>>5044
>Coldsteel was more autistic than anything official.
You'll niggas don't even know about Scourge the Hedgehog. In the Archie Sonic the Hedgehog comic, issue #11, from early 1994, Sonic goes to the backwards universe where Sonic and his friends are evil and Robotnik is good. It's a blatant ripoff of Crisis on Earth-Three, from Justice League of America #29, from 1964, where the Justice League (and Justice Society) go to the backwards universe and meet their evil counterparts, The Crime Syndicate of America. And by the way, this Sonic issue is the first issue written by Ken Penders, who went on to become very infamous for really fucking weird stories and art that, for some reason, just became worse and worse over time.
The Sonic from the backwards universe was just called Anti-Sonic, sometimes Evil Sonic, because they never cared enough to settle on a name. (I mean technically his name was just Sonic, but they still should have settled on a name for other people to call him.) He showed up many more times over the years, sometimes in pretty important stories. Notably, he became a lackey of Robo-Robotnik, a version of Robotnik from an alternate universe where Robotnik won, and then set his sights on taking over the rest of the multiverse. He helped Robo-Robotnik get a superweapon in issue 19, but all the other Sonics of the multiverse saved the day. About five years later, he was hired by Robo-Robotnik to get the same superweapon back, but he accidentally delivered it to the Robotnik from the Sonic Underground universe instead, because they looked alike (even though Robo-Robotnik was made out of metal, but uh... whatever). This storyline, which takes place right around issue 75, leads in to Robo-Robotnik moving to the main universe, where regular Robotnik had died (in issue 50), and taking his place. Robo-Robotnik later gets turned organic by aliens, and it's established that his history is the same as regular Robotnik's up until the point where regular Robotnik died. Instead of dying, Robo-Robotnik turned himself into a robot and won. So since their histories are similar, they're treated as the same guy and it's only occasionally mentioned that they're technically different guys. They act like Robotnik just came back to life.
In the early 2000s there was an arc where Knuckles, due to being a chosen one, and also because his dad stuck his egg in a giant microwave before he hatched, was able to absorb the power of the Master Emerald. He didn't become Super Knuckles (of course the Chaos Emeralds do that, not the Master Emerald). Instead he became green and got god powers. He eventually sacrifices his life against a giant threat, and when he comes back he doesn't have god powers anymore, but the point is that the Master Emerald turned him green. This will be important later.
Anyway Anti-Sonic appears several more times. At one point Sonic gets lost in space for a year and Anti-Sonic steals his identity and fucks a bunch of bitches in his place, including Tails's first girlfriend, Fiona Fox (actually it turned out his Fiona was a robot based on the real Fiona, and the real Fiona didn't like him, but he still liked her), and Bunnie Rabbot (from the cartoon, who at this point was dating Antoine, also from the cartoon, for like five years). When Sonic gets back, Fiona swaps from Anti-Sonic to regular Sonic for a little while, but after Tails gets mad at Sonic for (essentially) fucking his first love, Sonic breaks it off and Fiona goes back to Anti-Sonic and becomes not just his love interest but sort of his sidekick. (There is an Anti-Tails, and an Anti-Sally, and Anti-Amy, but the Anti-Freedom Fighters are evil and thus none of them are very loyal. They all basically hate each other.)
But that's all me making it sound as cool as possible. Actually Anti-Sonic fucking sucks. He's literally Sonic in a leather jacket and sunglasses. So in 2006 the new editor of the comic got sick of how lame everything was and he fired Ken Penders and brought in a new writer, Ian Flynn, who writes the comics to this day, and also writes the games now. In Flynn's very first issue (#160), his first task was to make Anti-Sonic actually cool. So Anti-Sonic powers up using the Master Emerald, like Mecha Sonic did at the end of Knuckles' story in Sonic & Knuckles. But he gets stopped halfway, so he doesn't turn full Super Sonic, if he even could have. That's unclear, since Sonic never turned Super with the Master Emerald, only Mecha Sonic did. However, he did turn green, like Knuckles did that one time. Maybe this is because since Sonic is also a chosen one, theoretically Anti-Sonic is, too. And Sonic is like the opposite of Knuckles, like Sonic is Chaos and Knuckles is Order, so then Anti-Sonic, the opposite of Sonic, would be like Knuckles. Idk. Maybe that's all bullshit. Anyway the Master Emerald turned Anti-Sonic green.
But halfway through his powerup, Knuckles' dad, Locke, punched Anti-Sonic off the Master Emerald. Locke has two big spiky knuckles on each hand, like Knuckles does (but actually Locke's are just gloves. Knuckles' knuckles are real because Locke stuck him in a microwave when he was a baby). This leaves Anti-Sonic with two big scars running down his chest, and when smart artists draw him, the scars look like the number "II." More on that later.
Anyway Anti-Sonic turns green, and also his glasses change color and his leather jacket now has sweet flame decals on the arms. He declares that he's changing his name to Scourge the Hedgehog, and he kicks everybody's asses. Soon Robotnik makes a Metal Scourge and there's a big brawl with Sonic, Shadow, Scourge, Metal Sonic, and Metal Scourge, and Scourge does eventually lose, but he's a lot cooler than he used to be.
Later we find out that when Scourge went home, he decided enough was enough and he took over his whole universe. He forced all the Anti-Freedom Fighters to change their names so that they wouldn't just be lame copies. But this reveals his weakness. He's actually ashamed of how he is literally a copy of Sonic, and the big "II" scar on his chest highlights this. When his next fight with Sonic comes to its climax, however, he reveals that he had already collected a bunch of Chaos Emeralds in his dimension (they're called Anarchy Beryls there, and there are a ton of them, but he only needs at least seven to become Super). He thus powers up and becomes Super Scourge.
Now, Sonic turns yellow when he becomes Super, and that's probably just ripping off Dragon Ball Z, but it also works because Yellow is the opposite of Blue on a color wheel. So what's the opposite of Green? Purple. So Super Scourge turns Purple. And he ends up looking very much like Coldsteel the Hedgeheg. And at this point Scourge's whole deal is that he's literally a lame tryhard copy of Sonic, so he really is Coldsteel not just in looks, but in function.
However, looking it up now, Coldsteel is apparently from like 2013 (I could have sworn it was older), and Super Scourge is from late 2008 (issue 195). So actually Coldsteel was just a ripoff of Scourge the entire time, which in a way makes him even better.
Anyway, Sonic beats Super Scourge and says the point much more explicitly, that Scourge is a tryhard who doesn't understand what it means to really be cool, and by trying so hard to be "different," he's actually only defining himself off Sonic even more.
Scourge had a couple more stories, but a few years later Ken Penders sued Archie, claiming ownership of all the characters he "created" for the series, even though they were all just Knuckles with different haircuts, or in the case of Scourge, Sonic in a leather jacket. Due to Archie Comics being comically mismanaged, Penders actually won the suit. Starting in 2013, Archie thus wasn't allowed to use Scourge anymore. They also lost tons of other characters, but honestly Scourge was the only good one. Shard the Metal Sonic was sort of cool, too, I guess. He was literally just the original Metal Sonic, but he turned good, and Robotnik just made a new Metal Sonic to replace him. Somehow Penders managed to claim ownership of that. If Sega sued, they'd probably win, but they don't care. In 2020, Penders did announce that he licensed Scourge the Hedgehog to some people who said they were going to publish a Scourge comic, but after immediate backlash, they cancelled it.
However, after ten years, Penders finally did actually a publish his comic with Sonic characters recently. The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings actually came out a few months ago. It's almost all just reprints of old Sonic comics, but there are two very short original stories at the end of the book. In it, the timeline changes (which actually did happen at the end of the last reprint story in the collection, one of the last Sonic comics Penders did), and all the characters change forms to look different. Like Rotor Walrus turns into a Rhino with some different name. And all the echidnas now look even more disgusting than they did before. Scourge isn't in this, but I just wanted to talk about it. The new stories are only intro to the actual stories Penders is promising. But it took him ten years to release this, so we'll see.
Partially due to the Penders bullshit ruffling feathers, but partially due to general management stuff at Archie, they eventually lost the Sonic license in 2017. In 2018, IDW Comics started their own Sonic series, which is still going. Notably, they hired most of the people who were working on the Archie Sonic comics when it ended, so it's basically a continuation, but technically a different continuity. The IDW comics are supposed to be set in the same continuity as the games, after Team Sonic Racing but before Sonic Frontiers. (They say they're gonna catch up to Frontiers eventually, but haven't yet.)
The IDW comics introduced a character called Surge the Tenrec. Essentially she's just female Scourge, to make her legally distinct. She also has a different backstory, where a mad scientist who isn't Eggman (Dr. Starline, essentially a replacement for Snivley from the Saturday morning cartoon and an Archie original character called Dr. Finitivus) takes two randoms and augments them into being copies of Sonic and Tails (and also erases their memories and brainwashes them so they don't remember their old lives). But the point is that Surge is an evil copy of Sonic, and she comes to realize she's a copy of Sonic, and that messes with her head. So basically she's exactly Scourge. But since she's a girl she's seemingly been becoming a good guy in the latest arc, and I don't like that. It's fucking stupid and boring. We already have many other "evil Sonics who turned good," including Knuckles and Shadow. If Scourge turned good, he would have been lame, too. Hopefully they have something happens that makes Surge snap and go full evil again. She's not as cool as Scourge, since she doesn't have the 12 year history of actually being a fucking lame OC, but since they can't legally use him anymore, Surge is an alright replacement. But feminism is rearing its ugly head and ruining her.
>tl;dr: Coldsteel is (probably) literally based on an official character called Super Scourge. Pic related. I post this page (from issue 195) because Panel 2 has him sort of posed like Coldsteel's classic bio pic. Also, he punches Bunnie here, and I think it's notable that Penders had him fuck Bunnie about sixty or seventy issues earlier. They never reference it after, but it happened.