THE KEN PENDERS CHRONICLES: Geoffrey cucked Sonic t. Penders, 2019

I love how the art of it looks like Special Sonic from the Sonic 3D proto lmao, eyes pointed in different directions and everything.

 

He probably has it framed because the kids from "Sonic Live!" are his family. Don't know if kids are his or nephew/niece though.

 

I'm pretty sure the only comics I've ever seen him admit he made are bad are the final 3 Knuckles issues. Probably because he assumed his series was just pristine and perfect until one misstep made the EEEVIL ARCHIE OVERLORDS kill it and ruin everyone's "fun".

 

Wait... that expression on that Scarlet Johansson Black Widow pic... I'm seeing a resemblance with his ugly Lara-Su chimera thing. Is that what he has been using for his reference?

 

My original intention was to space these out. Even though he tweeted something right after my last post that I wanted to bring to the attention of this thread immediately. But I was strong... until I discovered something that just could not wait! What is it? Read on to find out!

This time, as an experiment to see if it improves readability, Mr. Penders' quotes will be in quote-blocks, and my own comments will be regular text.

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12/03/2019 (Twitter)

This is what made me so excited at first. Man, all the wonderful things that kids have to play with now, if only I'd had them when I was young! Shame I'm too old to use them now, because I clearly haven't. Seriously, what's his excuse?


12/05/2019 (Twitter)

I like it, but maybe suboptimal use of your time is why you can't use all the wonderful tools that might enable anyone to become a full-time director instead of your age, as you implied?


12/05/2019 (Twitter)

The date listed above is not a mistake, he had a second tweet on the same day about another piece of non-LSC artwork, and I don't think this is related to THE REPUBLIC either. Even better, this small-enough looking drawing will have updates (notice the plural) so people can see it evolve (a word that certainly invokes a lengthy process) so one might only assume it will continue to be a time sink well into the future. It doesn't look that great now, but his Star Trek stuff has looked good in the past, so you know what? I think it will be good when it is done. But, again, how is this helping his real projects? Shame about your extreme age making it too hard for you to compete in the young man's game of self-published media!


12/07/2019 (Twitter)

Well, it's looking good and he is working on it, but two days into a piece that's on a "smaller scale" than what he's used to and he's still not done? No wonder the LSC is taking forever.


12/07/2019 (Twitter)

Presented without further comment.


12/09/2019

This was a nice thing for Ken to do.


12/14/2019 (Twitter)

Here it is folks, the reason why I couldn't wait to make this post any longer, since Christmas of course is right around the corner! My space covers Mr. Penders with an objective eye which is why when he draws something to make his grandchild happy it goes here, and when he says that Sonic Live! is the greatest comic of all time, that goes here too. So if you want Penders-brand merchandise for your loved ones you can get it on eBay or by emailing the man at [email protected].


12/15/2019 (Twitter)

Presented without further comment except to say that if you want some top-notch sycophancy and a further elucidation of Ken's version of historical events then go check out the comments to these and other tweets of his.


12/15/2019 (Twitter)

He goes on to say that going beyond SatAM is "what saved the book," so yes everybody Ken saved Sonic. But that's no surprise from the man whose merchandise has also saved Christmas! Shame he can't save himself, but, you know, too old.

 

Man, he's really confusing 'respect the source material' with 'OBEY ONLY THE SOURCE MATERIAL', which is plain wrong.
No-one was asking for literal comic adaptations of the games, but I people wanted to at least feel that whoever was writing today's Knothole soap opera at least had a rough idea of how to plug in a game system.

Also, I know it's an unfair comparison since the 90's were very different from now, but IDW pulled off exactly what Penders is saying wouldn't work. Honestly, I do wonder what a hypothetical 90's Flynn style writer who was a bit more in touch with SEGA could have created back in the day.
His Archie work that encompassed a lot of the old material (AoStH/Game Gear titles) would have been a dream come true for me to read as a kid!

 

Yes! I was going to bring that up as an example. The StC Sonic & Knuckles adaptation is a great example of how to do it.

Actually, StC in general did a pretty decent job of sticking to the game world when it wanted to, despite Nigel Kitching confessing he too wasn't much into playing the games. The difference though was that Nigel never thought that the games were out to try and undermine his masterpiece world of OC's

 

So I’m still new to Sonic Retro and didn’t really follow the comics much. I just wanted to ask: how on earth was Ken Penders able to successfully argue he owned characters he created at Archie? He most definitely had to sign a contract with Archie when he got hired so I find it hard to believe Archie/Sega didn’t own the characters he created.

 

Penders strikes me as the old guy who is out of touch with young audiences yet is convinced he knows exactly what they want. When I was a kid/young teen, my interest didn't lie on love triangles, bad soap operas, faux-mature dialogue or pretentious symbolism.

In fact, the games had pretty much everything I thought of as cool back then, particularly the shonen elements. Kickass transformations! (Super Sonic) Badass rivals! (Knuckles, Metal Sonic) Killer mechs! (the final bosses in S2 and S3K) As a kid, I was puzzled as to why the Sonic cartoons were so lame by comparison, and would totally have loved an adaptation that was actually based on the games (I didn't read Sonic the Comic until much later).

 

The funny thing about that is that basically every single game had some sort of adaptation up until SA2.

Archie couldn't produce any papers saying that he didn't own the characters.

It seems Penders didn't sign anything.

 

You are pretty much right. The issue is that Archie didn't seem to keep a copy of that contract, and couldn't find anything when Ken started kicking up a fuss. I guess at the time they didn't expect anything like this would happen, or maybe they just thought it was too much common sense that Ken's Sonic OC's would stay, y'know... Sonic OC's.
Still, they couldn't produce the legal documents when the time came. So it was enough of an oversight for Ken and his lawyers to be able to grasp his characters away from SEGA's ownership.

It's also one of those things where I get the impression that Sega and Archie just got tired of the whole legal ordeal, and although at the end of the long, long road, they could have won and got all of Ken's OC's under their control, the time, money, effort and reward for playing such a tiring game just wasn't worth it. Much easier for SEGA to just settle that shit, give him what he wants and hit the reset button making sure to not repeat such a shitshow.

At least that's my understanding of it all. I might be wrong.

It still seems odd that to this day we've never had TRUE comic versions of the game stories. We've had plenty of adaptations WITHIN other continuities (StC, Archie, Sonic X, etc), but never a solid in-game-universe version of the story.

A comic version of the Sonic 3 & Knuckles story that takes the story from the Manual, adapts the Angel Island bombing, going all the way to Knuckles' solo adventure against Eggrobo? GIVE ME THAT.
A Sonic Adventure comic that actually combines all the story paths in the proper order? THAT'S COULD BE THE GOOD STUFF.
Purely hypothetical stuff, but I feel like there's room for it somewhere.

Oshit, I just realised that quote makes it sound like I'm saying "nobody wants this" when I was trying to mean "No-one was going to kick up a stink if Penders didn't accurately adapt every Zone and Cutscene".
I'm definitely all for accurate adaptations personally

 

I'm now imagining an alternate history wherein Archie was cognizant of Sonic Eraser and thus came up with Evil Doppelganger Sonic for its adaptation, thereby securing the rights to Scourge.

I could be thinking of literally anything else and it'd be more productive.

 

This was how it was when I was growing up too. Particularly the aesthetics of S3&K - Lava Reef, Sky Sanctuary, and especially Hidden Palace were influential in my doodles and roleplaying when I was very small. I've always found the American cartoons to be extremely ugly by comparison - greys and industrial (granted, intentional but there's more you can do with that), and I've always hated Sally's tiny body and huge head while the actual characters were better proportioned.

 

I know what you mean. The games have always had pretty inspired and interesting environments, not to mention that their colorful, surreal look gives them a unique charm. By contrast, AoStH had ugly abstract backgrounds that looked like they were riffing Ren & Stimpy. SatAM went to the opposite extreme, having more realistic and cookie-cutter environments, with most of the action taking place in either a generic forest, or the perpetually dark Robotropolis. The second season had Sonic visit other parts of the planet, but they all had this dark and sterile look that I found pretty repetitive and off-putting. Ironically, the pilot seemed to have a lighter tone and a more colorful palette, which made it far more charming and appealing than the rest of the show for me, at least in terms of visuals.

I never understood why DiC didn't just use the game environments, like they did with the Mario cartoons. Well, technically AoStH had some game locations make appearances, but they were always unrecognizable (Marble Zone was a mine, WTF). The sole exception was the unaired pilot (notice a trend?), which showed a few game areas that actually looked like themselves, and it looked much prettier as a result.

 

I keep walking the line of "Man I feel bad for Penders" to "What the fuck, you absolute spiteful asshole?!"

"I feel bad" when thinking about how everyone acts like his own work doesn't have any right existing; "What the fuck" when he throws out shit like that tweet about his "classic" issue Sonic Live (which I hear nothing but bad things about, even from those that aren't biased) and the one where he directly acts like the movie should be using HIS stories (because it's clear he thinks they're the ones that aren't devoted to or don't respect the franchise, him, the guy that only got involved in the franchise because his kids, not him, played the games.)

 

Actually, I'm gonna have to correct that notion;
1) The Super Show cartoon hardly ever actually shows the Mushroom Kingdom (Unless you count that one cliff at the intro as such?) because the characters are always traveling from distant location to distant location, usually said location being a movie parody setting that's either jarring or impossible to reconcile or coexist with the "Mushroom Kingdom" setting, or to the continuity of the show itself. The most consistent setting for a non-parody setting is a place called "Pasta Land", a world where trees are made from forks holding spaghetti noodles as leaves. Also, in spite of characters like Birdo, Mouser and Fryguy being either regulars or notable appearances, Subcon never appears or is referenced.
2) SMB3 is when "The Mushroom Kingdom" actually has some showing, and looks like it'd kinda match what we'd expect to see of it at the time (It even has floating blocks with powerups, which Super Show notably lacked), but remember that this is the game that introduced 7 of the OTHER kingdoms in the mushroom world. Although there are a few episodes where Koopa goes after other kingdoms, the specific ones, with their specific bearded kings, are never seen or referenced (outside the title cards showing their 8-bit forms) and instead areas with some of their level elements are simply put in the Mushroom Kingdom instead, and Koopa is more prone to going straight to the kingdom or into the "real world" for hijinks. Also, as this is in-continuity to Super Show, it could be argued that it took DiC over 52 episodes to actually show an interpretation of the Mushroom Kingdom. Compare with the AoStH pilot which had settings from the games in it right off the bat that did not transfer into the actual show, named settings after zones, had the Special Stage appear once, and had a loose adaptation of the Chaos Emeralds, all before it's episode 52.
3) "Dinosaur Land" in the Super Mario World cartoon is probably the closest they get to adapting a setting; it has some semblances to Yoshi's Island in the games, but a lot of it is either not shown or glossed over because the show would rather you pay attention to the dumb cavemen (to the point where it feels less like a tropical island vacation and more like a trip to Bedrock in The Flintstones). Of particular note is how there's only one "Yoshi" as opposed to being the dominant species on the island, which in retrospect is a pretty critical difference.

It's probably easy to gloss over these differences, though, because these cartoons still resembled the games more than Sonic's did for years.[/QUOTE]

 

I wonder what Ken Penders would do if he stumbled on Sonic Retro and saw this thread. Lmao.

 

Sue us for slander because we don't consider his Knuckles bible canon.

Sorry Ken, Knuckles wasn't killed for our sins and didn't rise again (despite Archie Sonic's... whatever that was).

Knuckles is a red echidna who guards the master emerald sometimes. That's all lol