Sonic the Hedgehog #244 p.16

Here’s a page with an interesting story. For anyone familiar with Archie Sonic, you may recall the lawsuit between former artist Ken Penders against Archie and Sega over the rights to dozens of characters he created for the comics. Due to negligence on Archie’s part, Penders actually won the case, thus Archie either had to pay him royalties or remove the characters from the series, which is where this issue and page came in.

Issue 244 had to be entirely rewritten and drawn as a result. The previous issue had still featured several of the characters created by Penders. However, this issue suddenly omits any of them, neither showing nor naming any of them. This page is officially where they were all written out of the series, with the character Thrash having sent all the echidnas and a few other supporting characters into another dimension, never to be see in the series again.

This page, story and resulting events had massive effects on the series, as the Archie Sonic universe was permanently rebooted shortly after in order to completely erase many of Pender’s contributions to the series, as well as led to large tension between Archie and Sega that led to the series being cancelled a few years after.