Parasitic Love Angers Young Agents

During my Archie Sonic Pre-Super Genesis Wave craze, I’ve noticed how much the art style for Sonic the Hedgehog shared some aspects with the one used in Codename: Kids Next Door. Five fingered hands, thin limbs with massive hands and feet, puffy socks, meaty shoes… Some of the comic’s artists like Spaz and Yardley even did the KND’s “lip break” thing when the characters’ mouths have to open to a certain size. So I often found myself replicating the poses from the comic covers with certain characters from KND. Numbuh 1 as Sonic, Numbuh 2 as Tails, Numbuhs 5 or 362 as Sally, so on and so forth. After the Super Genesis Wave happened and Sonic jumped ship to the IDW trainwreck, I have pretty much lost interest in the comic aside from ASO. 20 years of continuity thrown out the window, all because of that goddamned RPG. I’ve only done the “Sonic to KND” sketches a few times ever since.

But anyway, this one has been sketched back in 2022, and it was planned for that year’s Valentine’s Day, but I ended up losing the sketchbook where it was stored and couldn’t find it until late last year. Now I’ve finally gotten around to finish here, just in time for the Brazilian celebration of Valentine’s Day (June 12th).

Issue 152 is probably one of the most infamous issues of pre-SGW Archie Sonic. From the cover alone, you can see why many people insist that Archie Sonic was a womanizer. It didn’t help that, thanks to an error on the artist’s interpretation of the script, it had an infamous panel of Sonic kissing Bunnie Rabbot on the lips!

The cover alone doesn’t do any favors to Sonic’s reputation in that era, but what many don’t know is that the first version of the cover was slightly different. Sonic had a confused expression instead of enjoyment, and Fiona Fox was in the group of girls instead of Rouge. I don’t know why they decided to change them, especially since the original cover was more accurate to the actual comic (Rouge didn’t even appear in that issue).

Despite the infamy of that issue, I’ve figured that it would be fitting for a similar scenario in KND, with Numbuh 1 naturally in Sonic’s place. How did it come to this? Maybe Negative Numbuh 1 impersonated him and did the same thing Scourge did in issues 150 and 151? I’ll leave it to you.

This cover had actually two different sketches: One for the original cover and one for the cover they used. Numbuh 1 kept the confused expression on both, but Numbuhs 5 and 362 switched places, and Numbuh 86’s pose was now based on the “knuckle cracking” Mina from the new cover. This version uses primarily the first version, but Numbuhs 3 and 5’s poses are from the second version. Maybe I’ll post the two sketches together in the future.

You might have noticed the different color scheme used in this one. For years, I’ve been using the color palette from KND stock art. However, since Lizzie, Numbuhs 86 and 362 didn’t have any stock art I was aware of, I used the show’s actual palette for this one. Just so Numbuhs 1, 3 and 5 don’t stand out too much from the other half if I had used their darker palette featured in stock art.
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Property of Mr. Warburton and Cartoon Network.
Original Archie Sonic the Hedgehog cover by Patrick "Spaz" Spaziante