Sunday, December 28, 2008

Sonic Gear's New Years

As this is the post closest to new years eve...
I tried to get a little of everything on there. Some old, some new, some current, and some future items. It took the mail back down to 60 again, but that's the same as last time...unable to get it down by even 1, due to the amount of items and info that keeps coming in.

The new was a flood of more shirts. Top Heavy is really going wild on Sonic. This is hopefully a good thing, and hopefully the market won't saturate with all the designs forcing some kind of cutback. Variants galore, and a new pose for Sonic highlighted the section this time around. Though, the new pose shows him rather agitated looking, which was somewhat fitting on the shirt's original color, a positivly unappealing olive-drab.

An old (but classy) tee went in for the 'past', and Sonic Universe the comic is here for the future. That's right, Archie is ending Sonic X, and replacing it with Universe. As the post said, the X comic was strictly 'limited run'. Due to it following/tie-in to the show, from the get-go it could not last forever. The only question was "How Long?" The answer, apparently, was a rather decent 40 issues. Sure there were some duds along the way, but for the most part it was pretty solid.

The comic always felt like "Filler episodes" as that's all it could be. The mini books (text/pictures) could get away with directly adapting or parroting the show episodes, but the comic could not. Because of the linear nature of the show's plot, the comic could never advance past it (or even really approach the end--as it got violent!) which forced it to be all composed of "What ifs" and "Side stories". It was pretty well handled though, with solid art and ok-to-the-continuity plots. Yes, some of the 'holiday theme stories' grasped at straws because they didn't know quite what to do, but one cannot call it a bad run.

Once again, it was an example of Archie having no choice in a matter.
The new book "Sonic Universe" will be a VERY curious thing. Depending on how it's handled, it may even rival the main book. Some odd buzz is that it's looking to REPLACE the main book or out-popularize it, at the least. Why? The main book is bogged down with billions of chars and throwbacks to things over 10 years old that fans today barely recognize. Due to it's non-Sega-assisted start, the main Archie book always relied on tons of non-game chars to get things done. Now that the Sega cast is HUGE their dudes aren't so required any more. But the fans still like them...putting Archie in an impossible situation once more.

From the cover previews though, Universe does not impress. Spaz isn't on board yet, and it's his impressive art that's a real draw on the covers. Will he show up later? Only time will tell. He did most of the Sonic X covers and bailed on the main series. It was rumored "Because X was more Sonic-ish" but will anyone ever know?

I for one, am MOST curious about Universe, and hope that it succeedes.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home