#the 'stc style' but i know it's specifically elson. i know it.

[couch-house]

woaahhh fleetway sonic from five nights at funkin

[samobservessonic]

In the last issue, both of our on-going multi-parters wrapped up, meaning that we’ve got new stories this time around and both of them were written by Kitching (he also wrote and drew the Decap Attack story in this issue. Busy guy!). This main story is a oneshot, while the later Knuckles story is a multi-parter

After being spoiled by Elson doing the lead stories for Knuckles’s whole introduction arc, it is noticeable when they switch back to a different art style here. But Rodriguez’s art in this story has some great expressions that I’m looking forward to sharing later on in this post. Elson hasn’t gone too far either, as he’s drawing the Knuckles story I’ll be covering next

But for now, we get Robotnik and Grimer, who seem to be taking a direct approach after successfully destroying Sonic’s base and forcing the Freedom Fighter on the run last time

I think we know where they’re going with this

It’s the return of regular brown hedgehog Sonic! Y’know, this is one of those things that I just forget isn’t considered canon across the rest of the brand now, so I didn’t bat an eyelid while skimming through this story. But for those of you who aren’t familiar, StC follows an older Western Sonic backstory, where he was originally a regular hedgehog who gained his speed via an experiment with chaos energy gone wrong in the lab of one Dr. Kintobor, who was also affected and became Dr. Robotnik. That’s a quick version of the story, but StC has covered this backstory quite extensively by this point, so I don’t think it’s worth going into too much detail

The next question is, what happened to Robotnik?

…Oh. Okay then

Wait, what do they mean back at Sonic’s secret base? He doesn’t have a secret base any more, they went on the run last time. I can only assume that maybe this was an older inventory story that wasn’t run until now. It’s a bit of a shame, especially since they could’ve edited it to say that they’re in the caravan, since the background isn’t too detailed, but I’m not going to nitpick about that

Elsewhere, Robotnik is having a great day and Sonic is having a terrible one

Sonic makes it back and at first the Freedom Fighters are alarmed to see that the location of their hidden base has been exposed to a stranger

…Which brings us to the two best expressions in the issue! Johnny’s surprised pose on the left panel and Porker’s CONCERNED face on the right panel

This might be my new favourite MacGuffin drop - some guy made it, but he’s dead now and we’re never going to mention him again, so it doesn’t matter. That’s the kind of British snarky humour that I feel would’ve been at home in a Discworld novel and it works here as well

I can’t remember if we had a “countdown to things that make Grimer quit his job” count going, but I think we can add this moment to it

The badniks are either programmed to pick up on the chaos energy specifically, programmed just to go after targets that are blue and fast, or genuinely believe Robotnik looks like Sonic now. Whatever the answer, Sonic has mixed feelings about this mix-up working out in his favour

It’s up to Grimer to fix this one, so he decides to go ahead and take Sonic’s powers back away from Robotnik again

The swap has definitely worked in Sonic’s favour as well

Now that he’s got his super speed back, Sonic wastes no time in grabbing and destroying the device, so that this can never happen again. On account of the guy who made it being too dead to make another one

Y’know, if this was just the image with no further context, it’d accidentally seem like Sonic is threatening a gay couple :( 

And that’s the end of this story! It was a nice oneshot with a good premise, acting as something of a cooldown story after finishing up a longer arc. My only two nitpicks with this story are small - the first being what I already mentioned about how this story feels like it should’ve been set before the last arc. I was looking forward to seeing stories about the Freedom Fighters on the run, so it was a bit of a let-down to not get that right away. And the second being that the location it was set in feels very generic. I know that as StC carries on they’ll move more away from the game locations and into more comic-exclusive locations, but it still feels like a bit of a shame to go from the actual game locations to a nondescript canyon background that I assume was supposed to be set in or around Emerald Hill? Like I said, nothing major and I still enjoyed the story, but I hope we can get to them being on the run next time