#The Lara-Su Chronicles

[thes-hitoverlord]

/co/

[scientistservant]

I just noticed the jpg photo used for the background. Penders hasn't changed after all these years.

[rabbithaver]

i think the reason ken penders' writing is Like That is because he spent the first like 30 years of his life locked in a room where he was only allowed to watch Roger Corman movies and eat saltine crackers

[tenebraevesper]

The Ken Penders Era/Lawsuit (Sonic Archie Digest)

*sigh*

With the recent release of Ken Penders new comic, The Lara-Su Chronicles (do not search for any images, that comic is cursed), I had figured it would be a good idea to remind people why this particular comic writer is so widely hated by the Sonic fandom. There is a podcast on YouTube, where Sonic_Speed and his co-host(s) have gone into detail about all of the Sonic Archie comics and Ken Penders' writing in particular, releasing two special episodes that cover what had happened during that era:

They are a bit lengthy, but Speed and Aaron explain in great detail all the stuff that man has done, and why Sonic Archie fans, Sonic SatAM fans and Sonic Chronicles fans got screwed over in the long run. Below are also two additional videos in regards to Sonic Chronicles and TLSC:

Sonic Chronicles 2 Plot Details! Ken Penders Responds!

Ken Penders Returns To Comics?!

Please support Sonic_Speed, these guys are great!

[jimintomystery]

Original character do not steal

Kinda fell down a rabbit hole the other day reading about Ken Penders, the writer/artist who sued Archie Comics to gain ownership of 250 Sonic the Hedgehog characters. Most of them look like this:

You may now be asking yourself: What does one do with 250 Sonic the Hedgehog characters? The answer may surprise you!

I'll try not to get too deep into this, since Bobby Schroeder and Comic Drake have thoroughly covered the story already, and I can't improve on their work. But even the short-short version is going to take a while.

Basically, Penders contributed to Archie's Sonic comics from 1994 to 2006. I'm not certain that he's the only reason the Sonic comics in those days were so overwrought and a little horny. But it's far to say he's representative of that tone, and he really leaned into it.

Penders's worldbuilding was especially prolific in Knuckles the Echidna, where he introduced a lost city of Echidnaopolis. In this sense you could kinda compare him to Carl Barks, who created the "Duck Universe" within Disney's line of Mickey Mouse comics. Of course, the biggest difference between Barks and Penders is that Ken claimed ownership of his work. Normally this never goes well for work-for-hire comics creators. But in this case, Archie literally lost the paperwork that said Penders was work-for-hire in the first place.

Without a leg to stand on, Archie was forced to settle. This meant both sides had to go through the Sonic comics and determine which Sonic recolors unambiguously belonged to Sega, and which ones would be ceded to Penders. I like to think the negotiations were akin to that Beanie Baby divorce photo.

Now, the problem with owning dozens of Sonic recolors is that they're not much good for anything except appearing in Sonic stories. But Archie and Sega weren't about to pay Penders to license his weird little guys to them, when Sonic still had plenty of other weird little guys to hang around with. And so, in Sonic The Hedgehog #244 (January 2013), a villain reveals that he teleported the echidnas away forever. After that, none of Ken's concepts were directly referred to again. All that stuff was implicitly erased from history with a soft reboot in #251-252, followed by a hard reboot when the comics moved from Archie to IDW in 2017-2018.

However, Penders already had plans to move forward with his creations without Archie, Sega, or Sonic continuity. In December 2011, he announced The Lara-Su Chronicles, a series of seven graphic novels starring Knuckles's future daughter, who first appeared in Sonic #131. The character designs manage to be legally distinct from the Sonic art style while maintaining the most obnoxious traits. You'd think this would be an opportunity to get away from giant cartoon eyes and "quills" that look like tentacles. But no, Lara-Su still resembles a hot woman wearing a giant fursuit head, except now the fursuit head always looks like it's smelling rotten eggs.

Anyway, it's been nearly twelve years since Penders formally announced The Lara-Su Chronicles, and as far as I can tell he hasn't actually published any of it yet. His website is currently taking pre-orders for the first volume, which is supposed to ship around January 2024. But even that is mostly reprints of Penders's stories from Sonic #131-144, with a new ending tacked on. I'm not sure Ken can reprint Sonic comics, but this should be an interesting way to find out.

From a creative standpoint, I admire the gumption it took for Penders to wrest control of his characters from Archie and forge ahead without the Sonic IP. But strategically, the whole endeavor looks like a huge misfire. The entire selling point of Lara-Su is to revisit an era of Sonic comics that has largely faded into obscurity. Even within that limited audience of the people nostalgic for that era, they mainly liked Ken's melodramatic storytelling because it added depth to the Sonic IP, and not for its own sake. For those Sonic fans, Lara-Su will always be more about what Penders took away "from them" than anything he can give back. And while that may not be entirely fair, I'm not sure it was entirely unforeseeable.

[autistic-blazamy]

if im correct and this isnt fanart someone has posted and claimed to be penders art then i just want to fucking share this tails redesign that will apparently appear in TLSC and there are tears in my eyes

[artfromsaturn]

Apparently the Lara-Su Chronicles are actually going to come out soon which is kind of impressive. The announcement inspired me to try and re-design Lara Su in my own style, since Penders draws much differently than I would. And with much different artistic choices.

Seriously, if you have some free time, why not trying to redesign Lara-Su yourself?

[toaarcan]

So, after a literal fucking decade, Ken "Squirrel Years" Penders has finally opened preorders for The Lara-Su Chronicles.

The first (and likely only) volume is a 160-page graphic novel. 140 of those pages are reprints of the original Mobius: 25 Years Later comics, with the final page of the final story being edited to lead into 20 pages of 'original' TLSC material.

Only way this man isn't getting sued is if SEGA don't give enough of a fuck to fight him.

[rondo-of-blog]

On the Beginnings of The Lara-Su Chronicles

Today is, as of writing, the last day you can pre-order The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings if you want to make it into the Special Thanks section of the book. Anyone who pre-orders after will be in the app, still, but I think it goes without saying the significance of having your name make it into the first printing. You can pre-order here.

Whether you go and pre-order it now or later, or if you’re looking back at this after the book’s come out, I think it’s gonna be worth the read. Today, I feel moved to write a little about what The Lara-Su Chronicles means to me.

It all started with the Archie Sonic comics. A gag comic that metamorphosed into the bonafide superhero book it came to be known as, that was inarguably the blueprint for what Sonic comics get published today. These things aren’t predestined, no divine hand laid its knowing finger on it to move it from one to another - no, it was the freelance creators who put in the work to make Archie Sonic what it was.

And no freelancer who touched the book can be said to have had a greater impact on it than one Ken Penders. Not Mike Gallagher, who wrote the very first issues; not Scott Fulop, who oversaw the initial transformation the book underwent as the editor; not even Karl Bollers, an incredible talent whose original concepts & characters come the very closest to rivaling Ken’s.

It was Ken who wanted more for the comic, for it to become what the readers of the time wanted it to be. Ken, whose eyes were trained on the countless fan-letters that flooded in, who would test each story idea of his first on his son to determine if he was going the right direction. Sonic comics and everyone who’s helped make them over the years owe him a great deal, whether they want to admit it or not, but it was the Knuckles comic series where he truly shined.

Though it’s become fashionable in some circles to claim he ‘shoved Knuckles down reader throats,’ it doesn’t take too long a memory to remember how popular Knuckles was - and is to this day. One need only look at the incredible reaction to the reveal of Knuckles in Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and the very fact that there is going to be another Knuckles series on Paramount Plus, to know Knuckles stands out in the cast of Sonic the Hedgehog.

But where does Knuckles come from? Who is he? You can refer to wiki articles that note his species and status as a former rival of Sonic, you can watch YouTube videos collecting all the cutscenes for his story in the video game Sonic Adventure, but, as a ‘life-long fan’ of Sonic who is also a writer, I can tell you none of those get us a true insight into the interiority of Knuckles the Echidna.

You can restate his character’s premise like a dog chasing its tail, you can try and mine his angst at being so alone on his island until you’re blue in the face, but neither of those take the character himself in any kind of direction. Not forward, not backward, but stagnant. Only in the Knuckles comics did we see a true step forward, where words met action and the story of the echidna’s past finally had anything meaningful to say about the story ahead of Knuckles.

In the initial miniseries Sonic’s Friendly Nemesis Knuckles the Echidna, after B-stories and C-stories in the Archie Sonic series had laid the groundwork, Knuckles’s past came back for the first time. This was before Sonic Adventure, before Tikal and Chaos, and crucially… it was Knuckles’s story, first and foremost, not Sonic’s as it was in the end for Sonic Adventure.

The follow-up miniseries and ensuing ongoing comic series would expand upon Knuckles’s family, the society they had lived in the past as well as where they lived in the present, and even Knuckles himself. While the Chaotix may be familiar to Sonic fans, they and the Knuckles of these comics live lives and make decisions that SEGA’s characters have not and will not ever know.

In the Knuckles series, Knuckles doesn’t just reunite with his mother and eventually his father. He doesn’t just get into battles with greater stakes for his life than anything he had or would later experience in the video games, face foes more personal and meaningful than the leftovers Sonic leaves for him, and accomplish more than his official SEGA counterpart has in all the decades of history he’s had since. He gets a life - a home with people, not just an emerald and an empty island, to protect. And another soul, who starts off as an enemy, for him to fall in love with.

I’ve never met a Sonic fan who’s been able to reconcile this Knuckles with the echidna that SEGA calls Knuckles. In point of fact, every Sonic fan I’ve ever encountered considers the Knuckles series and every story of Ken’s that came before and after to bear so little resemblance to the source material as to no longer have the right to call itself Knuckles or to claim to have anything to do with what SEGA has done with the character. From their lips, this is an insult. To me, it is both the Knuckles comics’ ultimate badge of honor and greatest strength.

What’s the use of perpetually spinning your wheels and refusing to grow and change? What has Knuckles gained in the three decades since the character debuted, sitting on an island as the last survivor of a dead people? The right to mention every now and then he might take a break from being a guardian, and never seeming to follow-through on that? The right to star in animated shorts where he once again illustrates how little has changed since 1998?

I don’t say all this as a hater, either. I happen to like Sonic Team’s video games, I liked Sonic Frontiers, and heck - I’ve even enjoyed some of the comics they’ve printed in the current ongoing series of Sonic books. The simple fact remains that it’s 2024, Knuckles is still on Angel Island and he still has nothing but ghosts. In every way that matters, SEGA’s Knuckles the Echidna is as dead as his people.

Maybe SEGA does something new with the character in the future, maybe the writers they’ve entrusted with the comics become bolder with their plans, I don’t know and I don’t claim to know what will or won’t happen there. My point stands that today, all these years later, there still is no story told of SEGA’s Knuckles that gives him even half the dignity and respect that Ken’s stories have.

Now, all these years later, what is to become The Lara-Su Chronicles series of graphic novels is finally set to begin with the upcoming release of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings. In it, after a reprint of the unforgettably-excellent Mobius: 25 Years Later story, we’ll be seeing what awaits Lara-Su in the next chapter of her life and in the wake of her father’s death.

I’ve read literal hundreds of Sonic comics over the years. The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings is not one of them.

But that was always the beauty of the Knuckles series, now succeeded by The Lara-Su Chronicles. It started in Sonic, but emerged from it like a butterfly from a chrysalis into something unlike anything a humble caterpillar could imagine - and the sky’s the limit.

[bwrosas]

https://twitter.com/i/status/1790918735227969553 (Here's the video proof)

But this may be something that Ken may want to rethink about. Because he may wrote the story, but the characters he's using, that may cause an issue.

What do you say?

[hishighnesstheprincess]

i so desperately need other people to see this image from ken penders lara su chronicles

[sonyshock]

I tried a redraw of Ken Penders' comic panel. Not a 'fix', just wanted to see what I'd do with the same concept. Social media  + Commissions  + PAPERCUT

Posted using PostyBirb

[scientistservant]

Me when I'm drawn by Kem Bender

:(

[squid-in-a-party-hat]

I Picked Up A Copy of Ken Penders' New Book, The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, and made a video going over my thoughts!

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[soniclibraryooc]

The person she sent it to is. Ken Penders

[neoyi]

Oh my GOD, I just saw some of the new comic pages of that wretched, infamous Lara-Su Chronicles by everyone's favorite jackass, and I am just...

GUYS, this is my trainwreck. I grew up with Archie Sonic. I was, at one point, deeply fascinated by the goddamn Knuckles comics - obsessed with them, even. I have historically nostalgic ties to these cursed, CURSED comics.

And while I usually go out of my way to avoid what doesn't fill me with joy, sometimes, sometimes you have That One Thing that attracts you because it's a tire fire. That's Penders' and his legion of Knuckles OCs. And I am THIS close to purchasing that book because I feel like I need it.

Someone talk me out of this. Or do. I am literally on the shop page, hovering over the purchase button. Holy Shit, I cannot believe this man expects anyone to pay 35 dollars where 90% of the content is reprinted material from his old Archie run. I CAN'T and YET...