IDW Writer Evan Stanley Confirms New Clearer More Workable Guidelines for Shadow

IDW Sonic writer Evan Stanley has confirmed there are new clearer more workable guidelines for writing Shadow the Hedgehog in the comics moving forward.

We’ve gotten some clearer, more workable guidelines for how to handle him! I had very little trouble writing his part in the upcoming issues, and SEGA’s notes actually feed me up to write him more how I’d like to.

Evan Stanley has also provided more details regarding working with SEGA, such as SEGA requesting for Shadow to explain his reasoning in one of the issues to add more depth.

Shadow being more understood is precisely what happened. I’m reminded of a scene in an upcoming issue where in the original draft Shadow acted without explaining himself, only giving an aggressive, confident response to his team-mates. This isn’t how I would have liked him to handle the situation. But in previous issues, this is how I’ve been asked to write him… so that’s what I did.

So you can imagine my delight to get the script back from SEGA with the request to have him instead explain his reasoning when it makes sense to do so and to showcase his intelligence, pragmatism, and capacity for strategy in the future. Not only does this make him much more workable within storylines, it helps make it clear that his “pride” is, from his perspective, a non-judgemental statement of fact and not an ego trip. It’s also an honest reflection of reality– 99 out of 100 times he really IS that good.