I think it's more a question of how much SEGA would notice if someone else were to do this. SEGA barely showed any interest in the Archie/Chronicles concepts before the lawsuits, I think people overrate how different things would be on the game side of things if they'd never happened. This is also assuming Penders doesn't have some sort of weird legal contingency plan to get someone else to pursue a suit if people try to use "his" characters posthumously. I don't know if that's really a thing or not, but if it is, it wouldn't surprise me if he did it.
Ah yes, Mecha Madness... loved the cover art for that special. Spaz's artwork was great too, but I don't know what the hell they were thinking having Manak do the court martial story afterwards. No offense to the guy but to go from Spaz's awesome artwork to Manak's more silly/laid-back artwork for the last part of a rather serious arc was just... Also, anyone else find it odd how there were two stories about Sonic being falsely accused of crimes within a year of each other? Can we file that under Penders being unoriginal or an accidental coincidence? Or maybe he really didn't like Sonic's character that much lol.
He can try, but I seriously doubt anyone hates themselves enough to carry that torch. What is there to gain from it? Would they really go out of their way to lose time and money pursuing something likely to end in dismissal? More likely that any rightsholders (probably closest relatives or something) will promptly bury and forget it. Also, a work doesn't enter public domain until 70 years after the last remaining author dies. Since Ken's "property" was a joint work with others at Archie, that's gonna be a good while. If it's orphaned, it would be indefinitely stuck in legal limbo, unable to be used in any official future works until it hits PD. Moot because SEGA's never touching that content again, and we'd all be dead by that time. Also, I am not a lawyer and do not have a clue what I am talking about. My armchair is pretty comfy, however.
Since there hasn't been an update in a while (and @Chillbro Swaggins doesn't seem to be active) I thought I'd give this a bump. I risked my mental health and took a look at Ken's Twitter. Some things I've noticed: Doesn't seem to be tweeting about Lara-Su all that much. He seems to have calmed down with the political tweets recently. He still tweets some "wisdom" every once and a while but nowhere near the magnitude we've seen in recent years. He has some garbage hot takes on the Snyder Cut and the canceled New Gods movie. He flat-out said that no one should be able to touch the Fourth World except Jack Kirby, which is possibly one of the most bizarre criticisms I've ever seen. So in other words, he already decided how he'd like the movies before he'd even seen them. He has a new granddaughter. Yay! He had something to say about the whole Knuckles/race thing. Something about Knuckles being an alien so the whole debate was stupid. Oh yeah, and he said that The Lara-Su Chronicles will be his last comic before he moves on to other things.
Oh, come now. I'm sure it's close to done. After all, we've got a whole uh... seven confirmed finished pages, total? Eight or nine at most maybe?
Not as upset with this even though it's Penders saying it, it might sound dumb to some. But Jack Kirby used the medium he was creating things in to it's full potential. The thought of a New Gods or a Eternals movie with the most watered down visuals is not something I want to see. You'd maybe intrigue me with New Gods since DC's movies aren't as sterile cinematography wise as Marvel movies, but even then I wouldn't have high hopes. I know it's hard for some people to believe, but these companies don't care about artistic vision and how things should look. They just care about making money. There's no way a New Gods or Eternals movie would do the justice that material deserves.
...? I'm not really sure how to respond to this... You know that the goal of any company is to make profit, right?
That's no reason to say that only a certain person or people deserve to use it. The staff currently producing new material is not the company that owns it, and I'm sure there are plenty of fans (not me, I know jack shit about superhero comics) who would say the current stuff "uses the medium to its full potential". I mean, they got Taika Watiti to make one of those things. If it's looking sterile, that's because of executive meddling, not a lack of care or good people for the job. It's imposing that restriction from on high for the profit reason that creates the issue, so saying that those restrictions should be even more severe could even make the problem worse. Don't get me wrong here, I think copyright laws are a tool of plutocracy and without them we'd lose nothing, but so long as they're here, they should be more lax within the group that owns a specific copyright. There's basically no hierarchy where making the top of the pyramid thinner helps anything.
Someone being a fan of the material isn't always a good thing. It can lead to bad adaptions in some cases. It depends on the context or circumstances. If we're using storytelling and cinematography, the MCU hasn't even used cinema to it's full potential. I agree that the executives meddling is why it looks so sterile, but that's also a problem. That's not how you should be looking at these. Your opinion on the business side of things shouldn't affect your personal opinion on the material. Yeah, but companies should be willing to take risks. But you as a consumer, should care about the finished product. You don't get a cut of those profits. You should care that you're getting something of quality. Right now companies are too risk averse and because of that we don't get any movies that are willing to try something new or different. Even the MCU, a connected movies universe, was considered a risk in it's infancy, but now it's the norm, because someone took a risk on it.
Strangely enough I recently had a conversation about this. What a project really needs is someone who respects the material. A good example of this is Nicholas Meyer's work on the Star Trek movies. When he joined the production of Star Trek II, he had never seen an episode of Star Trek before in his life. But after sitting down with the producer and watching several episodes, he gained an understanding of what make it tick, and had a great respect for it. I feel like that sort of contrasts with something like JJ Abrams' Star Wars (or his Star Trek for that matter), where I don't think he had a deep understanding and respect for the material as much as he was simply a fanboy. Of course that isn't to say that someone being a lifelong fan of something means they aren't capable of treating it with respect, just that someone being a fan doesn't automatically mean they see the material with the proper respect and understanding to make something great out of it. Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man films are a good example where a fan of the material was the right choice, because he had the proper respect and understanding of it beyond simply being a geek who loves Spider-Man comics. (it might also have something to do with Raimi being a good director and a good storyteller, while Abrams is not, lol) On the topic of MCU movies, the only one I particularly enjoyed since the original Iron Man is Doctor Strange, and I wouldn't call those grand achievements of cinema either. Haven't seen the Guardians films though. The fact that Raimi is directing Doctor Strange 2 gets me more interested in that than I've ever been in MCU movies before.
Ironically, this ties back to Ken Penders because he had no respect for the source material he was working with.
I dunno, he might've had a gross, twisted sense of respect. Like, I'll be real, the guy aside, the Penders era of Archie is unironically my favorite era by a landslide. I dunno what it is, but the obscene amounts of cheesiness, anime, and dozens of intertwined plot threads absolutely hooks me lmao. It may have just been Penders forcing his fanfictions or whatever onto the book, but it at least felt like it wanted to have it's own identity. I feel like Ian Flynn was better suited for Idw. When he started writing for archie and Tracy coined that signature "sonic comic look" that's even in idw now, I feel like everything got bland. Ian and tracy can make fantastic comics based on the sonic games... but that wasn't what the archie comics were trying to be. Heck, the comic even started opening issues with "a world different from what you know in the Sega games!". Now cause people are gonna start accusing me of defending all the disgusting things penders has done, I'll just say it now- I do not approve of Ken Penders's actions. He got archie sued for something they had nothing to do with (it's not their fault they kept writing with what they had lol), he stopped Sega from even finishing a game series they were creating (I think Sonic Chronicles would've gotten it's sequel with Ken out of the equation) and ultimately got the beloved comic hard rebooted (and cancelled too? Was that penders fault? Didn't Sega decide it wasn't worth it so they cancelled the book and then we got Idw?), not to mention his twitter shitshow. So no, while I don't approve of Ken, I can't deny his contributions to the comic were probably some of my favorites, and I honestly wish we could eventually get official media that's at least somewhat similar. ... This is probably the objectively worst post I've ever made here
Well that's subjective, isn't it? I think plenty of people would say it does. I mean, I don't think so, but that also isn't the point. The point is, if the person in charge of something is wrong for the job, then your solution is to replace them with someone better, not to say "only the original creator gets to make this thing ever again". Enforcing that would be more corporate influence, which in all likelihood is what lead to a safe, middle-of-the-road lead for the project in the first place. I've only seen like two Marvel movies, dude. My personal opinion on them is not what's on the agenda here. Moreover, I'm not only talking about business. Copyright in its entirety does little more than limit who is allowed to produce a certain type of thing. It's typically to serve some rich asshole is one piece of that, yes, but that's not the whole story. Logistically, the more people are allowed to produce a version of a thing, the more it will happen. Both good and bad art will be created, but that's a good thing! If media is bad, all you have to do is not consume it. It doesn't hurt the good things, and some people will probably like it anyway, so more of both is inherently a net positive. Take, I dunno, Robin Hood for example. There are a lot of bad adaptations of Robin Hood, but more get made anyway, because the original is still pretty nifty. If you said that version was the only one that got to exist, how would that improve things? You'd be denying a hundred furries the film that brought their sexual awakening, you'd sacrifice dear, sweet, precious Rob O', and for what? Nothing, far as I can tell. I guess some 16th century Frenchmen might look twice at one of Charlemagne's paladins being depicted as an energetic crossdressing femboy, but they're all dead now.
It isn't rocket surgery, fam. Ken Penders wrote his stories, and the stories were based HEAVILY on the work before it in SatAM and AoSTH. He didn't copy every detail but he is definitely smoking stronger than weed to be claiming as much ownership as he does. Also, how many years has the Mary-Su chronicles been in the works? At this point he is more a pundit and copyright troll than an artist.
Ken Penders has always struck me as the Sonic equivalent of an alien who comes down to Earth, pretending to understand and relate to lots of foreign Earth things, but it's still glaringly obvious he's an alien. For a while he got away with it, but now that we've asked him what Crystal Pepsi is the facade is wearing thin. Not that I didn't enjoy parts of the buck wild Knuckles AU that Kenders so kindly injected into Sonic the Hedgehog's arm via syringe. But it went in such a crazy direction that it's hard to tell if Penders has any of this "respect" for the source material that we've been talking about. He seems to have done a lot with the foundation he was given to work with, but it felt like he was just using the Sonic IP to realize this extended Lara-SU universe he was ultimately envisioning. He did his homework on Sonic lore and brought in some obscure references and characters, but you can kinda tell he never entirely understood what it was about.
But did he have respect for the source material he was ripping off? Was Star Wars The Echidna handled faithfully?
