INFO BURST

Format: Comic strip
Initial Release Date: 11/12/93
Feature character: Sonic the Hedgehog
Villain: Terra-Droid
Other Characters: Badniks (unnamed construction Badniks), Miles “Tails” Prower, Animal Friends (Joe Sushi, Flicky the Bluebird, Chirps the Chicken, Tux the Penguin), Johnny Lightfoot, Porker Lewis
Locations: Mobius, South Island, Scrap Brain Zone, West Side Island, Emerald Hill Zone
Items: The Green Eater
Continuity: Sonic the Comic
Synopsis: In the Scrap Brain Zone, the gargantuan and tyrannical Terra-Droid orders worker Badniks to finish construction on a device called the Green Eater. The first test subject for this diabolical machine proves to be the Emerald Hill Zone, where the Green Eater uses its power to literally eat away at all things green and natural, dissolving Sonic’s friends’ hideout home and turning grass to a dead, orange mush. Sonic makes his way to the Scrap Brain Zone and smashes the worker Badniks, freeing the prisoners inside. The now-rescued animals distract Terra-Droid while Sonic destroys the Green Eater. In a one-on-one confrontation, Terra-Droid is simply too large for Sonic to effectively fight the usual way – so he doesn’t even attempt it, launching himself at Terra-Droid at super speed to rip out his battery. Now nothing more than a hunk of metal, Sonic and his friends bring Terra-Droid to the Emerald Hill Zone and hollow him out to use him as a new home.

CREDITS

Writer: Mark Millar
Artist: Mike Hadley
Letterer: Elitta Fell

Review

In a lot of Mark Millar’s Sonic the Comic scripts, as we’ve mentioned previously, Sonic ends up feeling quite one-dimensional. As written, he’s often a very generic “cool” character, with no real thought given to how he fits into the world around him. Perhaps Millar took Sega’s “Hedgehog With Attitude” moniker a little too far (which, considering the attitude and edge of his more famous work, wouldn’t be the most surprising thing in the world). Which is why it’s refreshing to see, as in this strip, Sonic being cool through his actions and quick-thinking rather than simply behaving standoffish and cocky.

The Green Eater opens in an interesting way, too, first introducing us to Terra-Droid, a Badnik so nasty and cruel that even other Badniks find themselves crushed under his heel. A villain so awful even the other villains are bullied by him is one we’re immediately predisposed to want to see Sonic defeat. From here, Millar sets up the stakes perfectly and illustrates what will happen if Sonic doesn’t win: first the Emerald Hill Zone, then every other Zone on Mobius will be dissolved into a dead landscape.

From there, the pacing is solidly maintained throughout with an instant scene switch to the Scrap Brain Zone – no wasting pages on Sonic running to his destination, he’s the fastest thing alive and a caption box does the trick – where Millar has Sonic deal with each problem in turn: freeing the captive prisoners who have been turned into Badniks, stopping the Green Eater and leaving plenty of page space to fight Terra-Droid, resulting in a clash that actually feels satisfying and a victory that feels earned.

That victory, in particular, is a highlight of the story. In this instance, Millar doesn’t have Sonic overcome a foe simply by running really fast (he gets that out of the way with the Green Eater), but through clever use of that speed to nullify the foe instead. It’s much more satisfying to have Sonic outwit a foe than just out-speed them.

If there’s anything that could be said against the script it’s that the Green Eater’s design leaves a lot to be desired. One can only imagine how, rendered by an artist like Richard Elson, the machine that sucks the life out of the planet could have been a more sinister, twisted contraption of wires and cables. Instead, Mike Hadley elected to go for the easiest option, depicting it as a smoke stack with a cable coming from it. It’s a really boring choice in a Zone that is full of smoke stacks and it’s a shame too because the art is otherwise bold and fun throughout. Admittedly, it also doesn’t help that Terra-Droid is coloured green, which leads to some visual confusion. An unassuming reader might think he is the eater who is green, rather than the actual device eating greenery.

The Green Eater is a much more confident and certainly better-paced script than any other Sonic adventure Millar wrote for STC. It’s a real shame we couldn’t have had more like this from him as this is a nice high point of the comic’s first year.