Penders admitted that he only "cared" about Sonic as a series his son was a fan of. Beyond that, he had little appreciation for it. Of course, the tweet where he admitted that was one in which he was painting himself in a positive light by claiming that he was one of the very few members of the creative team who "cared" about the series during the comic's early years. The only other was Spaz, who was actually a Sonic fan.
Maybe, but whatever he claimed in the past makes no difference. He has no proof he ever signed a work for hire contract.
Really I think this is the only reason the Lara Su project even BORDERS on legal despite seemingly just being a migration of his work on Archie, since really Penders barely hinged ANYTHING meaningful he made around the actual Sonic franchise. I feel like if he had got his hands on a different franchise he likely would have just tried to make the exact same thing. If he hadn't been so clingy about Sonic being the 'blank canvas' for his ideas and his call to fame, he likely could have just worked on a new project with original characters straight after he left Archie and saved himself a lot of controversy.
Shows in his work too. I can't even pretend like his covers weren't most of what sold me on the comic back then.
Is he doing something Sonic related at the moment? Last I remember, he did covers for Archie, and a colouring book?
Spaz did that and interior art for the Penguin Young Readers Sonic books a couple of years ago. Which I think children's books were what he'd been doing art for in general the last few years. For Simon and Schuster's children's book wing that I'm not too familiar with.
I loved Spaz's art. Anything he drew was magic, even if the story was shit. I remember trying to emulate his style as a kid but failing miserably lol.
IKR? Long before I started reading the comics I used to look at their covers on the internet and they looked so amazing and epic, haha. Needless to say, when I got around to reading them they didn't remotely live up to the covers. I guess Spaz was just too good for the series
Hey now. He wasn't perfect either. Too good for the series, definitely. Spaz was luckily always an amazing Sega fan, with so many cameos in his work dating back to his early run being a treat. Bean and Bark as far back as flashbacks in Endgame I think. But his first few issues were much cruder than his later work as you can see his art evolve. Still leaps and bounds ahead of his contemporaries, and seeing Penders draw over that seems like sacrilege. Him doing interiors was great. Mecha Madness was kind of the highpoint of the early run kind of tapering off around endgame. Maybe some of his work around the Adventure adaptation would be slightly better before some issues I'll bring up. The interiors early on never lived up to the covers, especially for consistency and detail. Art Mawhinney is very good and consistent, and kind of worked with the SatAM/AoStH style early on considering he did work as a storyboarder at one point. But after the Adventure change when he came back just always seemed off trying to do the same. I think the Adventure era to whenever Ian took over had Steve Butler primarily as the main artist and James Fry, which despite any complaints about their art styles, I still believe holds up as one of the better earlier art periods since I think they handled the Yuji Uekawa era Adventure conversion pretty well. For Spaz though, I think he may have overdone it. He started going for a more lanky anime design which he pulled off amazingly none the less, and the unrealized manga style spinoff even looked great. But from very simplified covers Archie started going with to the quills being as long as Sonic, Spaz kinda went full ham for a while to his own detriment. And Ron Lim tried to copy it and it made Lim's art worse. Ugh. Weirdest backfires in Archie. When he started doing the archive and select covers and started following the more classic designs again he was back to gold, and I wish he had time to do all of Genesis himself. It was a great return to form for the series, even if just a nostalgia driven anniversary tie-in. The fact the series started picking up such great artists over its run is all just still astounding as only a couple could really compete in detail. I think J.Axer was possibly the only one who may have had Spaz beat, but when Spaz doesn't hold back and gets time to finish things he's quite possibly the best artist from any Sonic run. StC probably had better and more consistent coloration though. The cheap photoshop gradients and how thin some of the linework had ended up at times was also a big detraction from Archie at various points too. At least Harvo (think it was Harvo) did great collab work for colors on Spaz's covers though.
Spaz was also a big reason why the Sonic Adventure adaptation was decent, considering he had to get the Japanese version of the game, beat it and then inform the writers of the basic structure of the story.
For what it's worth I thought it was cool. One of the few Archie arcs I liked more than one in STC which I felt started strong but deflated as it went on. Just thought it was neat they were able to integrate their continuity with the game without sacrificing much. It's no wonder the arc (anecdotal) gets credited with making people jump on board with the comic before the reboot.
Resurrecting this thread because Ken Penders now has a website! It could look worse, honestly. Maybe I'm just getting desensitized to his art, though. Nothing too interesting of note up at the moment, but I did notice that he's using somebody's work on his fanart section's thumbnail - I tracked down the original owner and told her that he was using her art, but he may have already gotten permission (or maybe she just straight up won't care).
As good as Spaz was, I'll say I don't think he ever figured out drawing the modern cast. Something always looked... off. Classic stuff is almost perfection though, they picked the right issue cover to have him draw for IDW (maybe they thought this too)
I think this is the case. I'm cracking up scrolling through this monstrosity. This may be true since I barely got any issues since the Adventure redesign.
As a side note, I can't stand websites that try to be slideshows like that. They're annoying to navigate through and more often than not don't have much to say in each "section".
