I’m using Blender since late 2011. But I’m a self thought Blender user, so please take anything I say with a grain of salt 
Sorry, I mistyped it and as The Omnilord guessed I meant “strands”. And I meant that the vertices should be better placed along the dotted line. Evenly spaced edges work better with the subdivision modifier, which you will use later on.
People still discuss when to use vertex modeling (sometimes also referred to as polygon modeling) and when to use sculpting. But from my observation a widely accepted rule of thumb is: vertex modeling is best for hard surface objects (most of man made stuff like machines, weapons, tools and so on) and sculpting is best for organic objects (characters, clothes, everything that is grown and not constructed). And yes, sculpting with a mouse is possible but difficult, but once you have a tablet most people say that it is much fun.
Box modeling means that you start with a cube or another primitive and bring that into shape be adding edges and extruding and so on.
Yes, Sonic is an organic shape. And me and many others speak of sculpting and retopology as a more modern approach, because since we have sculpting in 3D packages we don’t have to model characters by box or vertex modeling. It is easier and more convenient to sculpt a character. And then you can use snapping to place your vertices directly at the sculpted surface of your character. That makes it so much easier to place the vertices in 3D space.
Here you can see, how a sculpted mesh can help to place the geometry directly at the surface of a sculpted mesh in the step of retopology. Retopoloy means that you create a new mesh of lower resolution by remodeling on top of the scuplted mesh. The difference is that the sculpted mesh acts as a guide in 3D space for where to place the vertices.
That said it is - of course - still a valid approach to model a character from scratch by placing vertices, edges and faces.
More than that I’d say that it is a good exercise, because you can learn much about good topology when you do it by hand. That knowledge will help you later, when you use this techniques to retopologize a sculpted character.
I found an older thread where you can see, how BA user ronthehybrid did the topolgy for the head.
Don’t be confused why his model is so smooth. He uses a subsurface modifier and smooth shading. I would have done the eye area a bit different, but he did a good job. You can see how everything is spaced nicely and evenly. I see mostly quads (except the tip of the strands, which is OK) and you can also see what The Omnilord meant for the hair spikes.