Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: archie comics, Barry Grossman, comic scripting, Comics, Dan Nakrosis, entertainment, Jorge Pacheco, Michael Gallegher, scott shaw, sonic the hedgehog

From Strip To Script – Sonic The Hedgehog

By Josh Hechinger

Welcome to From Strip to Script, where I take a page of finished comic art and try to derive a script from it.

The first comic I ever read was Uncanny X-Men, that's a matter of public record (aka, it's a thing I've talked about a few times here). However, the first comic I read regularly, from the four-issue-mini-series-I-was-bought-in-a-Toys-R-Us onward, was Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog.

(It's one of three comics I've ever had a subscription to, which seems like such an alien concept to me now.)

Sonic's an odd duck (or hedgehog), in that the games basically had a plot of "run fast and pop robots to free tiny animals", but the comics and cartoons had a whole spectrum of tonal approaches:

There was the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon, where Sonic and Tails had goofy adventures stopping the fairly-incompetent Robotnik and his henchbots.

But also, there was the "Sonic the Hedgehog" cartoon, which was quite literally a darker and more complex show, where Sonic and an entire network of "Freedom Fighters" were trying to win back their planet from Robotnik's totalitarian rule.

And then there were the Archie comics. they started as a four-issue mini-series that initially split the difference between the two tones: goofy as anything, but springing from the basic premise that Sonic and his friends are freedom fighters against the plans of Robotnik.

The Archie Sonic increasingly took on the elements, if not the aesthetic, of the darker cartoon, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't all sorts of into that (…and the various mini-series…and the Super Specials…) up until around high school.

That said, revisiting the series via the "Archives" digests, I've found that I enjoy the goofy stuff waaaay more than the world-building elements; the crew of Michael Gallagher (script), Barry Grossman (colors), Dan Nakrosis (lettering), Jorge Pacheco (inking) and Scott Shaw (penciller) managed to nail the appeal of the perpetual motion of the games, the admittedly compelling premise of the underdog (underhedgehog?) fighting against a mechanized army, and the fun of trying to depict motion in the static medium of comics.

PAGE TWELVE

SONIC looks over his shoulder at the audience as he zips along the path to the forest.

– SONIC      This is the way to the village of Knothole…where all of us Freedom Fighters hide out from Robotnik and his creepy robots!

– SONIC      He hasn't found us yet…and I know you won't tell!

SONIC runs in from the left…

– SONIC      All you gotta do to open the secret entrance is pull the vine…

He SWOOPS as he swings on the hanging vine.

– SFX      SWOOP!!

– SONIC      But I like to make like Tarzan, man…

And he cannonballs into the open Knothole Stump.

– SFX       ZING!

– SONIC      And jump into the stump!

Cutaway diagram of the Knothole Secret Tunnel (which is basically just a big, crazy, underground slide). SONIC is having a lot of fun going through. The following dialogue can be peppered throughout his trip.

– SONIC      Here we go! Hold onto your spats!

– SONIC      Wheee!

– SONIC      Way past cool! This is my favorite part!

– SONIC      Almost there…

SONIC exits the chute, bouncing on some kind of padding…

…and nails the dismount, with a "ta-da!" gesture.

– SONIC      I'm baaaaaaack!

So, What'd We Learn?

– I skipped strict panel descriptions, because…well, I can script "the cartoon hedgehog is a series of afterimages" in two panels, but if I leave it open, I'd (hopefully) either get the jaunty cross-section of the finished page, or super dense individual panels for each action.

– Disclaimer: this is, moreso than usual, a Hypothetical Script; I skipped the gag about the hay, because I'd scripted that Sonic just exits the chute onto some kind of padding.

– The finished page is all about motion and engagement: it draws very clean lines of motion, giving Sonic explicit paths to follow throughout the page, and sprinkling that with patter balloons, so there's something engaging the reader every second as their eyes scan through the page.

Philly-based comic writer Josh Hechinger is a Cancer, and his blood type is A+.

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