Short explanation: if Sonic’s clone is a girl it means that sonic could be afab
Long explanation:
In Sonic The Hedgehog 2 there was a glitch were Sonic’s palette would turn green and black, the fans named it evil sonic/ Ashura the hedgehog
Archie’s artist Ken Penders turned this concept into a character named Scourge The Hedgehog, aka anti-sonic; a sonic from a parallele universe, bizzarro style
He was a fan favorite but Penders wasnt really the best (Google Ken Penders lawsuits to check) and gived a lot of problems to Sega and in the end the Archie comics had to stop because of him, and now IDW pubblish sonic comics, and due how messy Archie sonic was, now Sonic Team has put a lot of rules of what the writers can or can not put in the comic.
Since they cant use Scourge anymore; IDW made a new character based on the green sonic glitch:
Surge the Tenrec; a clone of sonic made by Dr Starline! And since she is a clone and a girl; accidentally implies that sonic may be afab
Sonic said Trans Rights!!!
Is that why Scourge is green? Are we sure?
Scourge first appeared in Sonic The Hedgehog #11, not as a green hedgehog, but as an evil version of Sonic who wore shades and a leather jacket and came from an alternate dimension where sonic and his friends were evil.
Basically, the story is a rip-off of the Mirror, Mirror episode of Star Trek, you know, the one where they go to another dimension where there’s an evil version of Spock with a Goatee. Great, classic episode.
Anti-Sonic kept showing up every so often but he didn’t turn green until, like, 100 issues later.
Penders was a very early writer on the Sonic comic who was one of the main people responsible for turning it from a low-continuity gag comic to more of the adventure drama the Sonic Comics still are today.
He was also infamous for having almost no interest in the video games; at one point Archie made a photo comic about two kids getting sucked into the video game, and they had Penders shoot the photos using his niece and nephew as models, but since he didn’t own a Sega Genesis, he just had the kids hold the TV remote sideways and pretend it was a controller.
I really cannot emphasize enough how little those early writers knew about video games and how little Sega cared about whether the writers knew anything about video games. If you wanted to get a writer for a video game comic back then you mostly hired somebody who had been writing Archie comics since the mid-60s, gave them a paragraph about what the video game was, and hoped for the best.
If it’s 1992 and you’re reading a comic book about, say, Super Mario, it’s a coin flip whether anybody working on the comic has ever even seen a Nintendo before, so they sure as heck weren’t inserting references to, like Minus World. References to Dion’s 1961 hit song “Runaround Sue” yes, references to Minus world, no.
So I do wonder if that’s why Scourge is green. He doesn’t turn green until like, 100-odd issues after being introduced, though, so by then it’s not out of the question.
But I digress.
Ken Penders’ relationship with Archie comics eventually soured, and he sued for ownership of the copyright of every character that he created for the series.
In court, Archie’s lawyers, obviously, claimed that he’d signed a work for hire contract giving ownership of anything he made while working for them to Archie and Sega, as is standard, exploitative, industry practice.
Penders claimed that he had never signed any such contract, and Archie’s legal team, Jughead and Big Moose, were also completely unable to produce any evidence that Penders had signed his work over to them, and while I don’t think this has been confirmed, it is widely speculated that the tremendous legal headache this caused for Sega is part of why they stopped working with Archie and went over to IDW.
For example, Penders filed a lawsuit against Sega and Electronic arts, alleging that characters in the Sonic RPG video game were copyright infringingly similar to characters he had created for the Knuckles the Echidna comic book.
Actually, looking it up, I think I have the timeline backwards: First he sued Sega/EA, then Sega/EA went, “Uh, you created those characters under a contract with Archie relinquishing any claim to their copyrights” and Penders was like, “No I didn’t, can you prove otherwise?” and then Archie started sweating and tugging at their collars and I believe the whole thing was settled.
Anyway my point is that I’m kind of shocked that IDW would make a character like this. I’m reflexively on the side of creators in situations like this, but by many reports Penders is a cranky and litigious man.
If he sues, what’s IDW going to say, are they going to Krusty the Klown it? “Our green, evil sharp-toothed clone of Sonic is totally and completely different from your green, evil, sharp-toothed clone of Sonic.”
It seems like a risky move, is what I’m saying.
Morlock why do you know so much about sonic comics
I grew up in the 90s. Do you go around asking people in the 60s why they know so much about the Beatles? Fucker was everywhere back then.
Also, they’re weird comics, and besides plain old nostalgia they’re fascinating to me because of how much has and hasn’t changed in pop culture.
The Sonic comic started when entertainment corporations were just starting to realize the benefits of selling the brand more than the product but before they had had thirty years to perfect their technique.
Like, okay, it’s 1992, and you’re an Archie editor. Your company has just gotten a contract from Sega to publish Sonic the Hedgehog comics in the US. What’s your next move?
Well, you call up the guy who you had writing ALF comics five years ago, and you have this conversation:
“Hey, wanna write for our Sonic The Hedgehog comic?” you ask, and he goes, “What’s a Sonic the Hedgehog?” and you go, “Beats me, some kinda computer game or something, I guess the kids like it, look I’ll fax you the pitch bible for the cartoon they’re making, get me a 24 page script by next week”
I am only barely exaggerating, in the forward to one of the trade paperbacks, the first writer on the book, Michael Gallagher, says he had never heard of Sonic when he got the job and that they gave him a week to come up with the first script.
This was standard operating procedure for licensed comics back then. When I was a kid I used to have this comic:
This comic came out in 1991. “Keep away from ‘Piranha-Round Sue’” is, of course, a reference to Dion’s 1961 billboard chart topper, “Runaround Sue”
Only true 90s kids will remember the pioneering doo-wop sound of Dion!
(To be honest, I was such a weird kid I refused to listen to anything but oldies radio, so I actually did get the reference, but I was definitely the only one.)
And the reason I bring this up is because, when that comic had come out, it had been literally 30 years since Dion had had a hit. Putting in references like that was, at best, deeply confusing.
And it’s also been 30 years since Sonic The Hedgehog 2 came out, and yet here we are, talking about obscure glitches in its debug mode and nobody bats an eye.
Sonic hasn’t had a bon fide hit in 28 years, he ought to be a latter-day Dion, showing up on the oldies station for old farts like me to listen to, and playing a weekly show on the Vegas strip next to Wayne Newton but somehow it’s just totally normal that we’re all talking about him today and nobody bats an eye, of course he still has movies and TV and comics, and of course the people writing in them would include obscure references to hidden bugs in 30 year old games. Just like in the Mandalorian, where they throw in a reference to Life day, because they’ve been making this stuff since before you were born and they know you’ve looked up the Star Wars Holiday Special on youtube…
