THE KEN PENDERS CHRONICLES: court docs out, deluded people think it means anything

I was in a class when I saw the latest reveal and I had to try incredibly hard to keep my composure and not burst out laughing, holy shit this is too good. Much like his competitive gaming counterpart Billy Mitchell, Ken Penders truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

 

You are a hero.

 

Honestly, I think they’re just being kind. SEGA could probably sue him into oblivion the moment he makes anything available for purchase, and there would’ve been several opportunities to send him C&Ds up to now, but what’d be the point? He’s just a sad old man desperately trying to claw out some relevancy, years after he stopped having any meaningful impact on the franchise. Spouting rubbish and riling people like us is the only way to keep his name on anyone’s lips these days. SEGA or Archie suing doesn’t benefit them much, but would be disastrous for Penders. And, sure, while he has his fans still (lord knows how), we’re kind of responsible for keeping him relevant in the first place. He won’t change his tune when confronted with the truth because this is what he thrives on. It would be best if we all just never acknowledged him again, but I understand that’ll never happen and I don’t really blame anyone - dunking on Penders is fun as hell.

 

So if he's telling the courts that he never signed for anything, but has indicated that he did at one point, isn't that perjury since he's willfully telling the court and untruth and punishable with up to five years in prison?

 

ThanksKenPenders' post on Tumblr regarding this whole mess is also worth a read.

 

It doesn't matter, the Lara-Su fiasco is never going to be released, we all know this, Pender knows this, SEGA knows this.

Knuckles was microwaved for nothing.

 

Timing makes sense due to the Paramount situation. The details makes sense because the story as we know it is that Archie dropped the ball with filings and Penders won on a technicality/the judge was senile. Blaming Penders makes sense because it is fucking Penders.

 

It's weird. I was reading a tweet by CelestOrion on Twitter showing that the filings by Ken say explicitly that he doesn't own the characters, or at least a couple of them including Kragok. With certain works that seemed to have been filed with them included. Image in the replies showing this as the case, which it now just leads to a blank page.

https://twitter.com/CelestOrion/status/1518771885386960896?s=20&t=ry3R5fZonkRJNeKbSpSCBw

The filings were for his works. Which, when they are turned down is usually due to it having to be unique and non-derivitive as necessary qualifications. Which would mean being so derivative would fail that test. So I can't help but think maybe Archie and Sega do actually own all of the characters (which would explain the Fulop case going to Archie having learned at least some lesson) and all Ken maybe has was his specific stories which threw a wrench into reprints anyways and either/both Archie & Sega said screw it and jettisoned anything to do with him as too much of a headache.

I'm definitely on the side of thinking there's a snowball's chance in hell that anything will ever be published, but kinda thinking I agree this is all Archie's goof for not responding to whatever copyright paperwork they received hamstringing everyone.

 

Oh yea at the end of the day this is still Archie's fault. Penders won on like technicalities and Archie's carelessness, which is probably why after all the dealings with Penders Sega decided to pull the plug on the Archie relationship. Too much hassle for not enough reward.

And that's also why now Sega looks at the IDW comics like a hawk. I'll admit I did like later Archie's unique take on old elements mixes with new, but there were some bizarre stories and elements in that comic. Remember when they had Sonic go to school for a bit? Monkey Kahn and the tech wizard woman married to like a roided up bull, Station Square existed in a mountain dome or something, all those aliens that seemed to only exist when Archie needed a quick exit from a plot they didn't know how to continue (like the Metal Robotnik/Snively thing and at one point Robotnik had like a robotic midus touch that was bizarre).

Oh yea and for some reason early on Shadow was drawn with blonde chest fur instead of white... never understood that choice

 

I don't think Sega did pull the plug. From a lot of things I'd found from around that time, between the Penders suit, another lawsuit on the Archie side which I think ran along side it, the Fulup lawsuit, and then how World's Unite crossover loosing them a lot of money had all actually left them in a serious amount of debt. So they had trouble renegotiating contracts when they came due, with Mega Man going first. After that Sonic was probably just on life support since I heard Sega also wanted to up the licensing fees. Don't think I had a source for that one. I'm trying to find it but there were a couple of insiders bickering over on the Archie side of the business about the money issues and it seemed kinda bleak if I remember right. I think around then they owed around a million to their printers. So no wonder with Riverdale and a comic reboot they went all in on just their own IPs.

 

In my ideal timeline, Archie still would've done the reboot but not gotten canceled afterward. And maybe the IDW characters could've been introduced after they glued the planet back together.

And Ken Penders turns his life around so the signed comic I got as a gift several years ago isn't just something to laugh about.

 

Im sad that Mega Man comic got canned I really enjoyed what they did with that, and I loved Worlds Collide. Worlds Unite was a bit too crazy and all over the place though (and it's distribution model was fucked, 12 issues across 4 different comic series? What?)

 

Penders may be remembered as a creator who, while not having incredibly original ideas, created quite an intriguing lore for the world of Archie Sonic.

Instead, everyone thinks he's a greedy freak with an overgrown ego, and it's the right way of thinking.


I've always wondered why Penders hated Ian so much, and I think I guess I finally figured it out.

Ian is everything that Penders is not. Quite a modest guy who writes pretty cool stories. He is reserved in many respects, what he may willingly share, but most of all - he loves the characters he writes and does not see them only as money or any other ticket to fulfill his fantasies. What's more, he is becoming more and more successful - working on games and writing scripts for animated episodes of Sonic Boom.

No wonder Penders can't tolerate him.

 

It's probably made worse by the fact that Ian was a regular poster on Ken's forums when Ian was still doing fan projects, as was WB back then. They chatted even back then. Then they started making the jump to the professional level at Archie and bothered to use his characters since they were fans first and foremost. Ken's entire continuity war internally with Bollers kind of goes to show just how bad Ken felt ownership to his work and how little he cared about anyone elses. Then Locke was killed off. That probably touched a sore spot. That on top of what you're saying with being essentially Ken's quintessential upgrade.

 

Thats true.
The funny thing is... the comic book industry is all about the fact that new people come to famous series and heroes and throw in new, interesting ideas.
For example - when Dan Slott was writing Spider-Man for over 10 years, people after a while got fed up with his writing. Then Nick Spencer came to the book, and rewrote a lot of things, that Slott introduced. That's just the way it is in comic books.

Penders, for such a big perfectionist who knows what and how in the industry, behaves at least bizarrely - insisting that only what he created is canonical... and in a licensed comic book, no less.

Zero professionalism.

 

Zero professionalism, but strange considering while showing pride in having worked on other licensed works shows none of the same possessive attitude over. Even worse considering he tried to use Archie as a springboard for his own Lost Ones story in Sonic Super Special 7. Apparently it was supposed to be Sonic going to the world of the Red Circle (or Dark Circle at the time) heroes, which Ken used his talks with Image for The Lost Ones and his ties to the Sonic story to finagle it the way it was. That being said, the fact Penders was friends with so many of the Archie staff behind the scenes before and during his tenure seemed to shield him from anything. It explains why he chaffed when oversight was being reestablished over the property when he decided he wouldn't put up with it. I remember Karl Bollers even posting on Pender's forum in response to something trying to set the record strait when they were still co-writing, leading to the post being deleted by BobR and starting some flame wars against whatever had been going on behind the scenes. Ken seems to always just bring trouble.

 

Are Karl Bollers posts archived anywhere? I would love to read them.

 

I'm not sure if this was what LMaster was talking about, nor do I know if these forum posts were saved anywhere, but the topic of drama was reputedly about The Slap & Sonic/Sally in Mobius: 25 Years Later. The fact that this got Bollers banned from Ken's personal forum is honestly hysterical - it's so petty and yet so funny.

 

There's also the fact that while Ian is a fan of Ken's stuff in careful moderation, he is first and foremost a SONIC fan. Like I'm not the greatest fan of Ian's writing in mainstream Archie in particular, and I see similar moments of pretentiousness as Ken (though Ian does have actual modesty to admit to some genuine bad ones like braindamaged Charmy, I don't know how much hassle Ken could have saved himself if he had done the same for stuff like Geoffery/Sally rather than trying to justify himself), really though, Ian builds so much of his writing around the Sonic franchise, it says something that the one time he was doing it the least was when he was working off of everything leftover from Ken's run.

For all of Ken's protectiveness of his tenure on Sonic, he really doesn't come off as a Sonic fan. I think he even admited he was apathetic about the games franchise and even thought Sonic himself was a bland character, just a means to build his own world around. Heck he tried to kill off Robotnik and Sally, characters not even made by the comics, because he felt they had outlived their purpose. So little of Ken's writing and lore building is developed around the actual Sonic series (something you could argue even works like SatAm are in a unique way) it is just a blank core for him to transform and make his own stuff on. I feel like the only reason he even cares about what the Sonic franchise does now is because how far he got in doing that.

Ian was pretty pragmatic with all that was leftover from Ken's writing since they had to get back to SOME essence of Sonic again. This meant negating or killing off a lot of characters and plot points he made, which likely only angered Ken further since from his perspective his legacy is more important to maintain than Sonic's himself. Sure it must hurt to have all that writing down the toilet, but really, very little of it was for IAN'S creative liberties, it was for SONIC'S. This wasn't some arrogant newcomer trashing all his predessors' work because 'my new stuff is better', this was just trying to get back to the core identity said predessor tried to ditch.