#30th anniversary spoilers

[lazorbeanz]

Knuckles giving Amy hammer training/tips YES YES YESSS

[lizard-spams-your-dash-too]

Yuri Moment

[keep-on-trying]

The way my face just filled up with a huge smile upon seeing this, aah. This is the best April Fools game.

[000marie198]

*Wheeze* he's literally the local bugs bunny I can't

[spindashes]

obsessed with this panel from Amy’s 30th Anniversary special

Trapped. Locked away, if you will. Absolutely sopping wet thang that they are

[luminous-orb]

megalomania monday again…I forgot it was the anniversary of the remake and now I feel bad that i just have a lil doodle 😔

[steel-nemesis]

Let him out.

Please, let him out.

He craves murder, violence, and enrichment in his enclosure.

[sonknuxadow]

HELP THIS IS SO CUTE

[therummesoccupied]

IDW'S SONIC THE HEDGEHOG, KNUCKLES' 30TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL - THOUGHTS

WARNING - SPOILERS AHEAD

It's that time, friends.

The year is 2024, and SEGA has declared it to be the Fearless Year of Shadow, making a big show out of showering the dark hedgie with all kinds of love over the course of the year.

This was certainly done to promote the upcoming Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie, but I can't help but feel that it's a bit unfortunate that the movie's release, and therefore the Year of Shadow, happened when it did, as 2024 is the 30th anniversary of the release of the original Sonic the Hedgehog 3 game on the SEGA Genesis - a game that marked the first appearance of Knuckles the Echidna. And so, where this could have been a year all about Angel Island's lone guardian, instead the spotlight has been dedicated to Sonic's other main rival for the bulk of the year.

Rad Red wasn't forgotten entirely, however, as just as they'd done with Tails and Amy over the past couple years, the folks at IDW gave us a nice little anniversary special dedicated to ol' Knux.

This story is not as strictly dedicated to Knuckles as the Tails and Amy specials were to their titular characters, however, as they also use the comic as an opportunity to commemorate one of the series' more recent releases with Sonic Superstars.

A good deal of this story centers around Trip the Sungazer, a new character introduced in Superstars who was the guardian of the game's setting, The Northstar Islands. I like Trip, if only because she's the first totally new playable character we've had introduced in a main series entry since Silver first showed up in Sonic '06, seventeen years before Sonic Superstars was released. It was really cool to get a new character with their own perspective on the adventure after such a long time, and they even got their own unique Super Form to boot! It was one of those little steps that helped make me feel like the series was going in the right direction again - or at least a direction I appreciated.

The story, penned by Ian Flynn, largely centers around Knuckles offering some one-on-one training to Trip in order to help her become the best Guardian she can be. He's an old pro, after all.

(Side note: I really adore this nod to Tyson Hesse's old "Knuckles is Great at His Job parody comic. That thing is comedic gold and this panel got a genuine cackle out of me.)

It's really interesting to see the comic run with this premise mere months after the Knuckles TV show premiered on Paramount+, centering around Knuckles training Wade Whipple in the ways of the Echidna warriors over in the movie universe.

The difference is this is good, though.

I know a lot of people were somewhat disappointed to see this Knuckles special dedicate so much of its time to Trip, especially after the Tails and Amy specials both put their titular characters in the spotlight to save the day from some kind of crisis, but I really love everything Trip brings to the table here.

Firstly, her presence gives us some really solid worldbuilding. I feel like, before Frontiers, it'd been entirely too long since we'd gotten a solid "Explore the Mysteries of an Ancient Civlization" story, and I feel like Sonic is often at its best when running with that idea.

When you think about it, that's kind of what Knuckles represents for this series. Stories about him are often the ones that do the most calling back to the lost peoples of old, the ones that really put in the work to establish this world's lore. Sonic 3 & Knuckles gives us the Master Emerald and gives us our first real storyline with the Chaos Emeralds at its center. Sonic Adventure tells the story of Chaos and the Echidna Tribe. Sonic Frontiers has Knuckles discovering the connections between Angel Island and the Starfall Islands, home of the Anicents who first brought the Chaos Emeralds to Earth.

This time, however, we're not strictly dealing with some long-lost society...

This was a delightful surprise to me. When playing through Sonic Superstars, I - like many others - thought the Sungazers were like the Echidnas: A bygone people all but wiped out in some kind of cataclysm, presumably related to the Sungazer Dragon, and that Trip, like Knuckles, was the last of her kind. Here, we learn that there just are other Sungazers around! Their civilization isn't gone at all! I think this is the first time we've gotten to see one of these ancient societies still existing in the modern world, and it's a really nice touch!

I do wish there was some variation in their color schemes, however. All of them using the same brown color palette kinda leaves a very... Ken Penders taste in my mouth. Blech.

Regardless, their designs are very nice and I like them, despite their shared palette.

As much as I like Trip and the Sungazers, the comic thankfully does not solely focus on Trip. Knuckles here does get his due.

The comic does a great job at displaying the juxtaposition between Trip and Knuckles, and how they approach their shared role as Guardians - Trip, who is just starting out in the Guardian gig and has plenty of people to help her learn and support her, and Knuckles, who has been a Guardian his entire life and lives alone on an isolated island with no one to help or teach him. Between this and his shared story with Blaze in the 2023 Annual Special, I really love the way IDW has been taking the opportunity to have Knuckles interact with other Guardians and offer his perspective into the way they approach their duties.

Through this, we also get a nice little peak into Knuckles' heart, and the way he approaches social interaction after being on his own for so long.

We get to see some of the difficulties he's faced understanding others after having to fend for himself for his entire life. In turn, we get to see how he's grown, and gotten genuinely closer to his newfound friends as a result.

We see him look back on the lessons he's learned, and use them to help Trip find her way as best he can. It's kind of beautiful that, between Tails, Amy, and Knuckles, Knux is the one most suited to an action story, and yet he's the one out of the three whose anniversary special centers entirely around him opening up and making a connection with another person.

Of course, Aaron Hammerstrom thoroughly knocks it out of the park with his pencils. The man is a juggernaut. It doesn't matter if he's trying to portray a style reminiscent of Yuji Uekawa or Naoto Ohshima, he absolutely delivers every time. I'm so happy we've gotten to see so much out of him lately.

His art is elevated by the lines of Rik Mack, whom I've been noticing more and more often lately, and the colors of Valentina Pinto, who does a phenomenal job with a comic that almost feels tailor(heh)-made for Reggie Graham. It's awesome to see them getting more opportunities to show their stuff.

All-in-all, I do wish we could get some more intense, action-driven Knuckles stories, but these introspective little bits of worldbuilding are also very nice, as was the opportunity to see Trip expanded as a character after her debut in Superstars. At the end of the day, I'm just glad to see Knuckles' 30th anniversary recognized among the tidal wave of Shadow love happening right now.

I do hope Shadow gets one of these stories himself one day, but it's tough to imagine him getting a dedicated 30th anniversary story when his 30th anniversary would also be the franchise's 40th. We'll see, I guess. In the meantime, we have a Chaotix 30th anniversary special on the horizon!

I'm super curious to see how that'll pan out. Will it be a Classic-era story, ushering the very first reappearance of the Chaotix's Classic designs since their original debut? Or will it be the first of these 30th anniversary specials set in the Modern era? Whatever the case, we're definitely going to be breaking some new ground. Before that, though, Issue 75 drops in about... eight minutes for me. So I'm gonna go get ready for that.

As always, thanks for reading!

[rogueartistjyn]

Kara Zor-El. Zero Hour 30th Anniversary issue #1.

[infinitysgrace]

what do you MEAN the figures in the background are the actual rangers that got frozen into statues?!

WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO YOU?!

[lazorbeanz]

New favourite guardian duo right here

THEYRE JUST SO ADORABLE❤️🧡

[augment-techs]

MMPR 30th Anniversary Special: Weddings Vows THE ONLY THING I CARE ABOUT UNDER THE CUT!!

@skyland2703 @lordkingsmith

DAVID TRUEHEART IS NOW COMIC CANON AND I AM SCREAMING.

And he and Billy are Tommy's bestmen, omfg. AND Aisha and Tanya are Kat's bridesmaids!!!!

[franzivonkarma]

Tomorrow it will have been a week since I first watched IWTV but every day of that week I have thought of the fact that they had a daughter they both had a hand in creating at least once, usually more. And also the fact that Louis turned that woman for Claudia (idk her name, does she have one? SORRY) and then THEY BOTH DIED just like his wife and child. His wife died in childbirth, which is something he inflicted upon her, and so the child died too, and the exact same thing happened with that other woman and Claudia but with vampirism, which he also inflicted upon this woman. GOD

[000marie198]

I love her

[mr-hammer-exe]

This was such a massive shock. Also poor Knuckles, you can see how bummed out and jealous he was of Trip's people still being alive.

When I say this revelation made me WHEEZE.

“Why didn’t you tell us you had a whole village of people here?!?!?”

“You never asked.”

Or alternatively:

“Trip… do you seriously think that all guardians have a village of supportive family and friends, centuries old ceremonial armor, and the ability to turn into a dragon?”

“Do… do you NOT?”