Seven years ago Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog Comic Book series was on top of the world with a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the “Longest Comic series based on a Video Game” while starting a new spin-off series titled Sonic Universe. It was a way to expand the Fictional universe, where characters who weren’t being used in the main story would have their own adventure, which would later be linked to the main comic series. Our review takes place after the events of Sonic the Hedgehog Issue #167, without further adieu, let’s begin the review! As always, if you are interested in reading past reviews, click here to head over to my Reviews Category.
The Story
Our story starts as any other fairy tale would, “Conqueror meets Princess, Princess marries Conqueror for the ‘good’ of the Kingdom. That is until a Teenage rebel brings back the true King, overthrowing the Conqueror, freezing him in a Chaos Controlled stasis.” If you have been following the series since the introduction to Mobius: 25 Years Later, we see after the change in history (As the events mentioned above), Sonic and Sally got married, beginning to repair what was destroyed by the former King, Shadow the Hedgehog. The second volume collects Issues 5 through 8, the script for this arc was pretty solid, despite criticism the writer faced when taking over a story that Ken Penders wrote before leaving Archie Comics. This newer approach introduced a new generation of Freedom Fighters to combat a bigger threat, but only for a brief story arc.
The Characters
Even though we saw the return of old foes, we got to see new faces in the fight for freedom. The new freedom fighters consisted of Belle and Jacques D’Coolette (The children of Bunnie and Antione D’Coolette), Argyle (the son of Vector), Skye and Melody (the son and daughter duo of Tails and Mina Mongoose). One of the interesting things in the creation of these characters are was the tradition of creating children for well-known characters, most of the time they ended up being Carbon Copies of one parent, with no traits from the other. Take for example, Belle inherits her brown fur, blond hair and blue eyes from her father. Her tank top and shorts are red and blue, reminiscent of Antoine’s uniform, while her brother Jacques, a yellow cybernetic coyote with green eyes takes after his father’s species, derives most of his color scheme from his mother.
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The Art
The Artwork in these collected issues was pretty fantastic. Yardley grew to instant popularity when he debut in the Sonic Comic scene, Like Ian Flynn, Tracy Yardley debut on Issue #160. The action sequences were clean, the expressions, characters, and landscape were drawn well (including the easter eggs that were hidden in certain parts of the story), there were a few art errors here and there but not enough to bring down the story entirely.
Sonic Universe: Mobius: 30 Years Later is available now, but has become scarce and hard to find after the both titles (Sonic the Hedgehog, and Sonic Universe) ended publication.
Final Grade:
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