To many American children, Sonic and his friends now existed primarily as comic-book characters. Sega’s follow-up to its Genesis home console, the Sega Saturn, was a total bust, and both Sonic cartoons had been canceled several years prior. Sonic the Hedgehog reads a comic book that wasn’t the center of a perilous intellectual-property dispute.īy 1998, just a few years after Sonic the Hedgehog’s debut, the blue blur was in trouble.