The Longest Videogame Based Comic as told by Polygon

[ByTor, Prince of Ro’den]

https://www.polygon.com/comics/2017/5/22/15666974/sonic-the-hedgehog-comic

[TheRedStranger]

 It indeed follows a trend. Speaking from a marketing perspective, Revisionism is extremely short sited when it comes to profit. There is a strong correlative pattern in comics that reboot: sells will spike and then drop rapidly. People will come to note what you changed, and the majority of invested and dedicated consumers will be deeply agitated to find most of what they invested themselves in for years has been stolen from them for a quick buck. What also drew people in usually is not there anymore in the mire of reactivist revision so it is a real high-stakes gamble to ever do. You can achieve a lot if you keep a reboot soft and gently massage out the failures, condractions, and general missteps, improving the work, but typically a hard-reboot is not a dumb, myopic choice. Once the hype and "hurry, come look what has changed" phase has passed, dedicated consumers are jaded about the producers of a work basically stealing a part of their identity, a part of their life they invested in this work like a lifetime relationship. It is like breaking in and giving your lifetime friend a botched plastic surgery, brainwashing them, and then selling them on some blackmarket on the cheap. What is even more sickening is that our laws attempt to make  ideas exclusive, treating abstractions as "intellectual property" and thus punishes and blocks you from trying to revolt and make your own sustainable material and garner the fiscal means to produce it (thus violating your right to use actual investing and real, tangible private capital - your labor and your resources). It is like having someone you know be replaced by one of the body snatchers or the Thing in a recently sanctioned  "gun-free zone." Good luck doing anything about it, it's not going to be easy, but if you want to keep what you love, it will have to be you all. 

 Personally the new Archie Comic reaches into the uncanny valley for me. It has hollow-men, bastardizations of loved once many once knew.

This basically sums up the reboot for fans.

This basically sums up the way things are for the fans who want to change things.

[Some mild blood.]

[Mike Arcade]

Reboots are indeed a tricky thing to pull off, and as seen from Archie Sonic and DC's New 52 can be easily botched when you take too much out of what people liked in the first place. Considering the shifty quality of the comic before Ian Flynn gave more of a consistency to it, how it became the longest running comic can be chalked up to as both a lucky fluke and really good timing. It only really started to struggle a bit after issue 50 before from what I can gather a sales boost during Sonic Adventure 1 and 2's releases despite the iffy quality being more apparent at that time.

Although I do agree with the notion of Soft Reboots being nice as to iron out a lot of missteps, yet I do wonder if Archie Sonic could have been fixed from such rather then the Hard Reboot it got. After all a lot of the implications and intentions of many of the stories were inherently flawed writing which crosses to complete uncanny valley from one writer to another being not as terrible but with very poor choices. Then again DC pretty much rebooted everything after Crisis on Infinite Earths which was rather successful during it's time but I can't completely know of the full reaction to fans of that era as those are far beyond my age and scope that it erased around 40 to 50 years of very loose continuity. I was in favor of how Archie Sonic Rebooted at first when it happened only because it erased all the mistakes of the past and brought hope that both old and new concepts can be done in a much better light, sadly that wasn't the case for many and myself.