Diana Skelly

With almost 300 issues in the core series, Archie's Sonic The Hedgehog stands as the longest-running uninterrupted American monthly comic book that's currently being published. In Hedging Your Bets, I attempt to get up to speed on Sonic the Hedgehog, challenging the odds to hopefully make it all the way to the finish line. This week, it's Sonic meets WrestleMania, and how do you screw that up?!

The Holidays are upon as, and the year is basically gone. And as you know by now, that mean that here at ComicsAlliance, we're looking back at the best that comics had to offer in 2016. So here, to give you warm feeling as you head into your holiday weekend, are the best Archie Comics covers of the year.

The last time we talked about Sonic the Hedgehog, when the current "Panic in the Sky" storyline was just getting started, I mentioned my almost total unfamiliarity with the franchise. But as a potential new reader, one thing I can definitely appreciate is that even here, in the second part of a four-part story, they're still giving everyone identifying captions so that I can at least sort out the characters by name. Fortunately, it doesn't take a deep knowledge to get the basics: There's an attack by an evil army and Sonic's crew of good guys are falling out of the sky --- and someone's very upset that their computer's not working. Check out a preview!

I've been pretty up front about the fact that I know very little about the world of Sonic the Hedgehog, but I do know that it can be pretty shockingly complicated. I know, for instance, that Sonic likes to run fast and is always ready to party, but when it comes to figuring out how the world he lives in was shattered by a global cataclysm, or why he's hanging out with cyborgs and a sentient AI who takes the form of a holographic lynx, I'm a little more hazy. But if you're in the same boat, good news. The next issue of Archie's long-running Sonic the Hedgehog starts off with a series of quick captions to explain everything --- and a More Than Meets The Eye/Arrested Development party to celebrate something that they actually have not accomplished yet. But will the answers themselves become more questions? Decide for yourself with the preview below!