Fleetway Sonic Comics
Sonic the Comic, known to its many readers as STC, was a UK children's comic published fortnightly
by Fleetway Editions (the merged companies Fleetway and London Editions, which progressively became
integrated with its parent company Egmont until it became known as Egmont Magazines) between 1993 and
2002. It was the UK's official Sega comic, featuring stories about its mascot Sonic the Hedgehog, other
Sega video game characters and some characters that appeared in Sega's consoles.
It started out with a format of 4 comics per issue with a set of features that covered cheats, reviews, charts,
news and other Sega related things at the time. The first comic was always a 7 page Sonic comic, the others were
usually based on a Sega video game (Kid Chameleon, Decap Attack, Eternal Champions, Streets of Rage) and contained
multiple parts spread out over several magazines. As Sega's video game output declined over the Saturn era, the
magazine stopped doing other video game adaptations (except occasionally Decap Attack)and each of the 4 comics
centered either on Sonic or characters in the Sonic universe. All the extra features also were dropped.
The mascot of the comic was a robot named Megadroid, comprised of parts of a Sega Mega Drive. Megadroid was
the persona used by the editors of Sonic the Comic to answer letters and provide story recaps and general
magazine news (much like Tharg in 2000AD, and in fact created by former Tharg Richard Burton). He acted as a
liaison between the readers (whom he called "boomers" which came from "Sonic Boom") and the "humes who think they're in charge".
Megadroid had a one-off strip, in which he ran away from the STC offices to a seaside town only to return from
his harrowing experience to attend to the needs of the boomers.
Megadroid was dropped from the comic in 1998, and with him the "Speedlines" letter page vanished. Speedlines
returned in 2000, though it was no longer a regular feature and instead of Megadroid, the letters were supposedly
answered by Sonic himself (actually editor Andy Diggle and later Steve MacManus).
The comic went out of publication for some reason and people online whined about it.
