bears beets bsg (dot com)

Comic books. I love them. I don’t love them the way people arbitrarily say they love things that, in fact, they just really, really like. That’s fine, that’s a kind of love. But I love comic books. I love comic books the way I love Christmas.

Why? Because of Archie’s “Sonic the Hedgehog.” I started reading Sonic when I was in elementary school. I don’t remember specifically whether I was seven or eight or what, all I remember is that I was in a store with my mom buying pogs (oh the 90s) and they had a few comic books so my mom bought me an issue of Sonic (issue 26, if memory serves) and an issue of a Mortal Kombat comic. Game over. That night, not only did I subscribe to the Sonic comic and order the Knuckles miniseries, but I wrote my first comic. It was probably two pages long, all I remember is that Sonic was up against Nack the Weasel (aka Fang the Sniper in some of the games). Thus, the foundations of the nerd that I have evolved into today.

Sonic was a staple in my life for years thereafter. That and the Tails and Princess Sally miniseries (what’s the plural for miniseries?) and the Knuckles spinoff were the only comics I consistently read at that time. I wouldn’t have known where to start with other comics, and still didn’t know for quite some time thereafter. The comic itself was magnificent, but it wasn’t just that. It was that there were other people – a lot of them – who were just as weirdly obsessed with the Sonic comic as I was. They congregated online at websites like The Sonic Foundation (or TSF) and TeamArtail – websites that are still up, but seemingly abandoned and essentially defunct. And all of us had our own stories. Many of the people on the sites were artists – some successfully transitioned into actually working on the comic, like J. Axer, but most were just enormous fans. We created our own characters, our own bands of Freedom Fighters, our own continuities, and, in a lot of cases, our own comics. The late 90s were a boom time for Sonic fans with hyperactive imaginations and it was incredible and it was exactly the kind of thing I needed. Sonic was the type of story that allowed that kind of involvement too. It was fun, it was clearly not the most serious thing in the world, but it took itself seriously, although not too seriously. Sometimes it didn’t take itself seriously enough, sometimes it pandered to Sega (understandably), sometimes it just wasn’t well done. But every comic has occasional pitfalls.

Sonic was a world that was everything nerdy rolled into one and made accessible for everybody and especially perfect for an elementary-school-aged me. It had a despotic, enslaving, dictator of a villain. The heroes were the Freedom Fighters. There was royal intrigue, there were spies, there were ninjas, there were lots and lots of robots, there was teenage angst and an orphaned protagonist, there were wizards and mad scientists and characters who blurred the lines between the two, there were race riots, there was a multiverse, there were secret societies, there were prophecies, there were weird ancient mystics, there were bounty hunters, there were double-agents, there was betrayal, there was love, there was everything.

Anyway, at some point, my reading of the Sonic comics dwindled, eventually trickling to a stop and it was a long time before I could read any other comic. I held Sonic in too high esteem for anything else. Eventually, thanks to my wanting to read everything Neil Gaiman had ever written when I was in my Sophomore year of college, I got back into comics. With a reintroduction like “Sandman,” it’s no surprise that I fell back into them with some force. But that’s another story for another time.

Every single comic I’ve ever read since Sonic, I’ve imagined what I would do if I was writing it. Not what I’d change, but where I’d take it. Same with every TV show. There’s something about the continuous forms of comics and TV that allows for that kind of perspective. As a kid, I would print out black-and-white pictures of Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat and draw all over them and color them all different colors and come up with stories for these different ninjas. I would buy guides to video games that I didn’t even own just to read the storylines and the character bios. I was a weird freakin’ kid but I will proudly say that Sonic the Hedgehog is what allowed me to do something with that pent-up creativity. Just like with the MK characters, all I had to do was color a hedgehog orange or make an echidna turquoise or whatever and I could spend hours, days, weeks (I’m not even exaggerating) wondering who they were and what they did and what their life was like. Sonic is the reason I want to be a writer at all, let alone a comics writer.

Every nerd has their reasons that they dove into the things they did. Everybody needs escapism at some point or other, kids especially. That’s why we end up the way we do and that’s why we can’t let go of the stories; that’s why, instead of ambivalently, nostalgically acknowledging a childhood interest of mine, I plan on buying the entire Sonic back catalog (which got tragically lost in a move at some point) and getting caught up on what I’ve missed in the last decade and reading it and rereading it like I did so many times on the floor of my bedroom. Because they matter. Because they’re our past and our selves and our hopes and dreams and our friends. Because they, to an extent large or small, made us into the people we are today.