#ken penders

[worstsoniccharacter]

Tom is one of the main characters in the Sonic Movies. He's a cop in the small town of Green Hills, who wants to move to a larger city due to the "lack of action." He takes on a paternal role to Sonic, as well as Tails and Knuckles in the sequel. He likes donuts. He "won" against Black Doom last round with 69.8%

Ken Penders' son and niece are what it says on the tin: Archie comics writer Ken Penders' son and niece. They were transported into Mobius while playing a Sonic game in a 48-page special titled Sonic Live. I'm serious. They "won" against Boom Knuckles last round with 79.5%.

[shaddytheguyislazy]

more 196 rejectposting

[biddyfox]

Doing This Shit Up Jesus Christ / Knuckles Style... Happy Easter

[lunastars21]

YALL HE IS ON THE LOOSE

I REPEAT. KEN IS ON THE LOOSE OH SHIT OH FUCK

[sonic-hot-takes]

[bridoesotherjunk]

Personally, I'm not planning on watching the Knuckles series. don't have paramount plus, never plan on getting it, still boycotting paramount after their support for israel.

but it makes me so fucking happy to think that Ken Penders is probably shitting himself with rage seeing the story they're doing for the Echidna backstory. And the designs I've seen so far. He's gotta be so fucking mad.

Lmao, get fucked dude.

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

The thing that gets me about Ken Penders -- I mean aside from everything else about Ken Penders like the misogyny and the daddy issues and the lawsuits and the fact that he's just a bad writer in general -- is that, taking everything he's said about his stint at Archie into consideration, he apparently didn't fully understand the broader scope of what he was writing.

Like.

He didn't understand the concept of "teenage protagonists in a story targeted at children", and thus kept trying to sideline "the kids" (that is, the ostensible main cast, including the title character) in favor of whatever adults happened to be in the room at the moment. At one point he has Eggman complain that his enemies are teenagers, saying that they're supposed to be irrational due to hormones.

He has commented that he believes that only the stories by the original author count as canon, and has boasted about not reading what the other Archie Sonic writers had written, and this explains so much but also, like ... first of all, that isn't how it works. He was hired by someone else, to work on a story which was licensed from an existing property, which other people had also been hired to do. It's not his story.

And second of all, he isn't the original author. There is absolutely no way you can interpret Ken Penders as "the original author" of Archie Sonic. He personally created eight zillion specific characters, yeah, but he didn't become a writer until issue 11, and again, it's licensed from an existing property regardless.

The guy straight-up doesn't understand that he was writing a kid's story, or that he was supposed to be collaborating with other people. He invented a justification for his entitled whining which wasn't actually true.

[s-------i-------g]

DID YOU KNOW?

Chilchuck from the series "Delicious in Dungeon" is a sly reference to Sonic the Hedgehog; "Chil" from Sonic's favorite food Chilidogs, and "Chuck" named after the robotocized uncle that raised him from the Archie comics which were hugely popular in Japan (I assume).

[blazehedgehog]

To everyone's surprise (I suppose), Ian Flynn cited Sticks the Badger at the very end of Sonic Frontiers. So she's now technically part of the main universe, even if she's never been seen there before (not even in IDW comics or anything like that). This is a little bit "strange" to me but... what do you think of this?

I wonder if Sega is just letting Ian name drop these characters but in the agreement they never show them. Like he can say Sticks the Badger exists, but she's never going to turn up anywhere. It's just a wink he gets to do the audience.

Same with the Tailstube videos on Youtube, right. They name drop IDW locations, IDW characters, but I don't think we'll see Tangle, Whisper, or Jewel turn up in one of those things. I think, bare minimum, the echoes of the Ken Penders debacle are going to continue to ring out and Sega's going to be a little gun shy. This is their baby steps; acknowledging those characters exist somewhere, but never committing to hiring actors and generating official Sega art, etc. etc.

Maybe it will lead up to them doing that eventually, but I don't think it'll be any time soon, if ever. Right now it's just to make you go

[onedegreeofsoniccomics]

The Legend of Zelda #3: Secrets of the Triforce

Writer: George Caragonne Breakdowns: Ken Penders Pencils/Inks: P. Zorito Letters: Jade Moede Colors: Christiaan

[comicdrake]

Ken Penders: The Weirdest Sonic Writer

I spent a couple months compiling the LEGENDARY lawsuits behind one of the most infamous Sonic creators, Ken Penders.

[worstsoniccharacter]

Ken Penders' son and niece are what it says on the tin: Archie comics writer Ken Penders' son and niece. They were transported into Mobius while playing a Sonic game in a 48-page special titled Sonic Live. I'm serious. They "won" against Orbot ad Cubot last round with 93.2%.

Boom Knuckles is a large, meathead version of normal Knuckles. He can't read, but he is a self-proclaimed feminist. He "won" against Antoine D'Coolette last round with 55%.

[digital-skeletons]

Ken Penders is about to go wild bro lmfao

[mooshs-crack-headcanons]

If you listen carefully to this scene, you can hear the sound of Ken Penders' bitching in the distance:

[fyeahsonicthehedgehog]

[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.