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Just now, SSF1991 said:

Well I figured the other stuff was already posted. I just wasn't aware about the solicitation news. lol

Sonic hasn't been in the solicits for two months now, but we know that there were plans and covers made for additional Sonic graphic novels (the Sonic Universe Sagas which was on Amazon)

This all points to what I said in my first post - there's been some kind of breakdown between Sega and Archie and probably from Sega's end if Archie was still making covers and moving ahead on comics through April.

Has anyone from any news sites reached out to Archie Public relations to ask for an official statement? Seeing as Tracy was able to get news out, that might be the best way to get a statement put out or at least attempt it.

 

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10 hours ago, Kidakairis said:

I'm honestly not trolling here but why does it seem everyone is so anti penders stories, I didn't really follow the comic back then so I haven't read that much of his work. I know about the lawsuits and the Lara-su chronicles thing but it seems every time I see anything about the pre Ian Flynn stories everyone just says "it was Penders era so it sucked." Without ever really explaining why his stories were bad.

Because that requires a lot of explanation that has been done. 

My main issues with his stories personally?

He often disregarded how the characters were and completely veered them way of to track to fit whatever dumb story he was writing instead of writing a story around those characters. The biggest example of this being his future arc, but we'll get to that back in point 6.

That brings me to my next qualm, the guy seemed to at a point completely threw out the idea that hew as writing a book primarily for children, and instead of like BTAS where they address more adult topics in a more nuanced way. He does with no tack, narrative tripling over himself , tone def, and usually throwing one or two sega characters under a bus to do so. 

This brings me to point 3 ,a lot of his stories about female characters and female characters are nothing, or just... really genuinely sexist. Just strait up, just really bad and sexist, the man has no understanding of actual women doesn't seem to ask, and in combination with point 2 you can see how he can write stories that in the end not only don't make sense genuinely are inappropriate and well sexist. His definition of strong female character is being upset, or just ... being strong rather than genuinely writing a good one a lot of the time. 

Brings me to point 4, he cared way more and valued way more his weird fanfiction characters more than the thing people are there for, sega characters. People accuse ian of this, but you cannot say that Ian is worse than what we had before with ken. The man had to be forced by sega to write stories about shadow, you know that super popular character, because he was so invested in whatever magical echidina bullshit no one actually cared about. To use things people actually wanted to see, and when shadow did show up, a lot of the story wasn't about him, it was about knuckle's dad talking about how cool knuckles's dad is, because people weren't tried of that shit. Sally's entire character and her family is another example, just horrible stories about nothing, not compelling not telling me why I should be interested in her or family, the only cool one was Elias, and he was cool because HE RAN THE HELL AWAY. 

Point 5 the man can't write a coherent plot to save his life and gets so weird about details that ultimately don't matter. A lot of his stories could be told more simply , better or in some cases not told at all, if he axed out all the dumb lore he had tried to create of the years. It was just dumb lore feeding in on to itself like a oroboros made out of bias confirming furry drama. His stories were often melodramatic for no actual reason, and often were incapability of conveying what people were supposed to be upset about. Its why folks hate the slap, why the shit was I supposed to care at that point

Final Point 6, he would throw characters under a bus for stories that didn't matter. These characters were more often than not, sega characters .You like sonic, he's a creep who uses women to get back at his friends. You like tails, welp he's shinji now, he creeps on girls and he's a nice guy. You like knuckles, instead of the headstrong character you know he is often complacent in the bullshit his family commits. You like shadow well he don't do jack shit, unless its the future, then he's a dictator even though that goes against ... the plot of sonic adventure 2 and will steal women for years at a time and torture people to death... because that's totally not horrifying. And I can go on and on.

So for me those, those are some of my main issues,

The man seemed to have no real respect for the property he was using 

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10 hours ago, RictalRose0 said:

He had the Chaotix you know? They could have just had adventures around the world, Treasure Hunting and stuff. There's no way all that stuff about Echidnas was a neccesity for the comic. And what even made Penders think Knuckles needed a girlfriend so bad? Besides no one told them to keep it after Adventure. They literally could have just written it off or dismissed it but instead they doubled down on it because the stuff introduced in Adventure about Knuckle's tribe and ancestors contradicted what Penders wrote and that pissed him off. 

So you wanted him to leave ME and Angel Island, thus throwing away main Sega elements? Develop Chaotix which would obviously end different then Sonic Heroes, thus back firing again? And then get his own villains and side characters that would have even less connection with the main idea?

Not to mention Knuckles wasn't treasure hunter before SA1.

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Penders straight up said he never played the games though, or cared that much about Research. I don't mind if something deviates from what the series was back then but the real reason why I dislike Penders is because his writing is awful. I dislike Bollers too but at least he did have some good moments, but his ongoing fight with Penders kinda leaked into the comic and that just wasn't neccesary. Why leak personal bias and emotion into your work on a property that doesn't belong to you? And that's what Penders and Bollers did that, but Penders did it a whole lot more.

Honestly if I wanted to read a Sonic Comic that was practically an AU with tons of OCs I would prefer to read Fleetway. At least those guys played the games, and to their defense, they just read the Sonic Bible which had a lot of strange ideas back then. They based Fleetway on a combination of the Sonic Bible and the games. And did their own interesing takes on some stuff.

"So you wanted him to leave ME and Angel Island, thus throwing away main Sega elements? Develop Chaotix which would obviously end different then Sonic Heroes, thus back firing again? And then get his own villains and side characters that would have even less connection with the main idea?"

It's not as if Knuckles never does that. He leaves the ME behind all the time if the plot needs him too. Hell he could have written something about Knuckles going on a quest, then returning to see the ME was stolen, and then he goes in search of the ME. It's not that complicated, the thing pretty much writes itself.

Besides, the fact that the Chaotix eventually were retconned wouldn't mean anything. Did you forget the part were the game characters always had weird backgrounds and the comic was always pulling stuff out of nowhere with them?

To list an example, Amy started out in the series as an 8 year old. But Sonic Adventure did a timeskip and now she was 12. So how did the comic explain the ageup? Amy aged herself up using an artifact and now she was stuck a 8 year old with the body of a 12 year old. That was one of the most infamous and disliked plot points of the comics due to how bad it fucks up Amy's character. And it never gets brought up again anyway. Because it was the dumbest way to explain that.

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7 hours ago, RictalRose0 said:

 I don't mind if something deviates from what the series was back then but the real reason why I dislike Penders is because his writing is awful.

There, on this we can agree.

 

15 hours ago, Kidakairis said:

I'm honestly not trolling here but why does it seem everyone is so anti penders stories, I didn't really follow the comic back then so I haven't read that much of his work. I know about the lawsuits and the Lara-su chronicles thing but it seems every time I see anything about the pre Ian Flynn stories everyone just says "it was Penders era so it sucked." Without ever really explaining why his stories were bad.

horridus and Shadowlax pretty much covered it (although Slap and "Shadow in future" were not made by Penders).

For me Pre-Flynn period looks like this:

1-20 is a comedy period. Puns, 4th wall, etc. Good for giggle, not worth looking again. No one though this comic would last, no one really cared.

20-50 is Satam period (becuase comic tried to copy style of cartoon). Some people say it was the best pre-Flynn period, but I never like Satam and this period wasn't much better (although "Mecha Madness" and "Sonic Quest" were probably best pre-Flynn stories, I admit that). Still, many people say that this changed of direction allowed Sonic to live that long.

50-75 is Bollers/Penders period, my personal favorite. It was bit of a mess, but thinks were happening. Everyone deals with retaking their homes, Naugus, Mogul, Elias, Robotnik is back. It had stupid moments, like "Daddy wants Sally to get married", but overall it was neat.

And in that time Penders was focusing on Knuckles comic, which like horridus said, having all this lore and direction sounded like a good idea, but the longer it went, the dumber it was. I actually enjoyed original Knuckles miniseries. But "Green Knuckles saga" or dingo plot threath that never went forward were just sad.

Around 75-125 everyone though comic is going to get cancelled, so there were tons of 1-issue stories. For some dumb reason focus went on melodrama. Sonic went to school, had a love triangle, etc. Also, this was period with absolutely worst artwork. Knuckles was cancelled, so Penders wrote his super-long-epic-sagas in 5 page back ups. It was sad.

And lastly 125-160 is complete mix bag. "Homecoming" and "Return to Angel Island" were best strories in years, big, epic and somewhat moved things forward (both written by Bollers if I remember correctly). But there was "Slap", "TItan Tails", everything about Shadow, Evil Sonic pretending to be THE Sonic to make out with bunch of girls (what a great celebration of 150th issue) and of course original XYL. Again, big epic saga by Penders, that was in 5 page back ups and mostly showed teenage drama (which Penders had no idea how to write) with some extremely vague threat in the background. But artwork was nice, I do miss Butler.

(Just to make it clear, no all of this was done by Penders. Karl Bollers and Romy Chacon 'helped' too.)

So it was 2006 when Flynn took over and said "hey, don't we have a lore from games to use? Maybe I give some time to Rouge or Chaotix? And how about we focus back on adventure and bunch of colorful villains? And I'm not throwing older stuff every, in fact I'll return bunch of older characters and make them cool again"

And so Flynn ruled justly over comic, creating such wonder like Sonic Universe and Megaman and everyone (except some whiners) were happy. The End. (And then was Mecha Sally, then Reboot, then Megaman was cancelled, then this hiatus now).

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I think part of the reason Penders got so much leeway at the time was because he's pretty good at making you think he's going somewhere, but he takes forever to get there, and that's if he does at all.

By the time he was done with the book, it was as if he'd taken us all to a great theme park, then spent so much time telling us about all the great stuff we're going to do there that by the time he was done. the park was getting ready to close.

And those few attractions you got to check out wound up being underwhelming as often as not. See: Mobius: 25 Years Later.

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2 hours ago, RictalRose0 said:

Penders straight up said he never played the games though, or cared that much about Research.

tumblr_inline_o58r6dmSfe1suaed2_500.gif

I did not know this, how did this fellow have a job for so long. The new guys everyone hated after lost world went and decided to do research after a point. It was late, but there was an attempt

 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, MetalSkulkBane said:

Not to mention Knuckles wasn't treasure hunter before SA1.

The Sonic the Hedgehog OVA would like to have a word. It was released long before Sonic Adventure and the Dreamcast were even a thing. 

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14 hours ago, Kidakairis said:

I'm honestly not trolling here but why does it seem everyone is so anti penders stories, I didn't really follow the comic back then so I haven't read that much of his work. I know about the lawsuits and the Lara-su chronicles thing but it seems every time I see anything about the pre Ian Flynn stories everyone just says "it was Penders era so it sucked." Without ever really explaining why his stories were bad.

Because Penders work is pretty bad. There's some decent stories before Ian came along but a lot of the better Penders stories were when he had someone to co-write and keep him at bay.

Penders is a writer who has a lot of ideas but isn't really good at putting them to practice.

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I haven't followed the very old comics that much either TBH. 

I learned a lot of the "bad" stuff that happened from tumblr blogs posting parts of the comic and either analyzed, explained, or made fun of them. Most of them were about Jesus Knuckles, creator's pet Sally, bizarre echidna culture, and evil Sonic hooking up w/ every other girl.

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What's sad in Penders's case is that had he not been a dick over this entire matter (despite Archie's poor handling as well), he wouldn't be looked at with such venom whenever his name is mentioned, many of his works would have been looked at less harshly than they are now, and for all his flaws he would have been seen in a much better light.

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I don't know about that. The Sonic fanbase is know for looking back at old things and saying "you know in retrospective this sucked" or "in retrospective this wasn't so bad" and I really doubt Penders's comics would have been the later.

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10 hours ago, MetalSkulkBane said:

And so Flynn ruled justly over comic, creating such wonder like Sonic Universe and Megaman and everyone (except some whiners) were happy. The End. (And then was Mecha Sally, then Reboot, then Megaman was cancelled, then this hiatus now).

I like this story. And thanks for breaking up into periods. As someone without much experience in most of those eras, I find the overview quite helpful. I notice you gloss over the reboot though. Does that not mark the beginning of an era for you, or is it just too soon?

9 hours ago, Shadowlax said:

I did not know this, how did this fellow have a job for so long. The new guys everyone hated after lost world went and decided to do research after a point. It was late, but there was an attempt

Did the Colors writing team get better in Shattered Crystal and Fire and Ice? I don't really handheld games. On a side note, Ian is research fiend, and I love that. He's always throwing out quotes and references from the games when they fit the context, and it makes his stuff feel very close in spirit to the games.

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2 minutes ago, Borvoc said:

Did the Colors writing team get better in Shattered Crystal and Fire and Ice? I don't really handheld games. On a side note, Ian is research fiend, and I love that. He's always throwing out quotes and references from the games when they fit the context, and it makes his stuff feel very close in spirit to the games.

Colors DS is considered the better told story because the dialogue doesn't hamfist as many jokes as the Wii version does. Gens 3DS is just as dull, Lost World shares the same cutscenes as its console counterpart. Shattered Crystal is about as dry (if not, more so) than Colors so if you don't like Colors Wii, you're not gonna like Shattered Crystal.

Fire & Ice is more or less a decent Boom episode so if you enjoy watching the show, Fire & Ice's story is right up your alley.

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Well Flynn is credited as one of the least drama causing writers of the comic. Though he did kinda create division too. Particularly he pissed off people that don't like Sally because he put her on a huge pedestal and was a very obvious "creator's pet" he even commented about it on a blog post but pretty much just said he thinks she's perfect. Also shipwars because you know, Sonally. He was the only writer that actually cared about it so he made a big deal of romance (Penders and Bollers did a ton of ship drama too but they weren't personally invested, they just thought romance drama sold better. Flynn on the other hand had a personal bias for it). It was kind of an embarassing time to be in the fandom due to all the constant bickering over ship wars. Jeez... Well, I guess Flynn got over his fanboyism for Sally now and the mandates put a full stop to romance so we don't have to deal with that anymore.

I like the reboot more, though it does feel like it's still warming up it's story. Well the Shattered World Crisis is done now so finally we're gonna get started on some fresh and new adventures, if the comic isn't cancelled that's it.

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Most of my experience with the pre-reboot stuff consists of starting very late pre-reboot and then marathoning the Sagas books afterward, but I'm not sure it's entirely fair to say Ian favored Sally. SatAM basically set her up as the main love interest, and Ian just followed up on that. I'm sure he was probably invested, but that's only natural as he was a fan before being a writer (how he got the job). Sally's position as the leader of the Freedom Fighters kind of makes her important, and there's the fact that she and Sonic have had good chemistry since SatAM (all the characters in that show had good chemistry with each other, didn't they?). Amy can be written to have good chemistry with Sonic too, but I can really only think of a bit in SA2 and a bit in Unleashed where this actually happened.

I think the whole SonAlly/SonAmy thing is tough, because both of the girls, each in her own universe, was set up specifically for Sonic (Sally as a true love interest and Amy as...maybe just comedy? But still), so putting them in the same universe and having to choose between them feels weird and is going to upset people either way.

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No he did favor her. As in like, he made a post on the official blog for Archie Sonic saying she was basically "the perfect princess" and since people got mad at him he made one where he tried to describe her flaws, but ended up just making even her flaws look like they were positives. Like she's too kind, too trusting or something like that. I don't wanna go look up the screenshots of those posts again because it's just a hassle. But it has been discussed a lot in the past.

And I could argue you about Satam. Half the time most of the FF's don't even get to interact with eachother since the show focuses so much on Sally. She's the only one that actually gets development. I think the guy that made that show, much like Flynn kind of had a pretty noticeable bias for her and again, she was the "Creator's pet". I think Ben Hurst was his name?

On the flip side neither Penders nor Bollers really cared about her. Penders wanted to straight up kill her off because he wasn't invested in her character and thought she messed with Sonic's style, while Bollers is the one that wrote the infamous "Slap" among some other stuff.

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I'm still not sure Sally being a perfect princess is so much favoritism as it's just her character. Ian also describes Sonic as a hero who always has the best comeback at the ready. It'd be silly for Ian to introduce flaws to Sally's character just to bring her down a peg. They would have to develop on their own for her to struggle with as a natural process of a story. I don't think characters have to be more or less perfect depending on how much you like them.

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But she literally isn't. And that was never the point of her character. She's a leader, she's a rebel. That's it. She's got tons of flaws, almost all characters in the series sans children have them. It's just that the narrative never really acknowledges them because the author itself doesn't want to.

And it's really jarring because when Flynn took over Sally was in a really bad place narratively speaking. She was insufferable. But Flynn took her and basically changed everything about her so people would like her more, but he changed her without first making her develop from what Bollers made her, it's like she just got replaced. Which granted is what every writer does when they direct the narrative. Bollers pretty much threw out all the characterization Penders wrote as well. But anyway what he did with Sally kinda worked on some ways and backfired in some others. It's a mixed bag. Then again, put any female in a pedestal and a spotlight and there's bound to be a mixed reception. People are a lot more judgamental and aggresive to "Mary Sues" that they are to "Gary Stus".

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That makes sense. Just curious, but could you list a few? I'm not trying to argue so much as I can't think of any myself--no doubt due to my general pre-reboot ignorance. What would you have the story acknowledge about her or have her struggle to overcome about herself?

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3 minutes ago, RictalRose0 said:

No he did favor her. As in like, he made a post on the official blog for Archie Sonic saying she was basically "the perfect princess" and since people got mad at him he made one where he tried to describe her flaws, but ended up just making even her flaws look like they were positives. Like she's too kind, too trusting or something like that. I don't wanna go look up the screenshots of those posts again because it's just a hassle. But it has been discussed a lot in the past.

I also hear the "Ian made Sonic ooc for the ship" "willing to portray [character] as a jerk but not Sally" and "everyone forgives her flaws" argument. I don't know how much is true, though. Personally I was more concerned of the unnecessary romance and drama related to it :angry:

I do have problems with the modern stories now (like pacing, dumb jokes, characters and some inconsistency) but it is definitely better and enjoyable than what I know of pre-reboot.

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Quote

That makes sense. Just curious, but could you list a few? I'm not trying to argue so much as I can't think of any myself--no doubt due to my general pre-reboot ignorance. What would you have the story acknowledge about her or have her struggle to overcome about herself?

First of all she's got issues with her dad, leaving him dictate her life so much to the point off complicating her relationship with her friends, that's a struggle never really gave a conclusion to. Second maybe have her actually connect with her friends? She literally only talks to Sonic and maybe Nicole. Most people even forget Bunnie is supposed to be Sally's best friend. Third maybe show her actually struggling with her position of leader of the FF's and that of a princess. That connects with the family issues part too so you can build on that.

As for flaws. Well first of all she's got issues with her tactical and leadership skills that never really get addresed you know? Several of her plans lead to some sort of disaster and yet the narrative never really punishes her for it or makes her learn from her mistakes? It just kinda pins the blame on someone else, usually Sonic. There's also again that she really can't stand up to her father not even to defend her friends. She should have grown into telling him off at some point. Most of her flaws though are not like personality flaws but rather her doing a mistake and the narrative failling to let her know she made a mistake and even making her out to be in the right. Like what happened with Monkey Khan and the slap she gave Sonic. 

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