Sonic the Hedgehog’s Forgotten Powers Make Him the Ultimate Superhero

Aside from his incredible speed, Sonic the Hedgehog has a super form where he essentially goes Super Saiyan for a short period of time, upping his speed exponentially and making him almost invulnerable until he reverts back. Although useful, Archie Comics’ discontinued Sonic the Hedgehog comic series use these now-forgotten powers to turn himself into the ultimate superhero.

In Sonic the Hedgehog #66 by Karl Bollers and Steven Butler, the Blue Blur absorbs an incalculable number of Power Rings that would transform him into Super Sonic if there were not so many of them. These additional rings allow him to instead transcend into a form that the he refers to as Ultra Sonic, a state where blue energy and black stars follow his every move. Ultra Sonic also performs some incredible feats at this time as he battles the evil wizard Ixis Naugus, who unfortunately also absorbs enough rings to transform. When Ixis fires twin jets of optical flame, Ultra Sonic counters by summoning a shield of ice water that douses the fiery attack. Ultra Sonic then blocks boiling liquid by lifting his hands up over his head, a motion that causes a wall of granite to rise from the ground in front of him.

Not too long afterward in issue #71 by Bollers and Butler, Sonic attempts to divert a mysterious beam from hitting his home of Knothole Village by running at top speeds with a Super Emerald strapped to his back. In addition to later altering Sonic’s appearance and overall design forever, Sonic’s high speeds soon mix with the Super Emerald’s energies, causing him to first transform into Super Sonic and then Ultra Sonic (where the stars are now colored instead of black) before the different environments that Sonic speeds through cause his body to shift in a manner that reflects these areas’ inherent qualities.  He turns into Solar Sonic in the Great Desert, Polar Sonic in the Southern Tundra and Eco Sonic in the Great Rainforest.

Although these unimaginable powers make Sonic into the ultimate superhero, he doesn’t get to hold onto these powers for long. In issue #66, the creator of the Power Rings reveals that the power of the rings that transform the Blue Blur into Ultra Sonic were never meant to be wielded in such a way. This explains why Sonic later appears to be struck with a severe case of vertigo and amnesia when his power soon dissipates before he eventually collapses. In issue #71, it appears as though Sonic can only achieve these elemental forms when running at absurd top speeds that can only happen when he has a Super Emerald in his possession. But even if he did just happen to have another Super Emerald, the speeds he reaches in these states appear to be so high that he wouldn’t be able to leverage them in battle, as he would be in a completely different part of the world in mere moments. It’s also a tease that readers never got to see what these Solar, Polar and Eco could do aside for changing Sonic’s color. Could they have been like the Thunder, Flame and Bubble Shields that first appeared in the Sega Genesis game Sonic 3?

Even though the original explanations of these powers set them up to be nothing more than one-offs, Archie’s Sonic the Hedgehog series proved that the impossible can become possible and could have found a way to bring them back in some other capacity. On the other hand, these one-time instances created a sense of wonder – even given them an almost mythological aura – that would have been ruined had the comics revisited them. These instances lead readers to believe that Sonic the Hedgehog‘s greatest powers have yet to be revealed.

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