How did it get to this point? The upheaval all comes back to one influential contributor by the name of Ken Penders.Īrchie Comics’ Sonic the Hedgehog was a spinoff of a spinoff, its premise taken loosely from the 1993 Saturday morning cartoon of the same name (unofficially dubbed “ SatAM” by series fans), which itself is based on the video games.
And the comics were weird: in an issue of Knuckles the Echidna from the era, an armadillo quotes Bugs Bunny and hoists a hospital bed over his head as he trips on acid.īy the late 2000s this series and its hundreds of characters would be at the center of a grueling legal battle, one that has sparked outrage in the Sonic fandom and forever changed the course of the long-running franchise. To many American children, Sonic and his friends now existed primarily as comic-book characters. Sega’s follow-up to its Genesis home console, the Sega Saturn, was a total bust, and both Sonic cartoons had been canceled several years prior.
Sonic the Hedgehog reads a comic book that wasn’t the center of a perilous intellectual-property dispute.īy 1998, just a few years after Sonic the Hedgehog’s debut, the blue blur was in trouble.
