I’m just gonna bite the bullet and paste the next few pages in full since they’re incredibly important to future events and just STC lore in general. If you remember back in Issue 6, there were some references to Dr. Kintobor and how he became Robotnik. Now we get to see the full story:
Where do I start? If you don’t already know, this was the basic origin storyline of Sonic in the west. This is the origin story that appears in the infamous Sonic Bible and was introduced to American players very early on in a comic promoting Sonic 1, where we get a less detailed (and unsightlier) version of the same story.
The story would be introduced to the British audience by the same book I’ve been occasionally referencing, Stay Sonic. So, while this story isn’t unique to STC, it’s definitely where most people remember it from.
To be honest I’m not much a fan of Sonic’s transformation, since I find it cliché that Sonic himself became a victim of the science fiction trope of only getting “superpowers” later. Well, maybe that’s a simplistic summary, since it appears that Sonic was already capable of running really fast before he met Kintobor, and the special shoes just allowed him to reach his full potential. A quick aside and rant: the concept of a friction-reducing sneaker is freaking stupid. Wouldn’t a friction-enhancing sneaker be preferrable, to give you a better pushoff with every step? Well, let’s not get bogged down with that.
But the real meat of the story is Robotnik’s origin. Unlike the games, where Eggman has always been an eccentric scientist bent on world domination, Robotnik was originally the kindly Dr. Kintobor. While his design is whatever in the American comic, I really like the look Elson gives him, with the crazy hair matching the mustache, and how he’s a direct contrast to Robotnik’s design, being a very tall, gangly man typically with a giant grin on his face. Kintobor’s goal is revealed to be the opposite of Robotnik’s: to rid Mobius of all evil. His method of doing so is using the Mobius rings to transfer all the evil energy of the world into six chaos emeralds (it’s never elaborated on how any of this is supposed to work, but I guess just the children audience is meant to wave it away as mad science that their tiny brains would never understand). It’s quite interesting how even in the version written to advertise Sonic 1 they’re referencing the fact that a seventh emerald is out there, with no idea whatsoever that Sonic 2 would introduce the seventh).
Anyways, this is how the Chaos Emeralds are explained, and unlike the Japanese lore, where they can be activated by positive or negative emotions, here they’re filled with energy that is pure evil. I suppose that fits their name, and it will later be used to justify why Super Sonic is so insane (not to spoil too much). Moving on, one day Kintobor takes a rotten egg out of the fridge, and trips on a loose wire, causing him to fall on the machine holding the Chaos Emeralds, creating a terrifying homunculus of Kintobor, the rotten egg, and the evil energy stored in the emeralds (it’s therefore ironic in this continuity that Robotnik never got the Eggman moniker, not even once).
It’s a ridiculous story, one that reeks of early nineties cheese, and one that no doubt will get scoffs from modern fans, but there is a certain appeal due to it’s strangeness, and if you’re a fan of the eviller side of Robotnik, this gives him an extra layer of creepiness. I prefer Eggman from the games myself, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy this backstory to an extent. The appeal of this story to me is actually what they do with it later in the magazine, but I really don’t want to get ahead of myself
So that’s that settled
