WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Sonic the Hedgehog #38, by Evan Stanley, Bracardi Curry and Matt Herms on sale now.
Sonic the Hedgehog has always surrounded himself with allies of all sorts. And while investigating one of Doctor Eggman's testing sites with his longtime partners Amy and Tails, Sonic and his friends find themselves in Sonic's own version of Marvel's Battleworld.
In the previous issue of the series, freak storms led to the discovery of a mysterious tower that appeared out of nowhere. Believing Eggman to be involved, Sonic, Tails and Amy take Tail's plane, the Tornado, and go investigate. When they enter the tower they discover that, as they explore, the tower's interior changed all around them, often bringing them right back where they started.
After they try to outrun the tower itself and even outright break the walls down, the trio finds themselves in a dimension of seemingly infinite space. Tails immediately springs into action, both when it comes to saving his friends from their freefalling doom and in formulating a scientific hypothesis. Looking at where they are, Tails believes that Eggman has created a space where he can circumvent the laws of physics, providing him with somewhere that can suit any function he might think of.
Discovering an exit from the infinite space, Tails declares that his hypothesis is now a theory. Sonic and friends escape Eggman's physics bending dimension and arrive in a ghost town. At first glance, there's nothing that would make anyone suspect that this place is any different from a normal town in the real world. However, when Sonic tries to run around, he runs right back where he started in the blink of an eye, proving that somehow, the heroes are still trapped in the tower.
Eggman's manipulation of physics, to the point of creating entirely new and completely different places within a single tower, feels like Dr. Doom's Battleworld from Marvel's 2015 Secret Wars series by Jonathan Hickman, Esad Ribić and Ive Svorcina. Whilst Sonic's world has always been a varied one, it still had a scale of change similar to our own Earth, nothing quite as patchwork as Battleworld. Eggman's tower, on the other hand, sees entirely different environments sown together with doors leading directly into each, much more like Dr. Doom's world of Secret Wars.
Sonic and his allies decide to enter one of the houses in Eggman's eerie ghost town. Everything seems fine until the appearance of one of the creepiest elements in all of the Sonic franchise -- the target dolls from the Sega Dreamcast game Sonic Adventure. And if that wasn't bad enough, the appearance of a hybrid super badnik in the bathtub is sure to ring the alarm bells.
Eggman, alerted to the intrusion of his arch-enemy, makes contact with Sonic through a toaster (he wasn't exactly expecting visitors at his top-secret test site) and reveals the truth about the tower. It's a proving ground for his most cutting-edge creations. Now that Sonic is here, he can put them through the ultimate test.
Eggman's final threat at the end of the issue relates even more to Marvel's Battleworld. Not only is Eggman's tower a patchwork ensemble of a variety of different environments, each capable of change at a whim, but the environment is capable of being weaponized against those who would oppose it. Here Eggman has much the same omnipotence as Dr. Doom did in Secret Wars, whilst Sonic and friends have as much control over their situation as the surviving heroes of Earth-616 and Earth-1610.
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