S.T.C Streets of Rage Comic Online

One thing I quite enjoyed about Sonic the Comic in it's early days was how there was stories based on a whole slew of Sega's most popular games at the time (and even a few based on third-party games from EA and Konami). One of the earliest to appear in Issue 7 was Streets of Rage, which went on to receive a three stories (one for each game I presume) and even a book collection.

This website called Geekenvy has some great Sega related articles and has also uploaded scans of the first Street of Rage story in all of its glory, written by Mark Miller and Illustrated by Peter Richardson. Considering the game's simplistic story and the fact that they could only get away with so much in a children's comic, they did a quality job on this.

If you want to download any of the S.T.C comics in their entirety, there is a complete archive over at a website called Tails.Kicks.Ass.net, though you have to sign up to download anything.

Japanese Sega Art Book of Sheer Beauty Part 2: Scans!

As I promised here are some full scale scans from that wonderful Sega game illustrations book.

Here's a scanned example of one of the pages, which not only contains all that lovely felt-tip pen colored art from Sonic 1, but also talks of the characters' "charming and saucy nature". Hmm. No doubt the PAL Sonic 1 box art was nicer, though. More scans after the jump.

Some art scanned from one of the Sonic 2 pages, showing Tails back when he was generally cute and not an annoying little idiot. "Look at all them Eggman's robots" indeed.

The creepy furries may get a kick out of this one. Features some artwork of the badniks from the Game Gear version of Sonic 2, which I can't say I've seen before getting this book before (for all I know they were probably in the Japanese manual)..

Ever wanted large artwork of Streets of Rage? Well here you go! Sadly I couldn't get perfect scans of these what with the page bends though, so a lot of these will have squashed shadowed sides. Still, click on this and you can see all that unnecessary muscle detail closer than if you placed the Mega Drive case against your nose.


This one of Monster lair wasn't going too far into the page dip so I got this one almost just right. Illustrated by , of who's artwork should be familiar to anyone that ever owned a Master System, as the art could be found on many a white gridded box (when they did very rarely put any effort into the art on them that is). This one might even work as a widescreen wallpaper.


This is one of my favorite pieces from the entire book, a real piece of art that's wasted on a tiny Game Gear box but would look great hung up on a wall.


This Phantasy Star II art is also very arty. Has the look of a Moebius illustration, sort of. Now a Panzer Dragoon art book, THAT would be nice.

Outrun artwork by Akira Watanabe (the same guy who did the Sonic 1 and 2 cover art, amongst other Sega art). This wouldn't look out of place framed in a 1980's diner complete with a girl flying around on Rollerblades chewing bubblegum. This image could be all you need on Wikipedia for the word "Sega". Amazing.


And if that wasn't enough airbrushed Outrun goodness for you, here's a poor attempt at a scan of the two page spread of Turbo Outrun. This American dream of driving like an arsehole to show off to your brain dead girlfriend is illustrated so perfectly here.



And finally here's the classic Outrun logo, which might just be the largest copy of it you'll find on the Internet. I could be wrong, though.


I may upload some more scans from the book if anyone wants them, and if they're possible without wreaking the book, and maybe I'll cook up some wallpapers too.

S.T.C Scans: Videos, Yoyo's and Milky Way Bars

I've made a start at scanning anything that people may find interesting (or not) from my collection of Sonic the Comics, starting with the many Sega and Sonic tie ins advertised. These first 4 are all the adverts I could find for the VHS releases of the cartoon Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Much better box art than the lazy work on the recent DVDs.

More after the jump.

Next up is a scan of a Frosties promotion for Sonic Yoyos. The Yoyo's wen't packed in the cereal box: you had to send off for them with coupons. There's also a competition on here that includes a Multi-Mega. Oooh. I wouldn't really want to see Tony Tiger in a video game, though.

Here's one for another Sonic promotion/competition, this time involving Milky Way chocolate bars, and promoting Sonic & Knuckles. I do remember buying a good few Milky Ways to attempt to win the game.

Finally here's one from a much earlier issue of S.T.C (one of the first, I think) of a Sega Game Gear carry case/ Lunch box type thing that also comes with a neat set of pins. I think the promotion was long over when I finally got my hands on this issue, as I started collecting them around issue 20.

Been there, done that, worn the t-shirts.

Why just play Sonic games, read Sonic books and comics, listen to Sonic music and use Sonic shampoo when you could also wear Sonic clothes to really show Sega owns your soul? I know I had quite a lot of Sonic clothing when I was a kid, that's for sure. I remember having a jacket covered in Sonic patches when I was about seven, and when I grew out of the jacket I had my gran stitch the patches onto a new jacket. I can't remember a time I didn't have any sonic shirts, I made sure my mum bought the ones they only did in adult sizes long before I could fit in them, presuming I'd still want them once I was in my teens. I remember having some of the T-shirts shown in this ad I found in an issue of S.T.C.

I had that one in the bottom right corner for sure. That one was great because it was all pixelated up like the first game and has the Lives/Score/Rings hud on the arm. I remember also owning a Spring Yard design of some sort that had Sonic transforming from his sprite to full artwork while bouncing off a spring. It was awesome.

More after the jump..

I actually still own a couple pieces from way back then, which I kept as collectors pieces and have rarely worn, currently stored away. They're both heavy jackets covered in patches. I'm not sure how I got these but I do know these are pretty hard to find now and I have seen one of them go for decent money on Ebay before. Here's some pics..

This blue has that Sonic 2 patch I have so many of, along with a huge S on the front, a Sega logo patch on one arm, and two character patches on the other. Wait, does that say 'Professor Robotnik'? Never mind.

And then there is the red Coca Cola one. Again, no idea where it came from, but there was a cap that went with this too, which I don't seem to own anymore. There's another Sega patch on one arm, a Coca Cola one on the front and other arm, and a big patch on the back of Sonic holding one of those old glass bottles.

In the last couple years there it has become somewhat of a fad to like retro video games, and this has been taken advantage of with tons of new clothing based on Mario, Pac Man and Space Invaders. Sega has jumped on the bandwagon by licensing out retro Sonic art to be plastered onto a whole truck load of T-shirts. Here in the UK they're mostly found in Gamestation and GAME, and I have about eight designs now after getting a load more this Christmas. They use a lot of the same artwork multiple times and have that fake-tattered look to them.


At the moment, Play.com sell three designs at the moment for £8 each. GAME currently only have one design for £10 on the website, and Gamestation 's website has lots of designs but not a single one in stock, as they were selling them off at a fiver each with a three for two offer on top of that. No doubt they'll be new designs later this year, though.