Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics introduced an original character named Geoffrey St. John, who at one point in the comic was in a romantic relationship with Sally Acorn, a character from the 1993 "Sonic the Hedgehog" animated series. This has been met with controversy from fans, because Sally was, at the earliest, 15 years old at the time of the relationship. While Geoffrey's age was never stated in the comic leading some to argue that a seemingly nonexistent age gap would be irrelevant, his creator Ken Penders claimed in 2015 that the character was 21 years old at the time of Sonic the Hedgehog Issue #46, which released in May 1997. In the Sonic-Grams fan letter section of that same issue, one fan letter asked if Sally is 14 or 15 years old, with the editor Justin Freddy Gabrie confirming she is 15 (it should be noted that while Gabrie incorrectly lists the wrong age for Bunnie Rabbot in this response implying others could be wrong, Sally's age is consistent with her being the same age as Sonic throughout the comic). All of this information is made significantly worse when Geoffrey is shown making out with Sally during the same issue, which they also did in other issues around this time. To complicate this further, in Issue #20 of the spin-off comic Knuckles the Echidna, which released in January 1999, it's shown that Geoffrey is older than Sally's older brother Elias Acorn, who was 21 at the time of the relationship, through two scenes. The first is when Geoffrey calls him a "kid" in the present, and the second is through a flashback showing Geoffrey as a physically older child than Elias, who was 5 years old in this flashback. Both aforementioned issues were co-written and solely written by Penders respectively, meaning that even if his original claim of Geoffrey being 21 was incorrect, it implies that he retconned Geoffrey to be older than that at the time, making the age gap larger.

This controversy worsened even further when Penders revealed in 2019 that he had planned at some point for a story involving Geoffrey taking Sally's virginity. While he acknowledged that this was a story that ultimately couldn't be told in the comic, as content found in the series had to remain within the realm of a G-rating, he attempted to justify the relationship in the context of a historical drama setting by saying:


However, considering the cited source material, this justification is fundamentally wrong as the actual implied age gap would be larger than the 4 years Penders suggested (Sally's 15 to Geoffrey's at least 21), leading fans to accuse Geoffrey, and Penders by extension, of being a pedophile.