Archie Sonic Off Panel Universe: (the long stories pre-Flynn) Issues 126-158

I wanna talk about Archie Sonic Issue 126’s Off Panel story because it was actually pretty funny. Normally the Off Panels are just a few panels of meta humor and never got me to laugh, but here there’s an entire 5 page story. Of course, the Off Panel stuff is wasting comic space that could go towards genuine stories in the Archie Sonic universe, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyed. Since that whole story universe is informal with tons of fourth-wall-breaking references to stuff like the lettering of the text and what page it is, I figure I might as well be informal too.

So Sonic’s with this bald guy, I think it was the editor of the comic, I recognize him from tons of Off Panels before this, and after they celebrate getting an entire short story dedicated to an Off Panel, the lettering in their textboxes gets harder to read and Sonic gradually goes back to being just a rough pencil sketch. And since this is the Off Panel Universe they panic about this instead of not being aware of it.

Then it turns out the villain doing this to them is a black-cloaked guy called Deadline. It was especially amusing that not only was he so melodramatically petty as to be all about making comics increasingly unfinished, but he looked like the Mysterious Traveler from Sonic the Comic. Like him, he looks like a guy you should take seriously but I actually laughed when I realized how petty he was with his evil plan, when he said that eventually, the story would be reduced to a mere plot synopsis, and we ACTUALLY SAW the plot synopsis written as such on a piece of paper on the panel!

Then I laughed again when I learned that surprisingly, they actually cared enough to give Deadline a backstory! He was a Sonic fan who kept sending in letters with no return address and he was mad that they were being ignored because of that. His letters had horrible ideas for stories which are amusingly called out as such, like Mammoth Mogul joining a flea circus and getting itchy, Knuckles finding out in a long arc that his real father is Elvis, and six issues of Eggman dancing while Knothole burns.

The story ideas are called drivel that no writer would agree to, which makes sense; Mogul’s supposed to be an intimidating competent villain, so him getting all itchy because of fleas would be about as misaimed and confused as Ixis Naugus being a comedy relief character. It was clearly told to us that Locke was Knuckles’ father, we even saw that he was with his egg and used genetic modification on himself to make Knuckles more powerful. And while Flynn did show that permanently burning Knothole wasn’t something he was above, even he wouldn’t have had six issues of Eggman dancing celebrating it. That’s mainly because him just dancing would be boring, though, Sega forced him to have Sonic save the people of Knothole an issue after Knothole burned.

That reminds me, I love that one Off Panel had Sonic complain that everyone was getting roboticized and he had to tell the editor to complain about the script, because it felt like it was an accidental Take That at Flynn for roboticizing all of Sonic’s friends in Worlds Collide, and roboticizing Sally before that, and then the Metal Virus arc happened. So everyone really DID get roboticized. And in the Sonic Miniseries, they had a story about the things that made the comic great, and some of them stopped being the case; Miles and Scourge are mutants, so they have mutants, and the comic would have multiple crossovers to cheaply boost sales.

From Issue 121.

Anyways, the way Deadline was defeated was that the editor summoned a huge amount of textboxes with the names of the people who worked on the comic, and Deadline said he was being crushed under the weight of all that talent.

Again, while normally I don’t condone fourth-wall-breaking since it goes against the point of writing a story, here the story was funny enough to make up for that to me; the very idea that Deadline, this intimidating looking villain in a black cloak, is defeated in such a petty but creative way, was hilarious. It was a creative story, with Deadline having a villainous goal and power you’d normally never see and being defeated by someone other than Sonic in an unexpected way. That’s all the ingredients for a great story.

In Issue 127 there’s a story called Agent Sonic vs Agent Knuckles. Even though it had no dialogue like a Wile E Coyote cartoon, I was smiling the entire time I was reading it. It’s basically an alternate universe Sonic and Knuckles trying to kill each other with spy gear and one-upping each other.

It’s like Aosth without disguises. Sonic tries to plant a tree, Knuckles tries to shoot at him with a sniper rifle as they’re both in black pilgrim costumes, and Sonic anticipates this and presses a button on a remote to stop him.

I laughed when it turned out the newstand kid selling Knuckles a book about how a Chaos Emerald was found was actually Sonic in a costume. The thing I really laughed at, was that for NO REASON, the book Knuckles bought burst into flames! And I liked that they chased each other into a carnival.

Eventually Eggman shows up out of nowhere and goes to a Shadow Zone, and I felt like the heroes were just bullying him because he didn’t really do much wrong, other than whack them with giant wrecking balls in Eggman’s Whacks Museum. After THAT they ganged up on him and he was as helpless as a villain in Aosth against Sonic.

And I was pretty surprised and hyped when Agent Shadow showed up at the last panel. He zapped them with a lever covering them in a blue force field. I assumed there would be a story afterwards involving him as a main character. The whole time, I was thinking that it was refreshing seeing Knuckles in a villain role dressed up like a bad guy trying to go after Sonic the whole time and it was even more enjoyable to see Shadow in that role. It made me wish that we could get a new continuity of Sonic that had completely different roles and interpretations of the Sonic characters for a change, that WASN’T Sonic Boom.

If only most of Sonic wasn’t obsessed with consistency with the games, the other continuities would be even more interesting instead of not functioning as well for being a break from the games’ poor direction and writing. Also it’s sad when an Off Panel draws Sonic so much better than the main story did, where Sonic’s eyes were way too big.

Issue 147 has another long Off Panel story. At first I really wasn’t enthused about this because it’s a self-insert fanfiction involving Mike Gallagher and some artist, and even Sonic hates it, as they make themselves superheroes because they have control over reality.

Fortunately it’s all a self-aware PARODY of self-insert fanfiction as they have a ridiculous amount of powers, and argue with each other over who’s better, and Sonic goes to the retirement home for badniks to make them humiliate them. They obviously didn’t think of the abandoned badnik island concept to replace the badnik bar, yet.

I’m not sure why the badniks are talking like old people though. Eggman wouldn’t have programmed them to talk like that in the first place, so I guess their programming wandered after a while as a glitch? It was also weird that a badnik hi-fived Sonic just because Sonic was glad he humiliated them.

I found it amusing that the writer’s writing was insulted with petty insults and the artist was accused of rushing the art. It was more interesting that way, that it’s taking advantage of them being an artist and writer.

Eventually Sonic got someone to call them out on squandering their chance at a story to themselves and that was satisfying, but sadly it ends on a disappointing joke as even THAT guy agrees to be a superhero. I liked the Deadline story a lot better, this superhero stuff felt like a waste of time, especially since there was like no action at all to take advantage of it and just two guys bickering. But it had some fun to be had in it.

And Issue 158’s Off Panel story was about a villain who exposes fictional ” behind the scenes ” footage of Archie that shows how its stories are ” really ” made. Like we see that the camera was flipped upside-down to make it look like that giant Burrobot was flipped. The only thing I have to say about it is that I actually giggled when it said that King Acorn had to spend HOURS in make-up to look crystallized.

That made the story kinda worth it, but it was still really pointless. I expected a blooper reel of Archie to involve genuinely funny moments where the characters embarrassed themselves, since the whole point of the bad guy’s plan was to make the audience lose faith and drop the comic, but since it was just ” here’s how movies are made ” it was forced that he even thought that would work.