Commentary for July 22, 2019:

So I’ve taken a little bit of artistic license with the “Mecha Knuckles” sprites used here. I mean, sure, artistic license is the name of the game with sprites a lot of the time -- heck, sometimes you use a sprite from a completely different game series as a stand-in for something in another setting entirely. But in this case, it’s that I’ve taken a boss sprite from Sonic Advance, where it was supposedly meant to be a robot copy of Knuckles made by Eggman, and used it as a combat training droid used by the Echidna Empire. Usually they’d be armed with paintballs rather than live ammo, of course.

Anyway, a small continuity note on the Imperial scientist on the left in panels 3, 4, and 6, which I neglected to point out last time. Her design is based on the character seen here in Chapter 6 of Vol. 2, and she is most definitely the same character. She hasn’t been named on screen anywhere (yet), but her name is Tyra-Za, if you want to know. And I suppose that’s kind of a first, really; she’s a character created for Vol. 2 who has now been retconned into Vol. 1. (Sure, you could technically say that characters like Sally, Nicole, Antoine, etc. are the true originals to be retconned into Vol. 1 following a first appearance in Vol. 2, but a) I didn’t create those characters and b) they did technically first appear my original pass at remastering Eon's Comic last year, which is is why they wound up in Chapter 9 in the first place, if that counts for anything). Anyway, I haven’t given as much thought to the other scientist; he’s just a generic, sorry.