Fan Fridays: Sonic Legacy

Sonic Paradox has made quite the comeback over the past few months. Though their animations are prominent, they aren’t the only contributing factor towards their revival. Recently Paradox introduced Sonic Legacy, a new fan comic set to launch in the coming month. We sat down with the project’s director CelestOrion to discuss the ins and outs of working on such a large series.

So Celest, how did the idea for Legacy first come about?

Well, it never started off as a comic, to be honest. We were figuring out another animated series to do on the Sonic Paradox channel to spice things up, with a different team than who was working on Casino Calamity and SEGA Shorts, and it would have been something like a TV show, originally ‘slice of life’. As I brought other writers on board, things started to shift direction more to a ‘sitcom’ feel, and a lot of world building I had planned to just flesh things out in the background would end up being unused, and I didn’t want to scrap what I had come up with. After a little bit of thought, and examining the activity in the Sonic Paradox Discord server, I realized that we had a lot of talented artists in our community that didn’t work with animation, and I didn’t want them to feel as if we didn’t have any way for them to contribute, and thus the idea for a comic series was born. Honestly, I had always wanted to make Sonic comics after growing up with the Archie issues, since I had started with the old Sonic Firsts volume back in ’97.

Now Sonic is no stranger to comics. What sets Legacy apart from the likes of Archie and IDW?

Well, while there are a lot of similarities between each continuity, I’d like to think that even with the original lore that I have planned for Legacy, it’s still more focused on recapturing the spirit from the original games. The games and original lore are the highest focus, with original stories peppered in between. Before, with Archie, it was mostly all original stories, with a few game adaptations thrown in from time to time, but it felt as if the games were more so ‘forced’ to fit their setting, and I felt that sometimes it just wasn’t executed too well. Plus, SEGA had mandates set for how Sonic and official cast are depicted, so with official material, there’s a lot of limits imposed on the characters, and we have the freedom to explore them a bit deeper as we’re not mandated by SEGA.

What would you say is the most rewarding and difficult aspects about working with such a large team?

Honestly, I think the most rewarding part about our team is how diverse we are, in many different ways! Everyone has their own ideas and styles that they bring to the table, and we’re able to round everyone off together to create some really unique material! Since we’re an open project, the team just continues to grow, and we’re able to get the story and issues cranked out faster once we really get the ball rolling! I can’t really say that we’ve hit difficulties yet, as we’re still pretty new, and since we’re not an official material, we’re not as worried about deadlines compared to official media releases (although we do want to try and regularly release the content)!

For those unaware, I’ve got to ask: Who is this new Tempest character?

Tempest was a fun character for us to create. No single person on the team created her by themselves, so we consider her ‘property of Sonic Paradox’. When we were first tossing ideas for the order of scripts, we realized that Sonic would be adventuring solo through South Island for the duration of Sonic 1, and we wanted to include characters based on when they appeared in the games. We didn’t want to have slow-paced issues with a lot of monologue, as we didn’t feel as if it fit with Sonic’s character, so we had the idea to have a partner for that duration, someone that can bounce off of his personality and keep up with him in one way or another. We also decided that aquatic “Mobians” are pretty non-existent in the franchise, outside of the post-reboot Archie era, and South Island was pretty tropical/water-themed, so the crew decided on having a dolphin character. She’ll be partnered up with Sonic for the duration of the Sonic 1 arc, and then she’ll be gone for a while until we move forward in the series, but she’ll be an important character to the lore later on, as well as other unannounced characters we have cooking!

Should fans expect a cast of fan favorites, original characters, or both?

While Legacy is still it’s own continuity based more so off of the games, we do take elements and some characters from all other Sonic continuities, as well! We have characters from SatAM, the post-reboot Archie, Fleetway Sonic, even name-drops from Underground, all rolled up into our universe here, and all rebooted to fit our new timeline. We don’t want to take too much from any one continuity, so there’s a lot of characters and ideas that I’ve had to ultimately shut down, but I’m sure that you’ll see characters that you enjoy! There will also be a good amount of new faces that you’ll see in Legacy’s lifespan aside from Tempest, all collaborated between all staff to ensure we have characters that don’t feel “Mary Sue/Gary Stu” to the overall story.

How can fans get involved?

If you’re an artist within the Sonic community and want involved, just join our Discord and submit an audition! While we do require auditions to make it into the ranks, we do so mainly for consistency with quality, and anyone can audition! We give critique on things that we think artists can improve on and build up on their style, and the same goes for writers, too! If you’re not an artist or a writer, but still want to support the project and the artists behind it, we do have a Patreon that all proceeds go directly to the artists for each issue! We’ve got some goals laid out that if we can meet certain funding goals, we’d try and make things such as digital art books, podcasts, and more! If you can’t support us on Patreon, just share the project around with friends, or subscribe to our YouTube to take part in our progress/game streams!

Thanks for your time, Celest! I’ll be waiting eagerly for the comic’s release.

Thanks for having me! For any artists or writers who stumble upon this, if you want involved, just join the community! If you think you’re not up to par, show us what you have, and we’ll build you up! We’re an artist community, and we want to see everyone grow!