Fuck D.C. for being cowards.

The 2024 annual feels a little insubstantial, mostly being setup for upcoming storylines, but I always appreciate some more of Surge and Kit and Sonic flirting with Knuckles was fun. A lot issues #76 to #78 is also setup but in a way that is picking up the pieces after the big bang in #75 and setting up new directions for things a bit more. Lot of cute moments here too. Belle in her wagon house with Motobud, Amy thinking Blaze is so stoic standing stop the Tornado while she’s actually shitting herself, the big group hug with the girls and the gays and Silver the Hedgehog. All the locations are, of course, gorgeously rendered and I love the race sequence between Blaze and Surge, and the way they use the trails to contrast Surge’s chaotic nature with Blaze’s careful control.

Even putting aside my dislike for the naming scheme that simply labels it as a cross promotion and nothing else—art is ever more stripped to branding exercises not even trying to promise substance—I find it so strange that the title uses the brand name DC itself and not the Justice League. Is the name of the company really more of a draw or recog­nis­able than the actual Justice League them­selves? Do people get excited just hearing “DC”?

Still, this is about as good as it could have been. It’s very pretty (other than the superhero costumes the Sonic characters end up in which look atrocious on them), it has a snappy pace with each issue establishing a new set of ideas to play with before quickly moving on to set up the next one, and it has a few good gags and some charm to it. I especially like the bit in the first issue of the Justice League asking how the hedgehogs got their powers only for Sonic and Silver to say that they’re just normal men.

I bought this from a German listing with no photos of the inside of the book. The cover was in English though so I took the risk and hoped it would be in English rather than in German. It was not. I ended up reading it using machine translations with my phone.

Interesting adaptation of the Ju-On: The Curse that eschews the nonlinear structure and ties the characters together more than the original; Mizuho is now the daughter of the realtors who sold the house to the Murakami and Kyoko is her aunt (and also looks very cool). It has a bit more gruesome violence than the movie was able to do with real actors. The gaps in the original film where the events of 4444444444 and In a Corner happen are filled in here with different, bloodier, ends to the characters. Kanna’s jaw getting ripped off, left to the viewer’s imagination in The Curse, here gets shown as Ma commanding stray cats to ram themselves down her throat until it gives way, which means that the Saeki family cat finally gets a kill of its own.

It also, despite the violence she is inflicting, shows Kayako as a more sorrowful character, wanting to end people’s suffering and being anchored, seemingly unwillingly, to where she died, but still aware of what she’s doing.

What voice I hear when I read dialogue in these comics varies a lot. When I read the mainline Sonic comics I usually hear Roger Craig Smith’s voice in my head as the hedgehog, but if it’s something where he’s a bit more immature it’s often Bryan Drummond. For Seasons of Chaos it’s Martin Burke from the O.V.A. with a matching Lainie Frasier Tails, but when I turn the page over to Sonic Learns to Drive he’s Jaleel White now. Sonic encompasses a bunch of different tones and styles and this book is a nice collection of some of the lighter stories with the younger versions of the cast.

Seasons of Chaos itself feels like it delivers on the promises of the Mega Drive miniseries that got cut short by the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic’s cancellation with an expanded, post-Sonic Mania cast who are also captured so perfectly in Aaron Hammerstrom and Reggie Graham’s art.

Sonic Learns to Drive is goofy fun that feels like it is hitting every single obvious joke to make but it lands them well.

Dr. Eggman’s Birthday and Amy’s New Hobby are two cute stories to end it out on, particularly the latter with its celebration of making your own little comics, which feels particularly meaningful given how much of the staff of the comics came from fan communities in the first place, and stands in stark contrast to how Sonic Boom and that era of Sonic media handled the idea of fan fiction with disdainful self-mockery.

I got this on a whim as part of a three for two offer, being a fan of Doctor Who since the 2005 series but only having seen bits and pieces of the older show and not much in the way of expanded universe material. I enjoyed it. The title story is by far the most substantial, trying to be a condemnation of the misogyny of a lot of sci fi adventure fiction but making the female cast suffer by way of demonstration. Emblematic of the approach is when Ace is told to put on a gold (presumably; the comic is in black and white) bikini, to which her response is to kick a guard square in the chest, steal his sword, and escape, only to quickly fall back into peril and be forced into the slave attire anyway. Much worse things happen to women in the story from there.

The art is impressive enough at times but often falls into uncanny and offputting in ways that extremely realistic styles do. It’s feels like making a comic out of stills taken from the show paused at unfortunate moments mid sentence that make the characters look as bad as possible. Included in this version are some redone pages that might be argued to look better than the originals in isolation, but in practise massively contrast with what’s either side of them in a terribly jarring manner. In the originals you have strict black and white with clear lines and contrast with the redrawn ones done entirely in digital brushes with no sharp lines and a million shades of grey. The contrasting styles could, maybe, have been used to dilettante the reality of Earth with the imaginary construction of the titular empire but that is not how they are used at all. In fact when I saw how the soldiers in fatigues looked in the painted pages I thought it made them look like plastic figurines, which I thought might tie into how Ace describes the empire of stinking of polystyrene cement, but those were the real UNIT troops, not part of Alex’s mindscape.

The second largest part of the book is The Grief which is a fairly middling riff on Aliens in which the Doctor guilt trips a guy into doing a big heroic sacrifice and then leaves him to die, followed by him in The Raven picking up a samurai to bring to the future so that he can murder a bunch of gangsters. I know these stories are trying to be part of an era of constructing the Doctor as a darker, more ambiguous, schemer but it just comes across as petty and mean.

Memorial tries to put this scheming to a better, more touching use, but the backstory being a highly advanced purely good lovely alien species being wiped out by another purely evil alien species seems very unimaginative, especially coming just off The Grief which had the same thing. Cat Litter is kind of fun with the chutes and ladders spread but I felt like I was missing some context reading it, which the commentary at the back of the volume confirmed and I have nothing much to say about Conflict of Interests or Living in the Past.

The story is straightforward but effecting and it is brought to life wonderfully in the art, especially Nathalie Fourdraine’s colouring and it’s a masterpiece in the use of light and darkness and it’s just lovely to revisit in in paper. And there’s just so many little details: The boarders changing based on the lighting throughout the comic, getting darker as they venture into the depths of the Death Egg and glitching out in time with Mecha Sonic.

There’s lots of great little moments throughout. I love when it briefly turned into Aliens everything turns green. And Mecha Sonic is just so cool.

I do think Sonic’s injured leg is something that he seems to just get over far too easily in the climax and really nitpicking things a small detail I noticed on reread: Sonic consistently walks putting his weight on his injured leg. I guess this is to make it more visible and prominent, and maybe easier to draw, but once I noticed it bothered me for the rest of the book.

Cute little action story with lovely art. Looking forward to seeing where it goes. Also knows how to seed in stuff about the world without resorting to too much lore dumping.

I picked this up on a whim when I saw it in a bookshop that I have a gift voucher for. I’ve watched the show before and enjoyed it so what I’m mostly interested in here is how it works as a comic in comparison to that.

And I do think there’s a lot here that works better on page. Something I’ve never liked in anime is quick cutaways in the middle of dialogue for asides or inner monologue. I think these work better in a comic panel where it’s just a little bit of extra annotation on the page but is almost universally awkward in a show where it’s cut into the middle of dialogue and messes with the flow of conversation. Dungeon Meshi isn’t the worst offender but it’s still not great.

The diagrams that pop up when people are going on a bit of a monologue also work a lot better when you can take time to sit on them, and especially the panels where the meals are shown off after cooking. The extra details of listing out the ingredients and nutritional information really adds to it (and as for the show’s version of that, I am a hater when it comes to overly shiny anime food, shit looks like it’s made of plastic half the time).

That said, the actual cooking sequences do benefit from getting to be animated. Those little montages of methodical preparation are satisfying. The actors in the show are also really good. I am fully just hearing the actors from the show in my head as I read. Except Falin. I never liked her voice. Sorry. (I watched it in English, mostly).

Then there are some issues I take with how they’ve lettered this in English. They have used a comic font with a seriffed I on the uppercase and a sans serif I on the lowercase. This is a standard way of encoding a comic font but the serif I is only meant to be used for the pronoun I and acronyms but they have clearly just typeset it by typing in the sentences normally, so any sentence that starts with I has it seriffed when it shouldn’t be. They also use a different font for asides which doesn’t have a seriffed I.

And then the onomatopoeias are awkward. It seems like some of them have been redrawn but most of them they have just scribbled in a transliteration followed by an attempt at an English approximation in brackets under it. Maybe that’s the standard way to do it?—I don’t read much manga—and I don’t know what would be the ideal approach would be but this way strikes me an awkward middle-ground that clutters the page and slows down my reading.

I think I will just wait for the show to come out and watch it as it does rather than continue reading this, though.

Because I like to keep my ebook library organised and American comics are a mess when it comes to sensible making a series straightforward to follow I have been maintaining my own reading order for the IDW Sonic the Hedgehog comics for a while. I have intended to add this to my site for a white and the current Sonic comic Humble Bundle seemed a good excuse to finally do it.

You can find it here.

I intend to keep this as a live document that I update as new issues come out and have it as something that I can point to people when I try to convince them to read it and they don’t know where to start. If you want to start from the beginning that Humble Bundle has the first eight volumes for €12.38 and for €1 it has Scrapnik Island which is a great self-contained story to get a taste of the series with.

If you looked at my reading order you might have noticed I had the Tangle & Whisper miniseries in the middle of the eight volumes offered in the bundle but rest assured that they are perfectly understandable without it. It’s not until further along in the series that the story of that miniseries is really built on more.