Commentary for October 10, 2019:

Why use Chaos Angel from Sonic Advance to portray the Hidden Palace, when there are perfectly adequate assets of the actual Hidden Palace from Sonic 3 & Knuckles readily available? Honestly, just style choice. I just prefer the way Chaos Angel looks, and that is why I did eventually switch over to using it to portray the Hidden Palace in Eon’s Comic, and it was the aesthetic I was going for (in a very simplified way) in Eon’s World Vol. 2 when the Hidden Palace appeared. So, that’s why. Let’s be honest, the ways Angel Island is portrayed between S3&K and Sonic Adventure are wildly different as it is.

Anyway, it was important to me to get in this scene with the Echidna Empire literally stealing the warp rings from Angel Island, because (spoilers), this theft will become relevant in a forthcoming chapter. In Eon’s Comic, I didn’t show it happening, I just established later on that they’d done it; and, while I don’t necessarily believe it is always better to show than tell, in cases like this, I think it is.

But how are they warp rings? They just look like regular power rings. Well, that’s because a fully sized warp ring is too cumbersome to easily carry around, and it’s also a bit of a homage to Archie Sonic, where warp rings could be made smaller for ease of transport when they weren’t open portals.