Archie Sonic: Adventure Era (#72-159) - Sonic the Hedgehog 123

J Axer is the closest thing to Spaz-style action we’ve gotten in a loooong while which is neat, but it IS weird how sexualized the girls have gotten.

The Sonic/Sally/Mina love triangle is so superfluous & obnoxious; just as the Geoffrey b.s. was. This arc does NOT pass the Bechdel Test lmao. Really wish we could get a scene of Bunnie & Sal chatting that ISNT just “he loves me, he loves me not.” But the general story was a solid 2-parter otherwise — I like that King Acorn trusts Sonic to rescue her; I’m glad that for right now we’ve mostly moved away from “King Acorn just sucks, actually” which made the entire Freedom Fight feel so hollow once he first returned (even disregarding the direct Naugus manipulation). I also like that Sally freed herself too — made it feel slightly less damsel-y.

As for the Last Robian… it’s CRAZY that such a pivotal moment — de-roboticization — something they’ve been trying to achieve for SO LONG… has been undone in like 5 pages as a BACKUP. This could easily have been its own multi-issue arc: first issue is random adventure that ends w/ return to Knothole only to find every Robian missing; second issue is investigating Knothole, Rotor & Tails picking up a signal originating from X location & wondering if Robotnik has found a frequency to re-control Robians, they find one of the Robians de-roboticized as next cliffhanger; third issue has the de-roboticized Mobian telling them vague idea of where they went, they continue and find more & more de-roboticized with only Jules remaining & Sonic going to see if Robotnik was behind it. But instead, it’s 5 pages.

It’s just bizarre — spend like 20 backups going over & re-going over how Knuckles has become God-powered only to abruptly die & then spend another 4 parts just recapping the 30 Knuckles comics… but spend ANY time on a major de-roboticization arc as a lead-in to the big 125th event? Nahhhhhh.