#pontac

Au Louvre-Lens, une expo : "Exils" (aussi bien réels qu'intérieurs, les mythes que les trajectoires personnelles de certains artistes)

Victor Hugo - "Marine Terrace"

Pablo Picasso - "La Suppliante"

Victor Hugo - "Exil", frontispice du tome II de "Contemplations" de Paul Meurice

Charles Hugo - "Victor Hugo, la Grève de Pontac, près de Saint-Clément"

Marc Chagall - "Souvenir"

Ian Flynn is finally writing the script for a Sonic game, something fans (including myself) have been asking for for a long time. So gone is the decade of poorly written Sonic game scripts…right? Well, not exactly.

The fanbase was confident that Ken Pontac and Warren Graff’s writing was the source of the dull, bland scripts that have plagued Sonic games for a decade. They started writing for Sonic Colors in 2010, which was praised at the time because a simplistic story that wasn’t loaded with many characters was a refreshing change of pace…a change of pace that wasn’t supposed to be permanent.

The problem became apparent in 2011 with Sonic Generations. The time-travelling adventure had the potential for good high-stakes writing, full of dialogue between two Sonics at minimum and more dialogue with the minor cast. What we received though was a script emptier than the zones Eggman’s machine left in its wake, and there were no stakes to speak of. Sonic Lost World and Sonic Forces were supposed to have high-stakes, but even these, as well as any sort of plot, were poorly conveyed, if conveyed at all, and every character, Sonic included, felt one-not and shallow, occasionally even self-contradictory as well.

All of these games were written by Pontac and Graff, so the conclusion felt obvious at the time, even to me. However, I’ve discovered a pattern that provides a more probable theory, and you need to look at the comic books and behind-the-scenes interviews to find it.

The Archie-published comics were shut down in 2016 and SEGA moved its Sonic licensing to IDW in 2018, with the request that they could be more involved in the editorial stage of the comics-making process than they had been with Archie. Many of the stories under IDW, despite being written by the same author who had been under Archie (Ian Flynn), began to take on the same bland, shallow writing,a far cry from his imaginative and expressive writing in the Archie comics. One might think Ian Flynn started slipping on his writing skills, but the problem requires a much closer look.

Behind the scenes, multiple drafts for parts of various issues were cut. Issue #19 is the best example. Ian Flynn stated in the drafts for #19, Shadow was supposed to heroically sacrifice himself to stop a horde of zombots, and that SEGA (not IDW’s editor) ousted the script. The script we got in the published issue had fans in an uproar at Shadow’s shallow presentation. While records of Ian’s statements are now hard to find, fans’ reactions still exist on the internet.

Ian Flynn isn’t the only one to point fingers at SEGA behind-the-scenes. On Twitter, veteran penciller for the series Tracy Yardley has shown drafts for panels on Issue #44 that had to be reworked because of Sonic being too “expressive.” His post also mentions this was a SEGA decision, not an IDW editorial one. (Note, the purpose of the post was not about SEGA or Sonic, but to demonstrate what the editorial process on a comic book looks like.)

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