“You know what, I can’t keep hiding from this page and I think it’s long past time that I stopped being so damn apologetic about it.
It’s a bad page. In fact, it is a TERRIBLE page for numerous, insurmountable, cumulative reasons but you know what, I didn’t write it. And it’s not bad because I didn’t write it, it’s bad for other reasons many of which I helped contribute to. This page single-handedly encapsulates what was wrong with the Sonic comic both verbally, artistically and editorially (yeah, I said it) back in the day.
I was told to draw Sally slapping Sonic, so that’s what I did. I was a freelance artist. I get paid to interpret scripts via art. If the script tells you to draw a character like they are blacking out and slappin’ the taste out of someone’s mama’s mouth then you draw that character slapping the taste out of someone’s mama’s mouth and then some.
I remember putting my all into this page and trying to really convey a lot of force into that slap. And its weird too, ‘cause outside of the electrical force coming off of it — that’s all I drew in that panel. Given my penchant for overdoing everything when I first started, that nothing is was shown there is a very small and glorious miracle.
I guess I must’ve succeeded in spades with that scene because somehow the entire Sonic comic community cracked itself in half, launched itself into the sun and then collapsed into itself like a black hole because I still see the colored version of this image along with Sally’s crazy-cat-lady-style tirade get posted up everywhere like the fandom equivalent of a scarlet letter. But you know what?
I wear that scarlet letter proudly because, regardless of the motives behind it, regardless of the fervor it caused and regardless of the rancor it still incites Archie Sonic fans with to this day — that, in the end, is what art (bad or good which is subjective depending on the eye of the beholder) is supposed to do. It’ll make you care about the characters. And the results of this page either made many fans either realize they’d stopped caring altogether OR made other fans realize that things needed to change and soon. So I guess that’s exactly what this page, warts and diarrhea and abnormally giant head-eating Sally and all accomplished and still does.
(OR some just kept reading like nothing ever happened — and that is just fine too.)
The perspective is weird, Sonic’s arm turns to rubber in one panel for whatever reason, Sally’s boobs are pronounced and looking like they’re about to lactate like there’s no tomorrow — SO MUCH WRONG WITH THIS — but, for me, the focal point always keeps going back to that slap. That’s the key focus on this page and, for better or worse, it did what it set out to do and then some.
And when people make fun of it online, I ain’t mad at that either, ‘cause now I know better and deep down, I make fun of it too.”
