A Farewell to the Sonic Comic (1992-2017) 

Late as hell to the party, but thanks for the kind words and the shout-out.

oh no

“Sonic truly understands the meaning of war...” is the most mind bending sentence to ever be written seriously

Remember that time when Tails hesitated to JFK Robotnik?

My favorite part of the early Sonic Comics were small little boxes in the corners of the front page, with my favorite one being Robotnik in the corner box and saying "Today the corner box, and tomorrow the world!"

so cybershell is finally dead. after all these years. its technically not dead but on an indefinite hiatus .

Ken Penders, congratulations you are one of the only artists who's work actually makes me wanna throw up.

"Last night I dreamt I was engaged to a red echidna named--" "Knuckles?" "Yes how did you know?" "I had the same dream" I know it's not what they meant but I just fucking laughed out loud at the idea of Sonic having a dream where he marries Knuckles

I drew that Sonic CD picture in the Sonic Live issue. I was like 16 at the time. They also messed up and put & Kitty beside my name, probably cuz I had my middle name spelt in Japanese.

You missed the 'best' detail in Sonic Live!: They were too cheap to buy and too lazy to borrow a Genesis, so there's no console in any of the photos and indeed the 'controller' the boy is using is obviously a TV remote turned sideways.

Are you kidding? Sonic did the Council of Ricks before Rick and Morty

"Pay attention to Ian Flynn" and "pay attention to Tyson Hesse" one's written the story for Sonic Frontiers and the other's been hired as character design lead for the Sonic movies. We're lucky to have them.

I think something bad is happening to Archie, first Mega Man and now Sonic.

Two issues I'LL never forget are Issues 175 and 200. The former in a nutshell, Dr. Eggman wins. He just straight up wins. He ambushed Knothole, destroys EVERYTHING and Snively captures everyone but Sonic(and Tails, Knuckles, and Amy) so that Eggman can defeat him personally, and he does. Sonic gets straight up thrashed, and even pulling off one of his most impressive speed feats ever, complete with a badass line(Limit!? I'VE GOT YOUR LIMIT RIGHT HERE!) he still gets knocked into the dirt. The latter is actually the first Sonic Comic I ever read(not counting the one in Mega Collection plus), and it's glorious. In the aftermath of 175, the following issues had sonic and company make the biggest comeback yet, and when Eggman was defeated after Sonic recovered from his brutal ass-kicking, he slowly started descending into madness, and his constant strings of defeat weren't helping. When Sonic beat him in THIS issue, bringing their war to an end, the Eggman cracks and he has a mental breakdown and the issue ends with Eggman in a straightjacket.

The main thing I hate about the comic getting cancelled is that the spinoff comic Sonic Mega Drive with art by Tyson Hesse will never be finished. It was great, best thing out of the Sonic Archie comics in ages.

I remember going to an antique shop with my grandparents and mom when I was 14. I was a huge Sonic fan, but never knew about the comics. Then I discovered a stack of about 50 of these for 10 bucks. My mom got them and I read and reread them religiously that year - it helped me get through the awkward age of 14 and I'll love these comics forever for that.

is that tails WITH A FUCKING GUN trying to kill robotnik AND A FUCKING UNICORN HUMAN BEING TELLS TAILS TO PULL THE TRIGGER? w h a t

Fun fact: Dawn Best, one of the artists who drew for this comic, is also the creator of Rouge the Bat. True story.

I still love archie silvers story; he searches traitor who destroyed freedom fighters for his whole life.he finally finds it and goes back in time to tell sonic,sonic beats him up and tells "traitor"(antonie) sacrificed his life to save king and quenn from eggmans lazer.thus disambbling freedom fighters

Ken Penders is the embodiment of deviant art OC cringe.

Playing overwatch while listening to the audio of this I heard IT'S HIGH NOON and I actually get scared

Do you ever think Sonic just ever thinks "Man, I miss old Robotnik?". I think that should've been touched up on in the comics. A reflection on the different relationships between Robotniks and Sonic. It just feels so weird that Robo Robotnik integrated himself so well into continuity and he's just sort of a carbon copy of Robotnik.

Yoshikage Kira just wants to live a quiet life

you know, ken penders kind of looks like eggman.

Sonic Comic in a nutshell: but then it got weirder.

"Cries in tears" Archie whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy IDW obtains the license "Oh ok"

fleetway Sonic is so weird

0:01 "The Sonic Comic is finally dead." 1 year later: *Making the IDW comics*

Spaz And Tracy were probably my favorite artists

I vividly remember Reading one of the Issues where it was a filler issue. I remember the plot being that The freedom fighters (Except Sonic) Had some Robotniks McDonalds style fast food, then they got sick. thus sonic had to go INSIDE them to fight off the illness for them. is was fucking bizzare.

Such a damn shame, really. The Archie Sonic Comics are what pretty much inspired me to begin drawing and creating characters, all the way back when I got my first issue - Issue #173 - from my grandmother after she saw it at a yard sale. I remember kinda drifting away from the Sonic franchise as a whole two or three years ago, but I still have all the comics I collected over the years. Seeing this news really just hurts.

1:44 so Tails received a gun before Shadow? Wow

Fun Fact: The Endgame Saga was originally going to be the End of the Comics, and according to Ian Flynn Part 4 of Endgame was going to be twice as big.

The irony here is that, if you take copyright and fair use laws into account, things would have worked out much better for both Archie AND Penders if he'd never gotten the job there to begin with. He could have made his crappy Lara-Su stuff unimpeded (and much sooner) since original characters can't be claimed by Sega or Archie's copyright, and Archie wouldn't have been forced to reboot the whole mythos in his absence. So in retrospect, one SINGLE act of nepotism screwed this whole comic over.

also Ken Panders is the devil. he sounds like a devianart artist that got way too much power.

The Ian Flynn run was probably the best the Archie comic got. Ken Penders had his moments when he wasn't being creepy, weird, or egotistical, but it was usually either him or Karl Bollers responsible for some of the worst story stuff to happen in the comic. The first year or two solid of Flynn's run on the comic was basically cleaning up the Penders/Bollers mess. And actually managing not to let Sega's increased meddling and increasingly oppressive mandate from ruining the comic. Ultimately it was Penders' lawsuit that killed the comic, since it was basically that and Archie's own financial woes that got the comic ended. I haven't ready much of the IDW comic yet, but I hear Flynn did a phenomenal job getting its lore up and going before he departed *that* comic. I'm always delighted when I hear how pissed off Ken Penders is that he's pretty much blacklisted from the industry and very few people give a crap about his attempt to continue his awful Lara-Su comic since he doesn't even have the Sonic license to base his work on anymore.

it figures it would be uncerimoniously cancelled

What a fucking shame. The Sonic comics and the Saturday Morning Cartoon were some of the best aspects of the franchise. I was always annoyed they didn't make any games based on them. Princess Sally is the original waifu.

*Listens to the stuff about Ken Penders* ... My god. This must be the most financially successful bad fanfic writer in existence.

"'A dragon's spoken word is fact', confirms Knuckles" kills me every fucking time lol

Wow. Never have I seen a creepier person, in both form and personality, than Ken Penders.

I want them to release all the comics in big easy to manage books. They had a few last time I looked but vast quantities were missing. I'll assume that they didn't expect me to maintain a subscription for the last 25 years to get them all.

So Kids, if you get sucked into the TV, don't forget Up, Down, Left, Right, A+Start!

2:26 Tails: “Sonic I don’t like that look of that face” Sonic: “I don’t much like the look of your face, am I complaining?” TAILS GOT ROASTED

man. my interest in the comic started waning after #50, i'd pick up an issue sporadically and then be all confused and shit. that endgame arc fucked me up as a kid tho, like damn. i think i've still got all my comics laying around somewhere, actually...

125 was actually the point when an evil alien race I forgot the name of was trying to wipe the world off the face of the galaxy, and Sonic wound up powering a warp-weapon to use against them by running really fast. The story ended with Sonic being warped to the galaxy that the alien race came from after the weapon successfully worked, and the next bunch of issues revolved around him finding a way back home.

35:19. Hey look! Sanic and Solly!

I will always grieve the loss of the fantastic backgrounds the comics gave to Espio and Silver. 😢 Silver's story didn't even get resolved in the end. It's just tragic.

Even if IDW does pick up the comic, there's no guarantee the FF will come back, esp. considering the fact that Ian Flynn had to fight Sega to keep the Freedom Fighters in the series after the reboot I think our Sonic SatAM crew is officially dead..... :'/

after hearing about all this stuff about ken panders.....i wonder if chris-chan worships him since he aint to far off from ken panders

5:27 There’s a dimension where Sonic accepted Knuckles’ steroids

I love that in the background with all the comics, at 12:20 one of them is literally just Sonic and the Secret Rings

Wow! You know, I always hated the Genesis Wave. I just couldn't undrestand what the fuck Archie Comics would want to reset everything, after they when through all that work, developing the character's personalities and and relation ships... Now I know the REAL reason why!... This Ken Penders should be lynched by his BALLS!

I personally loved all the issues that involved Nathaniel Morgan, he was a pretty solid character. Also #FuckKenPenders

i should be sleeping but fuck it i'll watchthis video instead.

I read from 172 to 243. So many amazing memories, these comics we're my childhood.

Unlike Mega Man, Sonic is an active properly, and Sega seems to be doing right by Sonic lately. Someone will pick up the license eventually. As much as it saddens me to see this go, and that it didn't get a proper ending, I am excited to see a potential fresh start for this series.

"Overly long rambling"? Nonsense, you really went in-depth about some of the issues, and you are still internet comedy gold. I love your content, so keep it up.

With it's high and low points, the Sonic Archie comic was great while it lasted, and it's a real shame to see it go. To be fair though, it wasn't just Ken Penders alone that killed the comic (as most have been led to believe), because Sega themselves had an hand in it's slow demise as well. You see, over time, Sega continuously passed notes down as to what could and couldn't be done. They were very restrictive as to how the official characters were depicted, and tried as hard to make the comics more and more like the games in tone and style while removing creative control from the writers. Not to mention Sega slowly destroyed the comic's roots and intended on erasing any connection to the SatAM cartoon completely because it didn't fit their vision of the franchise, a trend which was amplified tenfold after the Super Genesis Wave event. This was combined with a massive decline in sales after the reboot, as well as internal politics on Archie's side of things in the fact that they too wanted to get rid of the comic along with Sega, especially since Archie wanted to focus more on their homegrown titles, much like Marvel did in the 90's when they sold off their comic licenses to other companies. So when you really narrow things down, the Archie comic had everything going against it, so there's not simply one source for the cause of the comic's demise, but several different factors that contributed to it.

Me: *Please don´t talk about Ken Penders, please ignore that please please please* -Ken Penders and the Lara Su Chronicles *Oh boy... at least he might not know that Ken did the sonic live-* -Sonic Live is... *Crap...*

Hopefully Sega snatches the SatAM cast and all the Mobius stuff for themselves so that there's at least hope the comic sorta continues under different people.

Ken Penders and Chris chan should make a collab. Perhaps a Sonichu Lara-su crossover? Sounds like a match made in cringy heaven

Most excellent retrospective Sir, Living in the UK I never read any of the Archie comics, so this was a great piece for me :) Oh, if you want to know how messed up the Fleetway Sonic gets, may I recommend a RU-vid channel by the name of "SJ Webster" He's covered them really well.

Idk how I feel about a kingdom of fursonas being called knothole

The Mecha Madness arc was honestly one of my favorite comics as a kid. The art was killer in the special issue itself. Like you I stopped reading around the time of the Sonic Adventure adaptation. Spaz's art was the best. I always looked forward to his covers and when he did the inner art it was always incredible.

Wow, never knew the Sonic comics had the same continuity for so long. I always read random issues but now I'll start from the beginning because it looks freaking awesome lol

Not only one the longest-running comic series based on a videogame character, but also one of the best in general. Even if I didn't read much of it, I'm entirely sad to see it go. R.I.P. Comic Sonic. Also, screw Ken Penders, that slimy, talentless hack.

13:35 i love how in the background to the right, there's just randomly sonic and the secret rings amongst all the actual comics

It really is sad that such a greatly developed world is no more. And it couldn't even get a proper send off.

Goodbye, Sonic Comics. I hardly knew ye.

I'd highly recommend reading more of the comic, personally. I've only read up on everything post-retcon (which is actually triggered in the first Megaman/Sonic crossover, which I would ALSO highly recommend) but everything post-retcon felt like some of the best written sonic stuff I've ever looked at. Sonic Universe is even better to be honest, just because the main comic mostly stuck to the game storylines and Universe had the chance for some completely new stuff (like a Shadow vs Knuckles issue) but you really need to read the mainline comic to understand most of what's going on, and sometimes visa-versa. I read them both in tandem, switching over whenever it felt like one was moving ahead of the other chronologically, or when I hit something that confused me and looked like Sonic Universe would explain. Maybe that's not the best way to do it, I dunno. Like, this comic got me to genuinely care and be interested in a character named Eclipse the Darkling. This shit is good. Of course, with the cancellation there's no real ending. It kinda just... takes a break in the middle of everything for the Megadrive specials and then stops dead, which... is pretty sad.

I can't believe you just casually showed the "Alone on a Friday night?" panel and did nothing with it

Your Mona Lisa Jack-Off argument was surprisingly refreshing and compelling.

More like A Farewell to Cybershell the RU-vidr (2008-2013), (2017-2018) hahahahha amirite?

RIP Hershey the Cat

13:08 yo definitely my favorite comic was "Sonic and the secret rings" for the wii

Now I see why there are so many cancerous sonic oc's and fanfics

What, seriously? They're cancelling it? Even with all the shit that's happening in the books now? FUCK.

I absolutely loved the Archie comics--they were my first real introduction to the Sonic franchise. It's sad to see them go :(

Honestly, I really loved the fact that the Archie series had its own canon and world separate from the games. I mean why would I want to read a comic version of a game's story when I could just play it? I liked that the series had its own unique flavor of storytelling that you just couldn't get in your average Sonic game. I get that seeing lots of comic-exclusive characters would probably be a turn-off to a lot of game fans. I really get it. But to me, having those characters didn't turn me off of it- it actually did the opposite! It intrigued me even more as I wanted to find out just who they were and how they fit in with the game characters. I'll explain. My first issue was #140, Return to Angel Island Part 3. As you can probably imagine, I opened it up and saw like 20 characters I had never seen before and knew nothing about. Knuckles had a family?! What was going on here?! What's the Dark Legion?! Who's General Kage?! I see Eggman, but who's that weird lady right next to him?! And who's this "Hunter" guy at the end!? However, instead of being turned-off by all the unfamiliarity... I was actually quite intrigued by it! I wanted to know what was going on and who those unfamiliar characters were. I can see how it would be a turn-off to many people, but I really was on board with it. I felt like this new and unexplored universe was like a birthday present that I could slowly unwrap as the issues went on, deciphering the chronology of events and figuring out just who all of these unfamiliar characters were and how they related to each other. So yeah, I guess I had a pretty different reaction to reading the comic as a lot of other Sonic fans did.

Man, what a ride! The early issues of the comic are really nostalgic for me and they're still pretty damn charming! I think the Penders era was prettying entertaining too, for different reasons (you gotta love furry melodrama). Flynn probably wrote some of the best arcs in the series, but the soft-reboot erased a lot of the characters he was developing. I hope some of the Sat-am characters still get use after this.

Sonic finished the partnership with Archie to start a whole new comic with DW Publishing (or something like that).

Man, I'm real sad this is ending. I've read this comic for the past 12 years. I remember my first one was 151 and I've been reading them all since. I remember I even used to read them to my little brother. I think the best years if the comic were somewhere from 1-50, and around 160-225, with also some pretty good stuff in between. I think the best decision they ever made was starting Sonic Universe because they could use that to characterize the side characters and they do an actually really interesting take on Shadow and did a cool arc on Silver.

Well I was very sad on the verge of crying and felt like absolute garbage when I saw the thumbnail for this video and just started laughing hysterically so thanks for that cybershell

This explains why Issue 291 never hit stores. I prepaid for it back in January before it was supposed to be released, then it was pushed back to February, and then April, and then canceled. It sucks this happened, especially because I was just starting to get into the comics. Now though? I dunno. "Indefinite hiatus" is just a fancy way to say canceled.

Holy cow. My history with these comics was the same. Same preferences, same "check-out time."

I remember cursing Archie over putting Mega Man on "hiatus" after their bungling with Kickstarter, but I didn't expect Sonic to suffer a similar fate.

Knuckles Mom: "Honey, don't microwave the baby." Knuckles Dad: "...>:)"

When I saw Bunnie as a kid, I had weird feeling. Now, I know wat the feeling is. ;)

My first Cybershell video. I enjoy rewatching these videos a lot.

If I may point out, it's not exactly cancelled, it's just put on delay recently So we'll have to wait to see if they'll continue publishing. Though I've been expecting the publishing of this to end this very year.

Can we talk about how weird this comic was? Like I love it, I own quite a bit, but it got so... off. I remember when Tails fought Sonic because sonic dated his ex or something, and like... what?

Ken Penders is by far an expert, no, THE expert at murdering comic series. Do not ever let him have a job at your comic company. When you fire him, he will reap his vengeance and destroy everything you worked up for so many issues, and not to mention consume and destroy the childhoods, innocence and/or eyesight of all your beloved readers

25:28 That's seriously horrifying.

wow...never knew you could put the KNux comics side by side to make a complete image

British people who havent had a sonic comic since 2000: Bah

I'm sad. The Archie comics were some of the best parts of the Sonic franchise

Man, having you go over those old issues really brought the nostalgia. I remembered all the ones you covered. Issue 19 is one of my favs too. Odd that you said you barely remembered what happened in issue 125, when it was one of the most memorable things to me. Revealing that Mobius is Earth in the future, Mobians have human DNA, and this was all cause of some aliens. Then Sonic runs around some dial, blows it up, then gets flung into space. It's the last story-line I really remember, since it got more confusing then a soap opera.

for the first time in his life, sonic has become the wheel

Wow, what a rabbit hole. I think I read every single one of those right up to around the same time you quit on it too.