How a Sonic fanfic writer ended up leading Sonic Frontiers

techradar.com:

While we still know little about Sonic Frontiers, the first open-world adventure for the super-fast hedgehog, there is a good reason to hope it will be something special: one of the main writers on the title is Ian Flynn, a big name in the Sonic community, and chief writer on Archie Comic’s Sonic the Hedgehog series and lead writer on IDW Publishing’s Sonic the Hedgehog comics.

Flynn’s path to Sonic Frontiers gives hope Sonic fans (or any fans, really) can, with perseverance, luck, and talent, one day help create the thing they love.

Flynn’s love of Sonic started when his dad brought home a Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. A passion for the cartoons and comics quickly followed. “They got me hooked young,” Flynn tells us.

Throughout college and working on his English degree, Flynn remained a fan of the blue hedgehog. But on the other side, he panicked: “‘What does one actually do with an English degree?’ I asked myself.” So he decided to try and mix his passions and write a Sonic comic.

What does one actually do with an English degree?

Submitting unsolicited manuscripts to comic companies isn’t the norm for landing a job in the industry – not that there is a standard route – and it didn’t immediately pay off. Speaking to (now defunct) website Dreamflint back in 2006, Flynn explained how he sent in scripts for four years before then-editor of the Archie Comic’s Sonic The Hedgehog series, Mike Pellerito, gave Flynn a shot. Flynn told us how he started by writing data files – pages that appeared in the comics and gave detailed breakdowns of characters and locations –  though he then moved on to penning test scripts.

Flynn rose fast; within a few months he had become the lead writer of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, a