IDW Sonic the Hedgehog Issue #22 Review

Things continue to get dark within the Sonic the Hedgehog universe, as Restoration Headquarters falls, all hope is starting to be lost. If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading here!

Our comic starts out with Amy and Cream chatting about how Cream manages to keep a happy face on after everything that happened (she lost Cheese and Chocola Chao to the Zombot Plague several issues prior). Cream confesses she still has nightmares about what happened but feels that she needs to be strong for her mother and the people around Restoration HQ. She leaves after the conversation and readers are confronted with the building Restoration HQ resides in being completely full with no room for people to move about in (what an ominous foreshadowing…).

Vector has managed to get Charmy, who’s now a Zombot after his disappearance a few issues back, into a glass container to keep him safe until a cure is found. Cream has a heart to heart talk with Gemerl who is very anti the idea of Charmy being here, given that he’s a Zombot and can infect the whole building in an instant if he escapes. Vector takes Charmy away after Cream chats with Gemerl.

Scenes change over to an interaction between two unnamed characters discussing where they came from. Right up until one of them discovers the other is infected with the virus, and the virus now spreads to the person they were with. Pandemonium ensues as the virus rapidly spreads and people are rushed to the evacuation area. Charmy escapes his glass prison and begins also making trouble for the group.

Amy leaves the control room and fights through the Zombot horde looking for Cream, who’s flying around looking for her mother. Vanilla is fighting off Zombots, and right before Cream reaches her and grabs her, Amy pulls her back and saves her the same fate as her mother, who becomes overwhelmed by the virus. Now everyone who isn’t infected are in the plane waiting to get out when Charmy flies in and is grabbed by Vector, who leaves and puts Espio in charge, as Vector is now infected.

The plane takes off and gets to Central City to pick up the survivors there, and Amy, Cream, Tangle, and Whisper all year from Tails that his cure was destroyed by the Zombots (this happened last issue). Now the only hope of a cure is if Sonic can get back with his data analyzer intact and without him becoming a full Zombot himself. The end.

As far as storytelling, this is probably one of my favorites of this arc as it fully tells you as a reader what everyone is experiencing as the panic occurs when the virus strikes. You can really feel what everyone is feeling when it happens and you can really feel the pain and terror caused by the virus. I specifically want to highlight the last panel on page 12. This whole scene broke my heart reading it, because this poor unnamed character has been hiding that they have the virus for who knows how long, and when confronted with it, they cry out that they didn’t want to be alone. For me this could’ve been taken as an “I don’t want to be alone when I die to this thing”, and that’s fair. It’s a side we never see; that terror and agony that comes up when faced with certain doom, and all this character wanted was company when they died. But that desire led to the countless deaths of others, so did this character think about that when they snuck in, or were they desperate enough for companionship that they didn’t care? It’s an amazing piece of storytelling, this whole scene is. I usually give Flynn a high praise in these, and this time I really feel he deserves it more so. Flynn really is an absolutely amazing author.

I’m a fan of the art style in this issue. There’s a lot of color for an issue so dark, which is something I enjoy. Tramontano is an excellent artist who knows her stuff. I can’t really give many good examples because everywhere you look in the comic there are good examples. The comic is just overall well done with its art and color.

As for my thoughts on the next few issues, I’m quite curious whether or not Sonic will end up as a Zombot and the rest of the group will have to find a way to cure him so that he will be able to fight the Deadly Six. They’re being set up as the “big bad” of this arc. The Zombot feels much more like just icing on the cake for what the real enemy of this plot has in store, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes next.

This post was originally written by the author for TSSZ News.