I'm working on some new ideas with IDW for next year, and I've got one AMAZING project being drawn for Penguin right now, so plenty of Sonic stuff from me in the future. Thanks for everyone's support! Sonic fans are chill people.

Our editors at IDW were great all the way through! These things just happen sometimes in publishing, and it's crummy. I'm sorry everyone won't get to see the radical new villain we cooked up. I thought the designs were clutch.

Guess the world wasn't ready for "It's The Wicker Man but with Shadow."

Lastly some people have noticed some references, but I don’t think anyone has picked up most of the (intentionally very vague) stuff I put in the final panel. The shots of my iPad photo album show some of the other things I considered trying to work in but figured they’d be too obvious and rejected

The other themed room was the Greek room. We didn’t actually end up seeing much of it in the story, but the vase played a prominent role. In the final art I obscured Sonic’s spines so I could claim plausible deniability if Sega didn’t want Sonic in the vase.

I originally had Megani lifting her glasses to look at the card Vector throws her, but decided to leave the shot of her eyes until the last panel to heighten the impact of seeing her expression.

Designing the Japanese room was important because it features in pages that both Ryan and I would draw separately and featured heavily in the story.
(Ryan kicks major ass btw)

The first themed room in the museum was “Japanese” so I started with a simple room with wood beams and paper walls in a traditional style. @mrjamps.bsky.social said, “No, you lazy bum, let’s draw something REALLY complicated and difficult!” So I worked up the final version based on his design.

As it happened, they seemed to actually expect more game stuff after page 2 had featured game references, so who knows if the other stuff might have gotten through. You literally can never know what they will want or what they will ask to have changed. It’s a MYSTERYYYYYY! (a frustrating mystery)

As seen in the final issue, page 2, panel 1 shows some easter eggs from Sonic Frontiers and Sonic Riders as well as the totem pole from Sonic 2. For the final panel of the book, I was going to throw in more game references, but we figured Sega would say no, so I changed them to other stuff…

Danny’s script called for a museum with several themed rooms. My initial thought was a more modern contemporary, almost fantasy design (since I’ve heard my environments are sometimes too “real”) But we went with this more classic design that I based very loosely on the building in Sonic Unleashed

This issue was unique in the way I got to collaborate not only with @danny8bit.bsky.social via his script, @reggiegraham.bsky.social, @ppdppl.com, @mrjamps.bsky.social, and @deegeemin.bsky.social all worked directly together on visuals and some layouts as seen here. Lots of fun!