THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY The cover of this issue was penciled in 1991, inked in 2021. In-between those years I don't think we ever completed an entire issue. There were many false starts. Some of which came quite close to being published. That is, photocopied and given away. I turned fourteen in 1991. My best friend moved back from a neighboring town, where he'd co-developed SONIC with a kid from Florida, who had actually created him. They had done a cover for the otherwise mythical first issue on a Mac in their desktop publishing class. I took it from there. Like my earlier series, ACTRON, SONIC was supposed to be a collaboration. We'd even started trading off panels and pages, both working on each until we were happy with them. That lasted about five pages, then I couldn't get any more work our of him. (Ask me some time about the envelope I found in his attic containing a fully penciled issue of ACTRON I'd mailed him a couple years before -- it hadn't even been opened.) But, really, why should I have expected anyone to share my enthusiasm about a thing I'd effectively browbeaten them into working on in the first place? Over the years we made a few more false starts. Mostly, terrible covers. One of them (his) was intended as an embossed homage to the all-black cover of Metallica's eponymous 1991 album METALLICA. I still have the original artwork, drawn in white Prismacolor on black construction paper. I did more work on my own, culminating in a more or less complete story wherein, tipped off by a message from the future, Sonic's team assassinated then-President George Herbert Walker Bush in order to avert an impending calamity. Stoked by a recent re-read of the DeMatteis/Giffen JUSTICE LEAGUE, I rewrote the dialogue in 1995, and published the story as issue #22 of my zine, FUCK(tm). More on that next issue.
