#but yeah Penders is definitely the loudest and most rancid

[sage-nebula]

Well, it was Penders shenanigans who forced Sega to step in so I don't blame them for watching the comics like hawks.

I don't like Penders at all—I think he's a petty, misogynistic creep and a bad artist to boot—but I think it's reductive to blame it all on him.

First, he wasn't the only writer on Archie who got up to some nonsense back in the day. I won't pretend to be an expert on Archie by any means, since I've only read two issues myself (one where Sonic got mind controlled for an issue and beat up his friends, the other was the Sally/Nicole stargazing one because I'm gay), so everything I know about it, I know via osmosis, mostly thanks to the ThanksKenPenders liveblogs. But I do know that Penders was only the lead writer on Archie for a certain amount of time, and that there were other writers after and I think before him. Penders is the most infamous because of the lawsuits and because he has a chronic case of Can't Shut The Fuck Up Disorder that constantly rears its ugly head on twitter, but he's not the only one that got up to some bullshit in the Archie comics. He's just the most notorious.

Second, while Sega undoubtedly started laying down more mandates once they finally started paying attention to what the Archie comics were doing (e.g. I've heard it was because of that cover with Sonic crying that Sega was like "no, don't show our hero in distress in that way"), it's to be honest standard fare for companies to pay close attention to how their license is used and it's stranger that Sega wasn't paying attention back in the 90s than it is that they are paying attention now. Like for example, Nintendo is notorious for how strict they are with their IPs, but they're far from the only ones. Hasbro has oversight with Transformers and My Little Pony, in both comics and cartoons. Disney controls portrayal of Mickey Mouse in any licensed games that are made. Part of why Voltron: Legendary Defender was such a mess is because of fighting between the writing staff and the desires of the brand executives, so on and so forth. The fact that Sega was so hands-off with Archie is an exception for how licensed properties are handled, not the rule, and my guess would be that there was some sort of leadership change within Sega that made whoever got put in charge step in and fix things.

So it makes sense for Sega to closely scrutinize what goes into the IDW comics, to make sure that it's promoting a positive representation of Sonic and the franchise as a whole. It's what pretty much every other license holder would do when it comes to a licensed work. The sun would burn out before Nintendo would let someone run roughshod with a Mario comic*, and the same with Disney and Mickey Mouse. I think it's fair and just that Sega protects Sonic in the same way, especially since the IDW team has proven that they can still produce very good comics even with the mandates in place.

(*In fact, Archie actually pitched the idea of a Mario comic to Nintendo, which would have been written by Ian Flynn. Nintendo of America approved it, but Nintendo of Japan said no, so the project was scrapped. Nintendo is very protective over their IPs, and I think it's good that Sega has started following in a similar example with Sonic.)