Sonic the Comic

~ the eulogy ~

I turned nine in 1993, which was exactly the right age for this and exactly the wrong country. Sonic the Comic was a British fortnightly in English, sold on British newsagent shelves, and the Sonic material that reached a nine-year-old in Turkey came off a cartridge rather than off paper. Fleetway launched it on 29 May 1993 at ninety-five pence, with three original strips and a free sheet of stickers, timed to the peak of Sega's European moment.

Richard Burton edited the first issues. Nigel Kitching and Lew Stringer wrote most of what mattered while Richard Elson and Nigel Dobbyn drew a great deal of it. Andy Diggle passed through on his way to a career in American comics. What they produced was a parallel Sonic canon with no obligation to the games. Their Sonic was openly rude and their Super Sonic was a separate personality who was genuinely dangerous to be near, and a good part of the supporting cast existed only in the comic and therefore only in Britain.

The license covered Sega's catalog rather than just the hedgehog, so the same issue could carry Streets of Rage, Shinobi, Golden Axe or Decap Attack strips under the Sega Superstars banner. That made it a Sega comic with Sonic on the cover, which was commercially sensible in 1993 and increasingly strange afterward. The Mega Drive aged out and the Saturn failed in Europe. By 1999 the brands filling those back pages were no longer things children had in the house.

Original stories ran out at issue 184, after an adaptation of Sonic Adventure. Everything from 185 onward was reprint. The announcement that 223 would be the last came in September 2001, and the final issue was cover-dated 9 January 2002 at a pound fifty.

~ the dossier ~

~ the reprint years ~

Egmont, which by then owned Fleetway's titles, worked on the assumption that the readership turned over completely about every five years. If that is true, then reprinting a story from 1994 in 1999 is not a repeat for anyone who matters, and the editorial budget becomes optional. So the commissioning stopped along with the page rates, and the comic kept appearing fortnightly for another thirty-nine issues made entirely of its own past.

Reprinting is the cheapest way to hold a slot on a newsagent's shelf, and it does nothing at all for the sales problem that made it necessary. Kitching has said he did not know the end was coming until shortly before the readers did, about eighteen months after the last original strip he wrote for it.

~ what the fans did ~

The fortnight after issue 223 would have been issue 224, so that is what the readers numbered their own continuation. Sonic the Comic Online picked up the stories as an unofficial webcomic and kept going for years, made by readers of the original who by then owned scanners.

There is also a current project reillustrating the old strips, and an independent issue-by-issue guide at sonicthecomic.com that indexes all 223 issues with their covers, credits and free gifts. None of it is affiliated with Sega or Egmont, and the index treats the thirty-nine reprint issues as carefully as the original run.

~ the distance ~

A licensed children's comic is the most locally bound product in this whole graveyard. It needs a newsagent, a language, a fortnightly habit and a pocket-money economy, and all four of those are national. The games crossed borders on their own; the comic about the games stayed inside the country that printed it.

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