Who expects better from Sonic people?
I get what y'all are saying but for the longest time (esp. in the back half of the 90s) he was basically the only source for any sort of story content and thus setting the tone for the whole series, and so it's little wonder that a lot of folks wound up drawing inspiration from it all. Patient zero for off-kilter storylines derived from the series. At least for me as a kid I found his comics writing less condescending than the corny dialogue of Mike Gallagher's stuff. Of course these days it's easy to see it's of a piece derived from the various shows Ronald D. Moore was working on (DS9, Battlestar) but with focus on rather strange narrative details in the same way we look at, say, Rowling with her wizard shitting lore.
Ah, yeah, managed to find the explanation of that. From user Erinaceus at Sonic Retro, because I sure don't have any copies of the comic anywhere to cross-reference any more:
I remember the comic era in which that "connect the dots" had been published, it was just after 9-11, and a few issues before, Ken Penders had just explained in a previous editorial that he had been seriously ill for a protracted period (explaining the reason why the Jim Valentino "Guardians of the Galaxy" spoof from Sonics #103-104 was published).
Like the time between issue #100 was some of the worst output for the series, and definitely felt like the time period in which Penders started to lose whatever touch he had (like, even if, again, it's very obviously inspired by some of that stuff on DS9 his echidna society backstory stuff wasn't
awful). While the comic eventually got better I feel like Penders' output never properly recovered. I mean, I always felt in the earlier days like his art was pretty stiff but he tended to have much cleaner linework than what he got after that point. Some of that might come down to the inking talent, but I genuinely think his art has gotten worse with time and that was the inflection point.
For the uninitiated, this is the connect-the-dots thing I'm referring to, obviously done hastily due to time constraints, likely even worse than the usual problems for comics production:
It's supposed to be an image of Robotnik in profile:
