INFO BURST

Format: Comic strip
Initial Release Date: 16/10/93
Feature character: Sonic the Hedgehog
Villain: Doctor Ivo Robotnik
Other Characters: Miles “Tails” Prower, Stripes, Flicky the Bluebird, Johnny Lightfoot, Porker Lewis, Chirps the Chicken, Sally Acorn,
Locations: Mobius, Spring Hill Zone (mentioned), South Island, Marble Zone (mentioned), West Side Island, Emerald Hill Zone
Items: Robotnik’s Space Satellite
Continuity: Sonic the Comic
Synopsis: Sonic answers a message telling him Tails has been captured on the other side of the planet. On arriving, however, Sonic learns this was all a ploy by Robotnik to lure him to the other side of the globe. Robotnik has a space satellite primed to fire a death ray at the planet to wipe the Emerald Hill Zone off the map. Robotnik activates the ray and Sonic has only five seconds to get to the Emerald Hill Zone. Pushing himself harder than he ever has before, Sonic manages to make the seemingly impossible journey half way around the globe in time to tell his friends to get clear of the death ray. Coming to the beach, Sonic runs on the sand at hyper-speed, which blasts it into a mirror. With a little help from his friends, Sonic is able to position this mirror and fire the death ray back into space and at the satellite, blowing it to pieces. Tails finally catches up to Sonic but the hedgehog is more concerned with preening himself in his new giant mirror.

CREDITS

Writer: Mark Millar
Artist: Ed Hillyer
Letterer: Tom Frame

Review

Over the course of the preceding two months, Sonic the Comic had made perfectly clear it was moving in a new, bolder, more exciting direction. The characters actually felt like characters, Mobius felt like a lived-in world. And then Time Racer comes along to revert things back to how they were before. It’s pretty clear this one (and, indeed, most of Mark Millar’s remaining scripts) was written before the Mobius R.B.R. setting was hit upon because if you remove it from the story, absolutely nothing changes. The two biggest hints to this are both in the Emerald Hill Zone (and it’s certainly interesting that Sonic seems to travel there from South Island’s Marble Zone instead of to the Green Hill Zone, presumably another editing-stage alteration). Firstly, Sonic’s friends seem to be milling about, minding their business instead of being subjugated by Badniks. And, secondly, if Robotnik’s conquered the planet, why is he trying to blast part of it to smithereens?

Of course, this sort of minor continuity wrangling doesn’t really detract from the story. Unfortunately, that’s in part due to the fact there’s really not much story to detract from in the first place. On the one hand, the question the story raises is an interesting hypothetical – can Sonic run halfway around the planet in five seconds? The answer is much less interesting: yes, with no negative repercussions. Sonic pushes himself beyond his limits to make the journey around the globe, with Ed Hillyer’s art becoming fantastical and surreal as the world becomes a blur of colour around Sonic. On arriving in the Emerald Hill Zone, it’s just business as usual for him. There are no signs of stress or strain, he isn’t struggling to save the day, he isn’t in pain and he hasn’t so much as broken a sweat. In short, there are basically no stakes. Of course Sonic is going to save the Emerald Hill Zone. But if he isn’t even going to have to work particularly hard to do so, why should a reader be impressed?

Sonic’s chosen method of defeating the space satellite is pretty cool, to be fair, and a rare spot of educational content in Sonic the Comic. While bouncing a laser back with a mirror is pretty entry-level stuff, Sonic racing around the beach at top speed to turn the sand into said mirror is sincerely a very clever touch.

The art is perhaps a little spotty, with the odd shaky panel here or there but, on the whole, everything looks pretty good. In addition to the aforementioned sequences where Sonic is running almost inconceivably fast, the space satellite exploding looks superb and the characters are full of personality. Unfortunately, it’s just not enough to hold together a very flimsy story.

Time Racer is, regrettably, a step in the wrong direction for a comic that had seemingly found its footing after an excellent run of stories. It is also unfortunately not the last weaker strip to get through before the comic truly settles on its identity.