People do not understand this, nor do they understand that despite the fact it's a corporate franchise, there still actually are people up top who have a specific intent and who aren't random suits but people who put their lives into creating this thing. If the guy who created Metal Sonic all the way back in 1992 is still there and doesn't want Metal Sonic portrayed a specific way, I think whinging about it is a bit absurd, as is absurd the general whinging of not wanting other characters depicted like X Y Z. Would you do that about someone wanting to control how their OC here is depicted?
(maybe you would, of course- vide the way fandoms have reacted to cases such as Gooseworx)
And let's not even get into how it ties to wider "SoA vs SoJ" resentment discourses and how you get people going "um actually without Archie Sonic, the franchise would've died" ignoring all the markets where Sonic was a hit without this comic existing in.
Taking all that together, I hope it makes sense and you can see why I can enjoy stuff about this comic but still feel that, at the end of the day, seeing the headaches it causes, one can't but wish it hadn't existed. The alternative is people accepting it's dead and only taking it as a historical object, but sadly, the fandom at large refuses to. Just got to see how many cling and despair to each new Sonic Blitz update just because there's mentions of something like Antoine in its code, completely ignoring the wider context of the fact even characters like HawkHawk (a totally irrelevant Marvel parody with two issues) were there, that the game devs erroneously created "Modern Bark" despite there being no such thing, and Rovio being a known AI using company, making it clear what happened was just they went "hey ChatGPT list me Sonic characters" and it just went and lifted at random from the Sonic wiki.
Maybe 15 years from now we'll be able to talk more normally about this comic as just a weird historical quirk. Maybe one day I'll get to write the comic pitch I actually have of introducing a canon version of these characters, similarly to how Dragonball Super Broly made a new canon version of Broly.
For now though? I'll keep just being tired whenever I see it, hoping it hadn't happened, and when in a better mood and for my own whims, pretending it IS a world where it's not a constant cloud looming over what I do professionally and thus allow myself to fanart for fun.
Final note- if you actively like Archie Sonic as a comic (which I think is fine enough even if I feel that Sonic the Comic is a better comic when taken just for the being a comic, ignoring the Sonic), read Usagi Yojimbo. It does a lot of things similarly, but just much better.
Or just read Don Rosa's Disney work, which basically commits all the sins and annoyances Ken Penders does, but gets away with it with a mix of Rosa being more humble, and just being leagues better, causing a sort of reaction of "man this stuff should be cringe but by gum he made it work".
