With all the hype of Sonic Boom launching this month it seems right that I pick up the tie in comic which came out in the UK this week and start to get my head around this new re-imagining of our favorite blue hedgehog and friends.

Read on for my thoughts although be warned potential spoilers ahead.

This being a first issue they have kept the story very light, starting with a generic battle with Eggman, and following up with Tails’s house going walkabout… quiet literally. It’s pretty basic stuff and certainly a lot lighter than we would normally expect from one of the current issues of the main Archie Sonic series, but I think there is a very good reason for that, with this being literally the first published depiction of this new interpretation of Sonic the hedgehog, (I believe the TV show is still a few weeks out, and the games are the back end of this month, also the toys don’t count), it falls to Archie to establish the personality of the characters, and this is where the story excels.

The dialogue is largely given over to friendly banter between characters revealing more about there personalities which is what is needed at this early stage. Sonic and Tails appear to be largely unchanged, other than the addition of clothing accessories, and to be honest these two characters are the corner stone of the franchise *braces for arguments to the contrary in the comments section* and as we say in engineering if it isn’t broken don’t fix it.

Knuckles has undergone the biggest change physically to better match his personality and strengths, pun intended. Personality wise he seems to have been dumbed down and turned into the butt of most of the jokes in this comic, which does irritate me. Knuckles was never really stupid in the past he was just gullible. However in saying all this the comic does show at the end that Knuckles is thinking for himself and the way the story plays out implies to me that they are setting things up to show us Knuckles is actually a fairly intelligent character, and I hope this turns out to be true.

Amy is the one out of all the established characters that has changed the most, her dynamic within the group seems to be as the planer, getting the rest of the team to pull together as one in order to save the day. I’m really very happy to see her take more of a leading role rather than just chasing Sonic around trying to get him to go on a date with her. She now balances the team counteracting Sonic’s impulsiveness and is taken seriously by the rest of the team.

Eggman, well he’s still Eggman, from little we see of him, although I do have one comment related to him and in fact Tails, there is a moment where they both chat technobable for a bit, and I feel it could use a little more work, although kudos for slipping a Back to the Future reference in there.

Now for Sticks the Badger, they have gone with a jungle warrior Tarzen set-up for her, growing up in the jungle alone and only now learning to interact with others, which leads to grammatical mi-uses and well strange ‘jungle’ behavior. I’d say it’s too early for me to tell with this character she seems fun but at the same time she smacks of being a cliche, I guess I’m going to have to keep reading to better judge.

I know I’ve focused rather heavily on the characters here but I feel that was the point of the comic to introduce us to them, and I think they have done that rather well. Overall the story is solid if simple, the character dialogue feels natural and the artwork is to the same high standard we normally see from current Archie Sonic comics. I’d suggest if you get a chance pick it up and have a look if only to get a better idea of what’s coming in the TV show and games.