The beginning
A long time ago in a land far, far away… 1991 in Japan, to be exact… SEGA Enterprises (who would later change their name to SEGA Corporation) had a problem.
Up 'til now, they'd made their money in the home console market by porting their arcade machines to their Genesis console. This gave them a foothold, but Nintendo still dominated the market, having just released Super Mario Bros 3 – at the time the best selling game in the world.
SEGA decided that just porting arcade machines wasn't enough. They needed something new. Something that could compete with Mario. Something that would let them break into the coveted American market.
At the time, Nintendo were pushing the Super NES. It wasn't released in America yet, so SEGA had a chance to get there first. But on specifications alone, it was the Genesis's superior in nearly every way. More colours. More RAM. Bigger sprites. More sprites. More audio channels.
The Genesis had pretty much just one thing going for it – it could render frames faster than the Super NES could.
So. SEGA needed a new flagship character. They had to appeal to American kids. They had to be blue, to match SEGA's logo. And most importantly, they had to be something Mario could never match. They had to be fast.
And so, SEGA decided on their new mascot: Sonic the Hedgehog.
(Well, first they tried to go with a rabbit but their ears proved too hard to work with, so Sonic it was!)
SEGA dug through the pile of rejected concepts for their new flagship character and pulled out one "Doctor Eggman" to serve as his villain. SEGA hit the airwaves, advertising the Genesis as the 'cool' console to Nintendo's 'toy'. And in the American market, the cartridge for Sonic the Hedgehog came with the console.
This worked. They cornered about 65% of the market by 1992.
Before that happened, though, both SEGA of Japan and SEGA of America wanted to promote their new mascot. I haven't been able to find anything about why the two didn't collaborate on this – my guess is that they saw the two markets as being fully separate, and the two marketing teams couldn't be bothered working through translators. Either way, the two diverged hard on how they sold Sonic.
Both decided to release a comic (or a manga, rather, in SEGA of Japan's case) promoting the character months before the actual game came out. SEGA of Japan did a basic manga just going through the motions of the first game – though for some reason they gave Sonic a group of catgirl/bunnygirl/etc tag-alongs… but SEGA of America? Oooooh boy.
SEGA of America's promotional comic decided to make changes.
First of all: Eggman? What kind of name is that? That's out! Now his name is "Ivo Robotnik." Apparently chosen because "Ivo" sounds like "Evil".
Also, Ivo wasn't just some cookie-cutter mad scientist. Oh no. He used to be a nice guy called "Ovi Kintobor", who tried to suck up all the evil on Mobius (the planet is called Mobius now, Sonic's apparently an alien) into the Chaos Emeralds to be safely disposed of. However, an accident with his R.O.C.C. machine dumped all that evil into Ovi, turning him into the vile Ivo.
Also, the comic (and the later guidebook Stay Sonic) decided to address the fact that there were only two characters in the first game by giving names and personalities to the animals you rescued from the badniks. The bunny was called Johnny Lightfoot, the pig was Porker Lewis. The walrus was Joe Sushi, the penguin was Tux. The chicken was Chirps, and the bluebird was Flicky.
Oh, and the squirrel was made the token girl, and given the name Sally Acorn.
Remember her. She'll be important later.
So in Japan, Eggman was a silly man kidnapping animals to power his robots to find the Chaos Emeralds… to boil the world's biggest egg. And eat it.
But in America, Robotnik was the tragic result of good intentions gone awry, now filled with all the evil of an entire planet. He was kidnapping Sonic's closest friends for his own nefarious purposes!
As they say, American Kirby is Hardcore.
Guys, that's too many spin-offs. Guys?
Flush with success, SEGA started developing two sequel games at the same time. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was designed by the Sega Technical Institute in America while Sonic CD was developed by Sonic Team back in Japan.
Sonic 2 was another big success, and people in particular loved the introduction of the new playable character, Tails. Seeing how well he was received, SEGA would make it a habit of including at least one new character in nearly every Sonic game. And oh boy… did that add up over time. But we'll get to that.
Sonic CD did well enough, but it sold a fourth as many copies as Sonic 2 did – 1.5 million to 6 million. Also, delays during development meant that it released a year after 2 did, in late 1993 to 2's late 1992, despite both games starting development at the same time. The later development, lower sales, and Amy not being playable all contributed to making her less well known in the West.
This wasn't helped by the fact that SEGA of America tried to gaslight its audience, referring to Amy as 'Princess Sally' in the American game manual – we'll get to her in a second.
Sonic Origins would later make clear that the events of CD are actually supposed to take place before the events of 2.
Doing their part to promote the series, SEGA of Japan commissioned more manga. These weren't like the promotional manga they'd made for the first game – these told the story of Nicky, a young hedgehog kid from Hedgehog Town who unknowingly had the power to transform into Sonic when the day needed saving. These manga chapters were published starting April 1992 in the Shogakukan magazine, which was aimed at primary school children.
Because that's who SEGA of Japan thought Sonic's main audience would be. Little kids.
Funnily enough, CD's development delays meant that Amy's first appearance was actually in the manga! There, she was Nicky's actual girlfriend (though given they were both primary school kids that probably doesn't count for much), even if she got her characteristic crush on Sonic right away, leaving poor Nicky competing against himself.
Sonic 2 had proven that Sonic wasn't a one-hit wonder – his games were here to stay. But there was another aspect of Mario that SEGA wanted to compete with – Nintendo's mascot had had not one, not two, but three cartoon shows at this point. SEGA of America wanted in on this action as well.
SEGA of America partnered up with DIC Animation City to produce a cartoon show for Sonic. DIC wanted to air the show on weekends on the American Broadcasting Company's network, but also make additional episodes to be shown on weekdays to any network that would pick them up (like they had previously with The Real Ghostbusters). ABC, however, rejected that plan. Eventually DIC agreed to make two different shows: one that would air on weekdays (in syndication), one on weekends (exclusively on ABC).
The weekday show became Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, a show styled after Warner Brother's Loony Tunes. It had the same psychedelic backgrounds and abstract landscapes, and for the first half of the series the show tried to stick to a formula where Robotnik's minions would be the Wily E. Coyote to Sonic's Roadrunner. Robotnik built himself two very talkative badniks – Scratch and Grounder – as his chief Sonic-catchers, while Sonic and Tails lived a life constantly on the move. The named animals from Stay Sonic were completely absent.
The weekend show was just called "Sonic the Hedgehog", but fans came to call it "Sonic SatAM" to tell it apart (and because it aired on Saturday mornings). This show was done in the style of Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears, and was a far more serious take on the series. Instead of an aspiring despot, Robotnik was a successful one, with Sonic and his friends hiding in the forest and trying to sabotage his operations.
This would be the only time that the Americans would come close to again using those named animals they'd invented for their promotional comic. There's even early promotional material showing them as being part of the Freedom Fighters! But when they sat down to actually make the show… they made changes. Again. Sally Acorn was made a chipmunk, and a princess, and Sonic's girlfriend (CD still hadn't come out yet). Johnny Lightfoot was changed from a male rabbit to a female cyborg rabbit named Bunnie Rabbot. Joe Sushi was replaced by Rotor the mechanic. Tux, Chirps and Flicky were all removed, and Antoine Depardieu the French coyote was added in their place.
Now, SEGA also partnered with Archie Comics to produce a set of promotional comics for the two shows – and not, I should point out, the video games. Keep this in mind.
Because they were aiming to build hype for the shows, the comics came out before the shows did – aaannnd that was a problem. Because those shows were still very much in development at the time, and changes were still being made. The first Archie comics came out in February of 1993 (with a preview in November the previous year), while the shows being promoted wouldn't come out until September.
That meant that the Archie team got plenty of things wrong – for starters, they got Antonie's last name wrong (calling him D'Coolette) and called Rotor "Boomer" at first. Sally was originally shown with her pink-furred design from SatAM's pilot episode, not her final design. She was even blond in issue #0 of the miniseries, before they changed her hair to the (still wrong) colour of black!
(Mind you, this isn't really surprising when you realise that the original writer was given three pages of notes, some concept art, and a week to make that first issue.)
But most importantly, they seemed to think the two shows would be the same – or at least set in the same continuity. I don't know if they started work before the decision to split the shows was done or if there was just a miscommunication, but the early Archie comics have the SatAM cast in a slapstick style of misadventures that… didn't exactly match AoStH's style of humour either.
(The decision to copy Adventure's art and storytelling style was apparently a SEGA mandate, bizarrely enough.)
The Archie comics would eventually grow out of what was called the "Gag era", but that would take a few more years, so we'll come back to this.
So, despite being the ones to name all the animal characters, the only one the Americans would actually end up using was Sally, and only after a major redesign.
The British, on the other hand…
"Sonic the Comic", despite the name, didn't just promote Sonic. They existed to promote lots of SEGA franchises – Streets of Rage, Decap Attack, Golden Axe, Kid Chameleon, and this author's personal favourite, Sparkster: Last of the Rocket Knights, to name a few. But Sonic was always their main title.
Starting in May 1993, after Archie started but before the DIC shows, Sonic the Comic (also called Fleetway Sonic, after the company that published it) was based on the lore from Stay Sonic, and existed to promote the games, not the shows. The named animal characters all appear in it, though only Johnny and Porker would really stick around. Joe, Tux, Chirps and Flicky were all relegated to being background characters, and Sally only really appeared in the story twice, quickly leaving the Freedom Fighters for a career in newscasting.
The Fleetway comics serve as a very interesting story in their own right, and aside from the games themselves are the only continuity that can begin to compare against the sheer weight of content that Archie would eventually publish. They would ultimately be most famous, however, for two things:
One, theirs was a British take on a Japanese character designed to appeal to Americans. In the UK, his devil-may-care and too-cool-for-school attitude meant that he was rather flippant, emotionally repressed, and very dismissive even of his own friends. He still cared for them, but he was very bad at expressing it, making him look like a rude jerk to most casual readers.
Two, their take on Super Sonic. Either through ignorance or deliberate choice, the Fleetway team ignored Super Sonic's obvious inspiration from Dragon Ball Z, and instead based him more on the story of Jekyll and Hyde – and the Marvel Comics character based off of them, the Incredible Hulk. Rather than a power-up Sonic would use to save the day, Fleetway's Super Sonic was a monster that Sonic had to keep his cool to avoid turning into, as Super Sonic would quite happily kill everyone, especially his own friends.
The British book-publishing company Virgin Books also got the rights to Sonic around this time, and quickly published four novels based on the Stay Sonic lore, from September 1993 to January of the next year. These four novels are the only media to actually focus on the entire Stay Sonic cast, even if Sonic and Tails were still very much the main characters.
There would be the other Sonic books published, but those would all be short stories, novelisations, or game books – all set in existing worlds, none of them building up their own.
We're still in 1993, by the way. The franchise is just two years old, and it already has seven continuities – Games, Manga, Archie, Fleetway, Adventures, SatAM and Virgin.
Anyway, September 1993 is also when Sonic CD is finally released (it was a very busy month for the Sonic fandom), and Amy properly joins the cast. Knuckles would do the same with the release of Sonic 3 in February 1994.
The Shogakukan manga would quietly end in 1994. An official English translation was never made, so Sonic fans who want to consume all the media are forced to rely on incomplete scanlations.
The classic era
The French company Sirène try their hand at a Sonic comic, but Sonic Adventures only lasts for a single issue released in October 1994. It would also be loosely based on the Stay Sonic lore, adding just one named O.C. – an Echidna princess named Alucion. Knuckles himself didn't make an appearance.
More Sonic games are being made all the time, SEGA really trying to push out Nintendo while they have the chance, and the shows and comics are left not really sure how much of this they should be trying to incorporate.
SatAM ends up incorporating the Time Stones from CD and the Floating Island (Angel Island) from Sonic 3 into a season 2 plot, but without using Amy or Knuckles. (And, for some weird reason, they also included elements of Sonic Pinball?) Adventures didn't have to worry about this – because DIC had finished it in December 1993 to focus on SatAM. SatAM would also add Dulcy the Dragon as a character to really try and increase their appeal to Disney kids. She would be dutifully added to the Archie comics as they tried to keep pace.
Sonic the Comic, having always been focused on the games, happily incorporated both Amy and Knuckles without fanfare; following their game plots reasonably closely. As Amy didn't have much of a personality in CD, Fleetway would make her an Action Girl long before the actual games did – giving her a crossbow as her weapon of choice. Fleetway's Amy would become the token girl of the Freedom Fighters, and Sally would pick up that newscasting career mentioned earlier.
However, that wasn't the big change made at Sonic the Comic. See, Fleetway had been watching the DIC shows as well, and figured that they should try and match those as well. Their Robotnik – who had Classic Eggman's design at first – underwent a metamorphosis inside an eggshell after being told (in-universe) that the people "just didn't like him", coming out with the Robotnik design from Adventures. He would also banish Sonic six months into the future, giving him the opportunity to take over the world and set in place the status quo from SatAM.
They would also write in the character of Snively, from SatAM, as Robotnik's minion… but then realise that not only did they not need to use Snively, they actually didn't have the rights to use him either. They quickly invented the character of Grimer to take his place. In the script for that comic, Grimer's lines are still assigned to Snively.
Archie's comics would add Amy and Knuckles to their cast, but unlike Sonic the Comic Sally was very much prominent in Archie, and very much Sonic's love interest. For a company famous for keeping one love triangle going since the 1940s, Archie were strangely reluctant to have Sally and Amy compete for Sonic's affections, relegating Amy to being mostly a background character. (This gets especially weird when you think about how many love triangles they added around those two later on – Geoffrey St. John, Mina Mongoose, Fiona Fox…)
Knuckles, however, would become a very major character – even getting his own spin-off line of comics; which were almost completely written by one Ken Penders.
That's another name you're going to want to keep in mind.
In December 1994, the final episode of SatAM is aired. There were plans for a third season, but ABC had cancelled the series due to low ratings. The fans are upset, as they always are. To this day, SatAM has significantly less runtime than almost all the other Sonic shows – it's beaten only by Sonic Prime, which has just one less episode than SatAM.
But life moved on.
June 1996 would mark the release of Sonic the Fighters – an arcade fighting game. It wouldn't really be worth mentioning here, except that this game marked the first time that Amy would be shown armed with a hammer. The "Piko Piko" hammer was named after the squeaky noise it made when it hit somebody… because it was a giant toy hammer. Amy was the joke fighter of the game.
That hammer would go on to be the second-most important aspect of Amy's character, right after her relationship with Sonic.
SEGA of Japan decided they'd have a crack at this whole "TV show about Sonic on another planet" thing, and commissioned the Sonic OVA (also known as Sonic the Hedgehog the Movie) from Pierrot. First aired in January 1996 and set on "Planet Freedom", the series included another catgirl character – Sara – and is widely believed to have established the characterisation of Metal Sonic in most other settings.
Adventures got one last hurrah – a Christmas special episode released in November 1996, nearly three years after the show had been cancelled. This one actually introduced Princess Sally as being Sonic's girlfriend – despite Sonic having been a giant flirt the rest of the series… though she didn't get any speaking lines.
With the shows that Archie was supposed to be promoting now both cancelled, their comics flounder around for a while, trying to reinvent themselves. They'd eventually kill Robotnik off in issue 50, first published in June 1997. Fleetway would just continue on as normal.
But then… came the day.
The day that SEGA of Japan seized back control of the franchise.
It was time for Sonic to properly make the switch to 3D.
Sonic Adventure
Up until this point, Sonic games had been very light on story – most of the lore of any given game was given in the manual. (Who remembers when games did that? Anyone?)
But now, SEGA wanted to move into a whole new era. Voice acting. Full-on cutscenes. Elaborate plotlines. And the biggest change of all – fully 3D gameplay.
To celebrate the start of the 'Modern' Sonic era – back in 1998, a good quarter-century ago at the time of writing – the cast were all given redesigns, most notably Amy and Eggman.
SEGA of Japan sent out instructions to Archie – they must promote this game.
Problem number one: SEGA of Japan didn't send them a copy of the game they were supposed to promote. Not even a script. And the game wasn't yet out in English.
(Allegedly, anyway – my source on this is one Tumblr blog).
So one of the artists goes out and buys a Japanese copy of the game out of his own pocket, along with a Dreamcast to play it on. They squint at the cutscenes – none of them speaking a word of Japanese – and largely guessed as to what was going on. Amazingly, they got the story mostly correct!
Problem number two: They'd killed Robotnik off. And he was the main villain of this game. Whoops. Time to pull in an alternate version of Robotnik from another dimension, and call him 'Eggman'. People expect this sort of nonsense from comics, right?
Oh, that's right – the character's name is Eggman now, even outside Japan. SEGA of Japan had never authorised the name change, so they 'changed' his name in Adventure to Ivo 'Eggman' Robotnik.
Problem number three: the Archie comics were very much rooted in the world-building from SatAM. And a big unexpected change from Sonic Adventure was the addition of cities of humans to the world… when Archie's comics had assumed that Robotnik and Snively were the only ones.
So, Archie bend over backwards and make a massive retcon.
See, the planet's name is Mobius… but thousands of years ago, it was Earth. Then humans bisected an alien ambassador, and the aliens reduced every lifeform on Earth into primordial sludge in retaliation. In that sludge, human and animal DNA would mingle and re-evolve into the anthropomorphic animals that inhabited the planet currently.
But, you see, some of those original humans survived! The survivors of a crashed airliner hid inside a mountain, and so were spared from the alien gene-bombs. (Yes, they went full Exterminatus on us.) Those humans built a hidden city inside that mountain, which would become Archie's version of Station Square.
(This crashed airliner would later be retconned to a massive government program of building hidden cities, and Station Square would be joined by many other hidden cities like Soleanna, but that wouldn't happen until later).
Also, rather than just have Amy aged up in the background or something, Archie would change Classic!Amy directly into Modern!Amy by having her idly wish she was older while rummaging around in some junk.
Touching the magic wish-granting ring that was needed to heal Sally's terminally ill mother, unintentionally depleting it.
And giving Amy the mind of a preteen girl in a teenage girl's body.
Yeah, the sheer awkward of this age-up meant that after this adaptation, Amy got banished to the background even harder than before.
Fleetway, meanwhile, had been cutting back on their 'Sonic' budget as far back as 1997. They lasted just long enough to do their own adaptation of Sonic Adventure – adapting the events to fit their world, rather than adapt their world to fit the events as Archie did – before going into reprints after 184 issues. The reprints would last until issue 223, June 2000, when Sonic the Comic officially ceased.
DIC would make one more go at a Sonic cartoon, airing Sonic Underground in January of 1999. Despite having come out after Sonic Adventure, Underground would re-use the SatAM design of Robotnik, and still wouldn't include Amy. In fact, it's also the only continuity to not have Tails! Instead, Sonic is one of three triplets – with Sonic, Manic and Sonia being given up at birth by their mother the queen to hide them from Robotnik.
Each of the three had a magic pendent that would let them summon a musical instrument – Sonic a guitar, Manic a drum set, and Sonia a keyboard. Together, they were the 'Sonic Underground', a travelling band/resistance group that aimed to topple Robotnik and find their mother. Each episode, the triplets would play a song of… varying quality.
The show would suffer enormously from very rushed writing and a lack of overarching plot-lines. It was cancelled after one season… somehow still having had more runtime than SatAM.
(Funnily enough though, Underground would have the so-far only time that a Sonic character would make the jump from a comic to another continuity – with Athair, Knuckle's great-grandfather from the Archie comics, appearing there as well.)
The two worlds theory
Fans were really confused at this point. There seemed to be two kinds of Sonic games: ones were Eggman was the only human in a world of animal people (the classic games) and the ones where Sonic and his friends were the only animal people in a world of humans (Adventure, Adventure 2, '06, Unleashed… you get the idea).
One idea that started to float around, supported by some (but not all) SEGA staff was that there were two planets – the world of Humans and the world of animal people, and that Sonic, Eggman and co all just hopped between them somehow. This didn't explain how e.g. Angel Island always seemed to be on the planet in question, but it was a very popular theory for a long while, only getting explicitly debunked in TailsTube in March of 2022.
It was so popular, in fact, that SEGA made a whole anime based off of it. In April 2003, TMS Entertainment started releasing Sonic X, a reverse-isakai story based off the two worlds theory. Sonic, Eggman and friends were sent to a near-real-world Earth by an accidental Chaos Control, stranding them here until they could gather the Chaos Emeralds to go back to their world.
Sonic X is a special case amongst Sonic TV shows for several reasons. First, aside from the very short-lived OVA, this is the only Sonic show or movie produced by SEGA of Japan, not SEGA of America. Second, it spent most of its second season directly adapting the events of Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, and Sonic Battle. Thirdly, it's… arguably the only Sonic show where Sonic isn't the main character.
The fans have... shall we say... divided opinions on Chris Thorndyke. He's the human kid who fishes Sonic out of his swimming pool and then puts the gang up in his parent's house, as they don't have anywhere to go. He's the audience POV character that we learn more about Sonic and his friends through.
Now, Chris was very clingy towards Sonic, something that was directly addressed in the conclusion of season two. And there's a not-inconsiderate portion of the fanbase that thinks he's an annoying, spotlight-stealing character.
(This author doesn't mind him, personally. I think that confrontation at the end of season two was a really powerful moment in the series.)
But, on the flip side, freed up from being the main character, X!Sonic is much, much chiller than his other counterparts. He doesn't need to carry the show's drama. He just needs to save the day, and then he can go for a run, or nap in a tree. Of all the Sonics adapted so far, he's the closest to how he's portrayed in the games, but even more so.
Sonic X wasn't exactly a smash hit in Japan, so SEGA was planning to leave it be after two seasons. But the American and French fans really wanted a third season, so SEGA caved. Season three began airing in 2005, featuring the cast back in their dimension, fighting the alien Metarex threat.
(Though if you want to watch Sonic X, be aware that the dub was done by 4Kids. You might want to try the sub instead.)
Ken Penders
It's February 2006, and Ken Penders has just finished his final issue with Archie, leaving the company for his own reasons. He would be succeeded by long-time Sonic fan Ian Flynn.
Now, as part of Archie's licensing agreement with SEGA (according to Penders), Archie wasn't allowed to create any new characters without informing SEGA. And they would have then needed to file legal documentation proving that the characters belonged to SEGA.
Archie… didn't do this. They didn't even tell the artists and writers that this was a thing they had to do.
September 2008 sees the release of Sonic Chronicles, a game made by BioWare on SEGA's behalf. The game features several characters who appear to have been directly inspired by some of Ken Penders's work, and he takes exception to not being credited in the game.
Now no longer working at Archie, Penders looks around and realises that Archie had never filed copyrights on the characters he created while he worked for them. So he does, in January 2009. By June 2010, the process is near completion… and the US Copyright Office send notices to both SEGA and Archie asking if they'd like to challenge the claim.
Note: This is pretty messed up in it's own right. You can bet that if Archie had filed copyrights, the Copyright Office wouldn't have asked Ken if he'd like to challenge it.
But neither SEGA nor Archie challenge the claim, so Ken gets his copyrights. He then asks Archie for royalties for using his characters in their comics, and oh he also wants creative control over them.
Archie then sue Penders, trying to overturn his copyright claim.
The court case could be summarised like so:
Archie: He can't have the copyrights to those characters!
Penders: I kinda do.
Archie: No, you can't, because you signed over the rights to any characters you made while working for us as part of your work contract!
Court: Oh, do you have that contract?
Archie: Well, er, no, see, there was a fire that destroyed the original, and uh, anyway here's a photocopy of the replacement contract we made him sign afterwards.
Court: Yeah that doesn't count.
Archie: …oh.
Penders: So, uh, you gonna pay those royalties by check, or…?
Archie: Remove those characters from our comics. Now.
(Penders claims he never signed such a contract, Archie claims he did but couldn't prove it in court, it's a great big mess.)
So the character of Thrash the Tasmanian Devil was used in Archie to round up all of Ken Penders's characters and banish them to another dimension, never to be seen again – and importantly, without mentioning any of their names or showing their appearances.
Penders would also sue EA (who now owned BioWare) and SEGA, alleging copyright infringement. He'd get tossed out of court twice before the statute of limitations would expire.(The judge wanted him to finish his lawsuit with Archie first – there was no point arguing that BioWare had stolen his characters if it was going to turn out that he didn't own them in the first place). SEGA cancel any plans to continue on from Chronicles's cliffhanger, and declare the game non-canon.
Meanwhile, Archie is having a realisation.
Archie: Wait a minute. If Ken could do it, doesn't that mean pretty much every writer before Flynn (whose original contract westill have)could do that as well?
Archie: Uh oh.
Just removing all of Ken Penders's characters wasn't enough. Archie had to remove every original character from their comics. And having Thrash come back to banish most of the cast wasn't going to cut it. They needed to go nuclear.
And, ironically, their weapon of choice was a crossover with another series Ian Flynn was currently writing for: the Archie Mega Man comics.
The final issue of pre-SGW Archie was released on April 2013, with issue 247. The crossover with Mega Man starts after then, but if you pay attention during the crossover there aren't any references to Archie-specific events or characters, and there are references to events that had yet to be adapted into Archie, like the Time Eater attack from Sonic Generations.
This wasn't a crossover between Archie!Sonic and Archie!Mega Man. This was a crossover between Game!Sonic and Archie!Mega Man.
How'd that happen? Well, Doctors Eggman and Wily were experimenting with a "Genesis wave" that could rewrite reality. Wily used one to move time forward in his world so that he could use Robot Masters from MM10 despite his comic having not started the events of MM4 yet, and Eggman used his to reset the world of Archie to the world of the Games because Archie was sick and tired of lawsuits already.
But at the climax of this crossover, the two tried to use a Super Genesis Wave to permanently rewrite both of their worlds right down to the laws of physics, making both of them into gods. Sonic and Mega Man are able to stop them, but Eggman interrupts Sonic while he's trying to undo the changes to his world, and the process goes wrong.
This was July 2013, issue 251, and this was Sonic's Crisis of Infinite Worlds. The destruction and recreation of his entire multiverse.
The Super Genesis Wave.
Post-SGW!Archie was far closer to the games than pre-SGW!Archie had been, having wiped clean all of pre-SGW's awkward retcons and world-building along with its cast. The only resolution to pre-SGW's many plotlines would be a brief moment where an accident of science and magic would give the post-SGW Freedom Fighters their memories back from the pre-SGW world… temporarily. They would quickly fade, taking with them the last traces of their old world.
Oh, uh, yeah – the Freedom Fighters were still there. SEGA and Archie allegedly didn't want the SatAM cast to return, and Flynn and others had to argue hard to keep them in. They were all given redesigns to better fit the aesthetic of the Sonic games, and started off on an adaptation of Sonic Unleashed.
Sonic Boom
In October 2013 it was announced that another Sonic TV show was in the works (the fifth show, count 'em people, with each being fully separate from the others).
But Sonic Boom wasn't going to be like those other shows, oh no.
Boom was going to have tie-in games.
Each of the main four characters (Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Amy) would each get major redesigns, and the addition of a fifth core cast member in the form of Sticks the Badger, comically paranoid conspiracy nut.
However, there was… some executive meddling.
To make a long story short, SEGA suddenly announced that Rise of Lyric would be on the Wii U, greatly surprising the studio working on it. Big Red Button had been developing it for Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox.
Yes – SEGA had gone from calling Nintendo's consoles 'toys' to making their games exclusive to said consoles. How the mighty have fallen.
They hurried to switch the game engine to one that would run on the Wii U, having to write a fair bit of custom engine code to make it fit. The graphics would suffer from the Wii U's comparatively lower processing power; and the game launched with several major bugs, most infamously one that would let Knuckles jump forever if he kept pausing between jumps.
Even though that particular bug got patched, there was another problem. BRB had planned on a massive exploration of Sonic's past in this new world, his relationship with Shadow, Eggman, and the mysterious race the Ancients…
Then SEGA said no.
And put the writers of the TV show in charge of writing the story for the game.
The comedic, nearly slice of life TV show.
But all of that still wasn't the worst part of Rise of Lyric, oh no. The problem was that the team leader (Bob Rafei) used to work on Jak and Daxter, so he built a game like that.
Jak and Daxter is fun, but what it isn't is a Sonic the Hedgehog game.
If it wasn't for the fact that the Boom TV show was actually funny, I'm sure most people would relegate Boom to "giant screw-up, destined to be forgotten". Two DS games didn't really improve the image of the Boom games, even if Fire and Ice was a step in the right direction.
Rally4Sally
The post-SGW!Archie comics would continue until July 2017, when SEGA of America declared they were ending their partnership with Archie comics. Neither they nor Archie have ever said why, though naturally theories abound. We may never know for sure.
The American comic book rights would instead be given to IDW Publishing, who would start making Sonic comics in April 2018, and they have continued to do so to this day. Unlike Archie, the IDW comics are intended to be set in the same continuity as the games, and start off directly after the events of Sonic Forces (the newest Sonic game at the time).
With Archie gone, Sally Acorn and the Freedom Fighters had lost their last active continuity. From their beginnings in a Saturday morning cartoon show that… didn't really have much in common with the games it was promoting, they'd lasted for almost 25 years, long outliving both the TV show they were based of off, but also any other continuity that paid any attention to the Stay Sonic lore that SEGA of America had set up and abandoned so long ago.
There's currently a social media campaign called "Rally4Sally", trying to have the Knothole Freedom Fighters brought back into the IDW comics. Ian Flynn has said multiple times that he wants to bring the Knothole gang back, but SEGA isn't interested, and even if they were brought back they could only use their designs and backstories from SatAM, not their character development from Archie. So no Holo-Lynx Nicole, no courageous swordsman Antoine.
But, I have a question.
Why Sally? Why not Rally4Tekno? Rally4Sonia&Manic? Or heck, even just Rally4TheFreedomFighters?
Well, here's my guess. The Archie Sonic comics ran for over 20 years, holding the record for longest-running comic based on a video game as well as longest-running franchise-based comic. Sally was there for all of that, start to finish. And while her relationship with Sonic was frequently turbulent, and suffering from literal decades of sub-par writing, Sally's story was improving, as Archie got better writers to work on the Sonic comics. Her plots were going somewhere.
And then, for reasons entirely outside of the fandom's control, the series was canned. Twice, if you count the reboot. For fans who grew up with Sally… that hurt.
I'm sure the fandom don't want Sally to come back by herself – they just think that if Sally comes back, then Nicole, Bunnie, Rotor, Antoine and the rest are a given.
So, what are their chances? Well, I'm not a SEGA executive, but… I don't think it's going to happen. If there's one thing Sonic's not hurting from, it's lack of characters. Sally's niches has been filled multiple times over by more popular characters. And the SatAM/Archie part of the fandom never grew to be a majority. Most Sonic fans just… don't know who Sally is. There's very little benefit to bringing Sally, or any of the SatAM cast, back.
But hey. You can be sad that it's gone, or happy that it happened. Archie doesn't sell Sonic comics anymore, but that doesn't mean they can't be found by people who look. The TV shows as well.
And there's always fanfiction.
The present
The final episode of Boom would air in November 2017, despite promises on Facebook of a third season.
T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶a̶b̶s̶o̶l̶u̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶v̶e̶s̶t̶y̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶,̶ ̶i̶f̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶g̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶a̶m̶p̶a̶i̶g̶n̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶S̶a̶t̶A̶M̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶b̶a̶c̶k̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶i̶s̶…̶!̶
Sticks would be name-dropped in Sonic Frontiers, implying that a version of her does exist somewhere in the main continuity. She would also appear in one of the Olympics games with the core game cast, and in Sonic Comic – a series of short comedy mangas released on Sonic Channel for Sonic's 25th anniversary.
(If you haven't read Sonic Comic, you should. The Shadow one in particular will hit you right in the feels.)
In February 2020 Paramount Pictures would release a live action/CGI movie based off Sonic the Hedgehog. Seemingly a throwback to the two worlds theory, Sonic is once again an alien (though like Sonic X his planet isn't given a name here). Sonic would flee to Earth from echidnas trying to steal "his power" and be adopted by two human parents, Tom and Maddie. A sequel movie in April 2022 would introduce Tails and Knuckles, and a third movie is set for December 2024, which was teased to include Shadow. A spin-off TV show focusing on Knuckles is also set for release sometime in 2024.
The trailers for the first movie originally showed a CGI model for Sonic that jumped directly into the middle of the Uncanny Valley – after a vast public outcry Paramount redid the CGI for Sonic, using a model much closer to how he appears in the games.
December 2022 saw the release of Sonic Prime on Netflix – a show set in the same continuity as the games, focusing on a "Paradox Prism" that shattered Sonic's world into a set of new, themed worlds. Sonic and Shadow are technically the only game characters who appear for the majority of the show, due to everyone else being alternate versions created by the shattering of the world.
The future
Going forward, it looks like there's only going to be two Sonic continuities – the main one, covering the games, the IDW comics, and the Sonic Prime TV show, and the Paramount one, covering their movies and the Knuckles show. While Sonic has some pretty cool 'Canon Events', to borrow a Spiderverse term, there's only so many times you can adapt Sonic Adventure. Sonic has so many characters these days that new fans are best onboarded though games like Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, rather than a giant retelling of dozens of origin stories.
There will be contradictions and inconsistencies, sure. The writers are mere mortals. Not all of the games will be fun all the time. But you can rage about the inevitable… or you can go outside, feel the wind in your hair, and just have fun along the way.
And in a way, isn't that what Sonic is really about?
Gotta go fast,
Mark the Tapir
Mark's grin was maniac as he lowered the papers he had been reading from, his eyes beaming out at the classroom in front of him. "Well? What do you think?"
The teacher next to him sighed. "Mark, the assignment was to write an essay on someone's history, not their meta history."
Mark pouted. "But Sonic's meta history is more interesting!" He whined.
"You don't even go to this school!"