Wechidna Rewrite
Dear Sonic Fan Comic Company,
Two months ago as a reward for my son’s excellent grades I bought a subscription for comics regarding the video game series Sonic the Hedgehog from your website. Since that transaction I have been treated with absolute disrespect by your company. This treatment immediately started within the first week of my purchase when I was sent over not a comic about the series Sonic the Hedgehog but instead multiple issues of a series I had not subscribed for, "The Lara-Su Chronicles." Upon seeing that the contents of my package were not what I had wanted I immediately sent an email over to your customer service team in hopes of resolving the issue and receiving what I had actually ordered. Instead of apologizing for the issue and promptly sending over the comics that I had subscribed to receive in the first place, I was met by silence from said department.
Not only is it egregious that I have still not been sent any actual comics regarding the Sonic the Hedgehog series, but the content of the comics that you send are absolutely deplorable. Besides the atrocious artwork wasting precious paper in such a way that ought to be classified as sadistic, the storylines and dialogue are equally as painful to go through. The inconsistent personalities, the awkward wording of sentences, the needless amounts of fluff each issue somehow manages to fit in. In spite of how all of the series' "characters," if you can even give the label of character to these one-dimensional cookie-cutters , one particularly stands out: Wechidna. In spite of having the same body snatcher esc proportions and child-like teeth as the rest of the comic's cast, the scar over his right eye being the only thing that separates him from the million other echidna clones on these panels, his dialogue is frankly jarring compared to the rest and makes me think of him as the author's soapbox to spread a variety of inappropriate beliefs.
An example of this is in comic #4 of the Lara-Su Chronicles. Going into a revolting amount of detail, Wechidna has multiple multi-panel dialogue boxes in which he seems to break the fourth wall, emphasizing to the reader the need to "stop the echidnacaust" and how "even in the twenty-first century people discriminate against echidnas," pointing to the "recent attacks against echidnas and the echidnagogue" as an example of this.
Ignoring all of the minor details about how story-wise none of this makes any sense to bring up, the fact that you cover these very serious topics in a comic book series made for children, especially with the way that you do it where you just use the word echidna over and over, is extremely distasteful and makes me question if your company has any morals at all considering that you found this appropriate to print. This is eminently concerning since in spite of all that I have mentioned my son has become such a voracious reader of these comics that I have to take time out of my day to stop him from reading said work. The fact that I have had to on multiple occasions stop him from salvaging some of these comics that I throw away weekly makes it chiefly important that your company does not brazenly treat these topics the way that they currently do.
Since the second time I received these comics about the Lara-Su Chronicles I have tried at least once a week, more often than not multiple times a week, to contact not only your customer service department but other departments within your company to stop all of this. Similar to last time however, not only was I again met with no response back from any of the emails that I sent but seemed to instead be met with an increase in the amount of these abhorrent comics that I receive weekly! Do your associates find my plight humorous? This is my final warning: if you do not cease with the sending of these comics and issue me monetary restitution for the blatant deception committed and all the trouble you have caused, I will pursue legal action against your company for fraud and repeated harassment.
--
Hugo D. Foster, PhD
www.hugofoster.com
Associate Professor of History
Fellow of the Henry Adams Institute at New Haven College