“Sonic The Hedgehog” #6

Freed from the baggage of decades of continuity and refusing to engage with the character’s online notoriety, IDW’s “Sonic the Hedgehog” series continues to offer some uncomplicated, entertaining video game-adjacent hijinks. This month: amnesia! Misunderstanding! The job title “Ninja Detective,” which I sorely wish I had!

Cover by Jonathan Gray and Matt Herms

Written by Ian Flynn
Illustrated by Tracy Yardley and Jim Amash
Colored by Matt Herms
Lettered by Shawn Lee

“The Fate of Dr. Eggman,” Part 2. Dr. Eggman has been located, but Sonic’s not the only one to find him! When Shadow comes, whose side will Sonic be on?!?

That roll call of plot points may tip you off to the fact that we’re on familiar ground here. Nobody involved in “Sonic the Hedgehog” #6 is out to reinvent the wheel, but that might be for the best. Until recently Archie published the officially-licensed adventures of the blue blur, which had become calcified with years of convoluted backstory and original characters struggling to integrate corporate-mandated game tie-ins. Meanwhile, the games themselves have varied wildly in quality. It’s a situation which, combined with a fervent and often fetid fan community, has lead the character and his attendant franchise to become prime ironic meme material.

Which is a complete 180 from where he started. What defined Sonic as a character, in the early years, was a quantifiable excess of cool. Compared to that fat little plumber Nintendo put forward as a mascot, he was ice cold. The fastest thing alive, with no respect for authority, villainy, or what hedgehogs actually look like! But that was a long time ago. Sonic the Hedgehog turned 27 this year. 27 isn’t cool. 27 is the age where you get excited at the prospect of buying some nice new curtains that match your bedspread, or have dreams about buying a comfortable chair for your apartment. I know this because I also turned 27 this year, and I had those thoughts and dreams, and I am also not cool.

In which case, it’s all credit to writer Ian Flynn and the art team of Tracy Yardley, Jim Amash and Matt Herms that they do not attempt to chase any street cred for their Sonic, nor to construct as elaborate a mythos of their predecessors. “Sonic the Hedgehog” #6 reads like the Saturday Morning Cartoon version of the character (but, er, not like either of the actual Sonic cartoons that used to go out on Saturday mornings in the ‘90s) with a clearly-defined, archetypal cast of characters, an easy-to-follow story with bags of charm where it’s perhaps lacking in ingenuity, and bold, boisterous artwork.

The premise of the issue is a real old saw. The villainous Dr. Eggman received some sort of bonk on the head, which appears to have wiped his memory. Now, instead of being a mad scientist who crams cute bunnies into killer robots as part of some ill-defined world-conquering scheme, he’s the harmless “Mr. Tinker,” friend to local villagers. Problem is, Sonic’s edgy doppelganger Shadow the Hedgehog and accomplice Rouge the Bat aren’t buying it, assuming the “amusement park” he’s building in his shed is in fact the latest of Eggman’s dodgy schemes.

That flimsy premise is a hook on which to hang an equally thin plot where Sonic lures Shadow out of the village Mr. Tinker has taken residence in, leaving his Chaotix compatriots (bling-clad crocodile Vector, childlike bee Charmy and aforementioned Ninja Detective, Espio the Chameleon) time to formulate a way of calming him down. Within that there’s some flirtatious banter between Rouge and the Chaotix, a twist you can spot a mile off, and some nods towards video game continuity, and dialogue which is never anything less than wholesome.

What keeps it all rocketing along at a speed befitting the super-speedy Sonic is Yardley, Amash and Herm’s stellar work. With a plot like gossamer, the art is unencumbered by long spells of exposition, complex layouts or difficult-to-illustrate scenes. It’s pure comics, reduced to its essentials of movement, guiding your eye invisibly around a page, and manipulating time within some stylized heavy ink lines and primary colors right out of the recent Sonic Mania game (in fact, the all-ages innocence of “Sonic the Hedgehog” #6 has a lot in common with the Mania-related animations Sega have been releasing online as of late).

Exaggerated poses, that thick line and superflat color job add to the cartoon vibe, without it ever feeling like you’re flipping through storyboards. Yardley has an almost preternatural comics eyes, with the movement of characters between panels always clear and easy to follow, even when Shadow and Sonic turn into actual blurs of movement rocketing across the picturesque landscape in their quarrel over Eggman’s protested innocence.

A moral that boils down to “you should always give people a second chance,” and the fact that you can boil the issue down to such a simplistic moral, rightly suggests that this is thoroughly uncomplicated, bread-and-butter storytelling. But for a character whose comic book incarnations have been bogged down with kid-unfriendly plotting, characterisation and often dreadful art for years, it’s practically revolutionary.

Final Verdict: 7.1 – A thoroughly enjoyable, if basic, Sonic comic. You know, for kids!