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SEGA Announces Partnership with IDW Publishing for New Sonic Comic in 2018

Lagamorph said:
I'd love for them to hire Nigel Kitching, his artwork was glorious, better than anything that was ever in the Archie comics.
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Elson was the artist, Kitching was the writer. They were both great.

I still remember going into a forbidden planet shop back in the nineties and seeing the archie Sonic comic for the first time. My first thought was how much tackier and cringeworthy it was compared to STC.
 
StC has some great art and some great ideas, and it never really hits the lows that pre-Flynn Archie did, but it's still riddled with some seriously schlocky material over the course of its run.
 
Sir_Crocodile said:
Elson was the artist, Kitching was the writer. They were both great.

I still remember going into a forbidden planet shop back in the nineties and seeing the archie Sonic comic for the first time. My first thought was how much tackier and cringeworthy it was compared to STC.
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That was it, I keep getting Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson the wrong way around for some reason.
I think Kitching did try his hand at the artwork in a few later issues as well though.


The psychopathic Super Sonic that they came up with was utter genius. I mean look at him,
latest

This is right after he believes he's killed Tails and Amy.
 
Lagamorph said:
That was it, I keep getting Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson the wrong way around for some reason.
I think Kitching did try his hand at the artwork in a few later issues as well though.


The psychopathic Super Sonic that they came up with was utter genius. I mean look at him,
latest

This is right after he believes he's killed Tails and Amy.
Click to expand...

God, that entire arc really from the Brutus stuff through to the 100th issue and Robotnik's defeat really was something. Super Sonic trapped inside the Omni Viewer in the special zone but gradually, menacingly getting closer and closer to the screen and getting out each issue - I may have been like ten, but I'll never forget that stuff.

I spoke to somebody at Fleetway at a con years after the fact who said that killing STC was widely viewed as a mistake, and was a decision taken as the Dreamcast died because management just thought 'SEGA is finished', then they ended up kicking themselves, of course, when Sonic and SEGA found their feet on other platforms and carried on as they were.
 
APZonerunner said:
God, that entire arc really from the Brutus stuff through to the 100th issue and Robotnik's defeat really was something. Super Sonic trapped inside the Omni Viewer in the special zone but gradually, menacingly getting closer and closer to the screen and getting out each issue - I may have been like ten, but I'll never forget that stuff.

I spoke to somebody at Fleetway at a con years after the fact who said that killing STC was widely viewed as a mistake, and was a decision taken as the Dreamcast died because management just thought 'SEGA is finished', then they ended up kicking themselves, of course, when Sonic and SEGA found their feet on other platforms and carried on as they were.
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Yeah that arc was amazing, right up there with the Brotherhood of Metallix arc. That was another incredible one, going back into the origins of Robotnik and showing that Sonic himself was directly responsible for Robotnik's creation in order to save Mobius from basically being turned into a machine and all life being wiped out, all because he was responsible for the Metallix self destruct system and without him they'd have just been created without it and completely taken over.

It was also great to see Amy develop from "OMG SQUEEEEE" fangirl and into a competent fighter and leader in her own right, capable of even outdoing Sonic on occasion.

There was an unofficial continuation of the comic, STC Online, that I think some former writers/artists even contributed to.
 
Lagamorph said:
Yeah that arc was amazing, right up there with the Brotherhood of Metallix arc. That was another incredible one, going back into the origins of Robotnik and showing that Sonic himself was directly responsible for Robotnik's creation in order to save Mobius from basically being turned into a machine and all life being wiped out, all because he was responsible for the Metallix self destruct system and without him they'd have just been created without it and completely taken over.

It was also great to see Amy develop from "OMG SQUEEEEE" fangirl and into a competent fighter and leader in her own right, capable of even outdoing Sonic on occasion.

There was an unofficial continuation of the comic, STC Online, that I think some former writers/artists even contributed to.
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Loved the brotherhood of Metallix arc. :D
 
I used to read the UK comic as a kid and they didn't add any of the Cartoon characters, the UK comic was fantastic I should see if I can find those digitally anywhere.

I did read the US comic and I did enjoy the story but I wasn't too big a fan of the cartoon characters showing up (and I absolutely hate the egg headed robotnick design). But I did like what they did story-wise.

I have absolute faith that IDW will do a great job with this license and I'm willing to give it a shot whether they bring the cartoon characters in or not.
 
Tensketch said:
I used to read the UK comic as a kid and they didn't add any of the Cartoon characters, the UK comic was fantastic I should see if I can find those digitally anywhere.
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Please post here if you find a legit way to do this, I'd love to read those again.
If you find a less legit way a pm would be good too ;)
 
I'm conflicted. I'll take interest if Mobius et al is still in.

Lagamorph said:
That was it, I keep getting Nigel Kitching and Richard Elson the wrong way around for some reason.
I think Kitching did try his hand at the artwork in a few later issues as well though.


The psychopathic Super Sonic that they came up with was utter genius. I mean look at him,
latest

This is right after he believes he's killed Tails and Amy.
Click to expand...

When the hell did this happen? The last 10 or so issues of Archie Sonic have been sitting unread on my shelf.
 
TheDinoman said:
We got some art by our boy Hesse.

DLZdIfzVAAAW6cp.jpg:small

DLZdIfxVwAAQfAL.jpg:small
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I like it. I think I'll definitely look to pick up the first few issues of this at least and see how it starts out. Hope it makes it to the UK Kindle store. Or at least the UK Comixology.



RedSwirl said:
When the hell did this happen? The last 10 or so issues of Archie Sonic have been sitting unread on my shelf.
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This wasn't Archie, this was in the UK Fleetway comics which were their own thing, and in my opinion were far superior to the Archie comics. In the Fleetway comics Super Sonic was essentially a Jekyl and Hyde situation, Super was an evil psychopath who only wanted destruction, which made sense as he was essentially a being of Chaos energy. He got incredibly out of control after Sonic was exposed to a massive dose of Chaos Emerald energy and since Sonic just happened to be thinking about how annoying Amy was at the time, Super's first thought was to go and kill Amy. He believed himself to have succeeded (along with believing he had killed Tails) and found it utterly hilarious.
 
That evil super sonic shit was dumb. And I was never fond of it, it seemed like actually some weird fan fiction shit to solve a non existant problem. That sega themselves solved by introducing other characters with super forms

On the note of the new info, hope it turns out cool
 
Protome said:
Hire the people who made the UK Sonic Comic back in the day. That shit was way better than anything that has come since.
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That comic has actually surrived to this day, in that the original team went online and have been continuing it in webcomic form with the most recent issue coming out last month.
 
Hesse has done it. He's made a rendition of Modern!Sonic that even I wholeheartedly like!

Really looking forward to seeing how IDW handles Sonic. They already got me for TMNT and Transformers, so I have pretty high expectations for what they do here. Be even better if Sega allow IDW the same kind of liberties that Hasbro and Viacom/Nick do.
 
TreIII said:
Be even better if Sega allow IDW the same kind of liberties that Hasbro and Viacom/Nick do.
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I doubt it part of the reason this is happening is because sega has burned multiple times in this exact same medium before , letting folks run wild. Characters got shat up and others ignored.
I expect this for a good while to be uniform as hell
 
Village said:
I doubt it part of the reason this is happening is because sega has burned multiple times in this exact same medium before , letting folks run wild. Characters got shat up and others ignored.
I expect this for a good while to be uniform as hell
Click to expand...

I expect there to be some base ground rules to adhere to, of course, but I don't think IDW would be satisfied with any deal that wouldn't allow their team to adequately tell stories, render characters and build up a universe. And unlike Archie, IDW has a bit more in the way of clout. They're like the 4th or 5th biggest comic book publisher in US.

I could easily see this being just as much a thing where Sega "needs" IDW for the sake of getting a trustworthy publisher to provide good serialized comic based off of their franchise, just as much, if not possibly more, than IDW "needs" Sonic.
 
Tyson is still one of the artists on the new version of the comic?
Nice, he's one of my favorite artist that worked on the license, ever since his old sonic webcomic days.

Can't wait to see the new issues next year.
 
TreIII said:
I expect there to be some base ground rules to adhere to, of course, but I don't think IDW would be satisfied with any deal that wouldn't allow their team to adequately tell stories, render characters and build up a universe. And unlike Archie, IDW has a bit more in the way of clout. They're like the 4th or 5th biggest comic book publisher in US.

I could easily see this being just as much a thing where Sega "needs" IDW for the sake of getting a trustworthy publisher to provide good serialized comic based off of their franchise, just as much, if not possibly more, than IDW "needs" Sonic.
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I think you are giving IDW entirely too much clout and control in this situation. But I'll let you and the sally accorn person be disappointing when the time comes. At the end the day Sega will be the one controlling where this goes and that's how they want it I feel. because plans will change, and games will come out and characters might become more important and then sega will go " do a thing about this" and they'll do it because that's how this usually works. If you go into this thinking Sega " needs" idw you are going to end up Wildly dissapointed
 
Village said:
I doubt it part of the reason this is happening is because sega has burned multiple times in this exact same medium before , letting folks run wild. Characters got shat up and others ignored.
I expect this for a good while to be uniform as hell
Click to expand...

Well, Fleetway managed to mostly adapt existing characters from the franchise rather than having to rely on creating their own characters. The core cast were entirely characters from the game, they just characterised the Rabbit and Pig that Sonic released from Badniks in the game. It's all about how creatively you can work with the source material.
Yes there were some original characters, but those were generally just side characters, a huge amount of them being throwaway villains.

Unlike Archie they had literally one original Echidna character, who turned out to be a temporary villain who appeared in only a few stories.
Hopefully IDW are able to do something similar if they're restricted to "Keep it close to the source material" and can still get creative with it.

Given the success of Sonic Mania I really hope that IDW decide to focus adaptations more on the pre-Adventure games story wise, keeping it on Mobius, few to no humans, etc.


Village said:
That evil super sonic shit was dumb. And I was never fond of it, it seemed like actually some weird fan fiction shit to solve a non existant problem. That sega themselves solved by introducing other characters with super forms
Click to expand...
Can't say I agree. Giving other characters Super Forms doesn't solve the problem of why characters don't just go Super to solve every serious problem, especially given that in the Fleetway comics the Chaos Emeralds were originally kept hidden by Sonic himself so he had constant access to them if needed, and were eventually returned to the Floating Island and constantly in Knuckles care, meaning again Sonic and Knuckles had access to them whenever they wanted.
It also worked well with the fact that in the Fleetway comics the Chaos Emeralds, whilst a very powerful energy source, held onto Chaos energy, which as the name implies is gonna screw you up personality wise. This is in keeping with their depiction in the comics of having been used to absorb evil from Mobius to try and turn it into a true paradise.
 
Flynn's back in the saddle again:

San Diego, CA (October 8, 2017) — Sonic the Hedgehog™ and IDW Publishing are excited to reveal today that fan favorite scribe, Ian Flynn, has come on board to take the blue blur and his friends in a fresh, exciting direction.

"I've been a SEGA® kid for life, and Sonic has been my career for over a decade," said Flynn. "I'm overjoyed to keep running with the little blue hedgehog, and especially excited to be expanding my relationship with IDW at the same time. I can't wait to show you what I'm made of as we reach for the stars and explore the endless possibilities!"

"Ian has a strong connection with both the character and the fans so there was no hesitation in bringing him on to launch this new Sonic series," said Sonic the Hedgehog editor Joe Hughes. "Not only is he a great writer, but he genuinely loves these characters. His pitches have been nothing short of amazing and we are very excited to get this out to the Sonic community who have been supportive from day one."

"When we partnered with IDW a couple months back, Ian was undoubtedly our first choice to take the helm and scribe the new comic series," said Michael Cisneros, Licensing Specialist at SEGA of America. "His uncanny knack for capturing the spirit of Sonic is evident not only in his work, but in the hearts of our very vocal and devoted fan base. We couldn't be more pleased to have him setting the stage for many years of compelling storytelling."

A new era of Sonic comics will begin next April with a four-week event. IDW will be moving at Sonic-like speeds to publish the first four issues of the new series in the span of four weeks. Those issues will be written by Flynn with a team of artists joining him to be announced at a later date.
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http://www.idwpublishing.com/idw-publishing-and-sega-welcome-veteran-sonic-writer-ian-flynn/

Additional info from a Q&A session, which I'll nick a few highlights from: http://www.tssznews.com/2017/10/08/sonic-nycc-2017-idw-event-qa-info/

  • The Freedom Fighters returning? "Stay tuned". They're aware of the demand, though.
  • "We're specifically making this world built in a world IDW controls separate from the games". Aaron is at the event. He added more to say there might be occasional tie-in with a game, but stay tuned.
  • Ken Penders was brought up, asked if he was behind this. Only answer? "I don't know who that is".
Click to expand...
 
ThatÂ’s great to here. I will still miss the old Archie universe since it was such a major part of my childhood but IÂ’m looking forward to seeing what Ian and IDW does next.
 
WillyFive said:
I would have liked a new person.
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The Sonic franchise just doesn't have a good enough track record with competent writing for me to be completely ok with fresh blood. There were only ever 2 writers that did it right IMO and 1 of them's dead now.

At the least it should be alternating between Flynn and new guys for a while until the new guys have proven themselves.
 
MAtgS said:
The Sonic franchise just doesn't have a good enough track record with competent writing for me to be completely ok with fresh blood. There were only ever 2 writers that did it right IMO and 1 of them's dead now.

At the least it should be alternating between Flynn and new guys for a while until the new guys have proven themselves.
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If that was a reference to the late Ben Hurst...I wholeheartedly agree.

Anyway, I'm liking what I'm hearing, so far, even if they remained pretty vague for a "townhall" format panel. IDW gets their own world to control entirely, with what appears to be relaxed "mandates" from Sega to limit their creativity. That's pretty much all I could ask for, and fits what I expected.

I'm not really concerned about the SatAm/Archie cast, because I think that explicit namedropping of how things work for Transformers was meant to be a direct reference about how we can expect those characters to be handled and reintroduced in a new series. IDW's TMNT series does this same thing, as well.
 
TreIII said:
I'm not really concerned about the SatAm/Archie cast, because I think that explicit namedropping of how things work for Transformers was meant to be a direct reference about how we can expect those characters to be handled and reintroduced in a new series. IDW's TMNT series does this same thing, as well.
Click to expand...

For those not familiar with how IDW Transformers or
me
, how does it do things?
 
MAtgS said:
The Sonic franchise just doesn't have a good enough track record with competent writing for me to be completely ok with fresh blood. There were only ever 2 writers that did it right IMO and 1 of them's dead now.

At the least it should be alternating between Flynn and new guys for a while until the new guys have proven themselves.
Click to expand...

You know there were other people writing sonic comics while flynn was writing them right?
One of the artists wrote a few and created her own character. I think flynns's wife wrote some too, flynn isn't some "mythical being who is one of two men who can only understand the deep and complicated mythos of the legendary sonic franchise"

Turns out if you aren't a weirdo hack, you too can write competent comics about animals who tend to go fast, and a fat doctor with a lust for power , casino's and amusement parks.

You just have to be, competent, and not a weirdo, or a hack.

There are probably plenty of people who can do that, who like sonic, or are at least professional enough where as even if they might not care for sonic or care about sonic they can tell a good story.
 
Village said:
You know there were other people writing sonic comics while flynn was writing them right?
One of the artists wrote a few and created her own character. I think flynns's wife wrote some too, flynn isn't some "mythical being who is one of two men who can only understand the deep and complicated mythos of the legendary sonic franchise"

Turns out if you aren't a weirdo hack, you too can write competent comics about animals who tend to go fast, and a fat doctor with a lust for power , casino's and amusement parks.

You just have to be, competent, and not a weirdo, or a hack.

There are probably plenty of people who can do that, who like sonic, or are at least professional enough where as even if they might not care for sonic or care about sonic they can tell a good story.
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Again, this particular franchise's history makes me cautious until proven otherwise. Such is the way of Sonic: Always assume the worse case scenario because that's what we tend to get.
 
MAtgS said:
For those not familiar with how IDW Transformers or
me
, how does it do things?
Click to expand...

Basically how it works for Transformers (and TMNT, as well) is like so:

Characters from previous media (as long as there's nothing stopping their inclusion) can be rolled over to the current canon as much as the writers wish. Sometimes, they may be more or less verbatim to how you remember them, or perhaps can be described as a compilation of all the versions of the character across th. Sometimes, they may be a bit different or have different backgrounds, because this is a new take on the character and they want to try something different with them.

Fellow TF fans like Tizoc would probably agree with me that the likes of Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime probably most benefitted from the latter, if you're most familiar from his version from the original cartoon series.
 
MAtgS said:
Again, this particular franchise's history makes me cautious until proven otherwise. Such is the way of Sonic: Always assume the worse case scenario because that's what we tend to get.
Click to expand...

While it is unfortunate the writers for the series tend to be uninspired like sonic boom , or bad like a good chunk of the comic, sonic x, and some people working on the games now. But there has and can be more good ones, i'm sure they will bring in more as the book goes on.

I don't believe that sonic is cursed to where as every time someone tries to write about it in an official capacity they loose their mind like staring at an elder god. Though its a fun thought
 
BaconHat said:
Tyson is still one of the artists on the new version of the comic?
Nice, he's one of my favorite artist that worked on the license, ever since his old sonic webcomic days.

Can't wait to see the new issues next year.
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I really hope Sega works with Tyson more often for future Sonic games.
 
It's a new #1, so even if Freedom Fighters are in it, it would be with zero connection with the previous universe. A shame, but expected.

Considering the amount of world building Ian did with post-Megaman crossover it's sad to see it restart. With the Fish People and the Egg Bosses, Black Arms, and various other characters-based-on-unlikely-sonic-animals like Relic the Pika it felt like things were going to calm down again.

Though I imagine characters like Nack, Bean & Bark will make their return basically unchanged.
 
Rlan said:
It's a new #1, so even if Freedom Fighters are in it, it would be with zero connection with the previous universe. A shame, but expected.

Considering the amount of world building Ian did with post-Megaman crossover it's sad to see it restart. With the Fish People and the Egg Bosses, Black Arms, and various other characters-based-on-unlikely-sonic-animals like Relic the Pika it felt like things were going to calm down again.

Though I imagine characters like Nack, Bean & Bark will make their return basically unchanged.
Click to expand...

Even if it is a shame, I do think that in the long run, this was the best move that could be made. 11 years or so later, and Flynn finally gets to pitch his own world from top to bottom, with the backing of a publisher who largely has their shit together, instead of continuously applying fixes to Penders and Bollers' stuff, trying to establish your own stuff and dealing with Archie's ineptitude at the same time.

And who knows, I still wouldn't be surprised if at least a few lingering threads from Archie are continued or resolved in the new setting, someday.
 
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