THE KEN PENDERS CHRONICLES: PendersCON Alert level 5- something actually made it to sale

Spoiler

Remember everyone, this is just a taste of the action! Soon™, very Soon™, we will see what all the headaches and loss of characters in Archie was truly for! Aren't you excited?

 

- Art is subjective
- Art is in the eye of the beholder
- Art for art's sake
These are all phrases I understand and can get behind.
I've just never seen them so thoroughly misrepresented before.

 

Never have I dropped what I was doing so fast to order something online

 

This man is more than just a jerk. He's also a little perverted.

Also, auto-correct just changed "jerk" to "hero". Is my phone secretly an admirer?

 

Looks like he hasn't let go of the whole Geoffery and Sally thing. In fact, apparently Sally was one in his line of "conquests" and using the situation to mess with Sonic. Yikes.

 

I have to wonder if Sega would take action against this. I assume Penders spent a good while figuring out what he can legally get away with, but Sega might think differently.

Anyway that picture of the echidna breastfeeding is fucking foul and proof that giving humans eyes to see was a mistake

 

Looks like kino is back on the menu boys

 

What a freak this man is. I don’t think SEGA will take action though, which I think is the right course of action. Let this book cement Penders’ legacy for what it truly is before he fades further into obscurity and eventually is forgotten. A lawsuit is probably what he actually wants for some publicity.

 

Now the new generation can finally understand why a lot of us don’t like this guy.

 

(The fact there's a full on breastfeeding panel means this is almost one step away from being a porn comic and I don't know if I like Penders anymore)

 

SEGA is legally spineless when it comes to Sonic. They haven't even bothered to try to take care of stuff that's actively polluting the brand like Sonic.exe, so I doubt they'd take care of any actual infiringment if it happened. but he also seems to be working around everything well enough to where there's very little ground to stand on. We'll have to wait until he solidifies his misunderstanding of Sonic Chronicles before we can really look out for actual potential rights disputes.


Also like... I don't know how to say this, don't make this weirder than it has to be. Be critical of the choice to do the scenes at all if you want but don't throw around charged words that can be taken as accusations around non-sexually depicted "nude" scenes. That's just not what it is.

 

I have no idea what sin I committed to deserve this, but I promise I'll never do it again, please, just take these Echidnas away from me

 

The echidna butt shots left me laughing like an 8-year-old.

 

So... I am not an artist.. nor am I a qualified art critic...

But here is why I believe this is traced from porn...

Wouldn't someone who is breastfeeding... be looking at he baby? And not off to the side like that?

 

Possibly veering a little off-topic, but anecdotally, a friend of mine told me his 6-year-old nephew is obsessed with Sonic. He asked him if he knew who Big the Cat was and he said no, but that he loved Sonic.exe.

tbh, Sega probably doesn't mind shit like that "polluting the brand" because it's essentially free advertising. Likewise I can't imagine they'll care at all about what Penders is up to because the amount of people who even know about The Lara-Su Chronicles are at best a drop in a very, very large bucket compared to how much publicity and attention are given to new Sonic games, movies, TV shows etc. You could probably fit the number of people who'd be so put off by Penders' work that they refuse to buy any Sonic product from now on into a broom closet.

 

As someone who barely does art but is an experienced pornographic comic critic, I can say I don't think there's any conclusive evidence one way or the other.

I know we're all laughing at him, but I don't have reason to think it's taken from any porn, and we've seen enough weird anatomy and posing from this guy that there's no reason to assume he even traced this specific thing. When Ken traces, it's usually "Page 1 of Google"-levels of easy to identify.

I know exactly what he thinks about this. He believes he's pushing boundaries and that "it's very progressive and feminist, actually" to show a woman breastfeeding in what he thinks is a non-sexual, non-objectified way. He'd take the time to meticulously construct this drawing in a "tasteful" manner.

He's wrong, of course. He's absolutely incapable of not writing creepy fetish shit into his stories, his art would be catering to the male gaze all the damn time if it were actually pleasant to look at, and his feminism extends about as far as "I am a feminist, therefore everything I create is a paragon of progressive virtue".

Anyway I had no idea this would come out and be this immediately fucking embarrassing. I thought we were getting some lore summaries or character recaps, but no he's just mask-off terrible right out the gate.

 

My theory is much more complex than a simple one-post response segue has time to explain, but a basic version is that I don't think a fan of one converts into the other, but I think algorithmically on things like YouTube Sonic.exe competes in the same space and that Real Sonic will probably never be able to "covert" someone because it's just such a fundementally different thing. You could say "great, then it just appeals to different people" but I also don't think it's as simple as that. Maybe something for its own thread at some point.

 

To be honest, I do not think that this was intended to look like fetish art. It's a common trope in children's media for the bad guys to claim that they're about to use brutal torture methods, only for said torture to be something completely harmless, usually tickling. Hell, Snively does this to Antoine in SatAM by cooking escargot with margarine.

But yeah, it's really funny how Penders considers himself a feminist despite his writing clearly proving otherwise. Can anyone here name a single Penders-written Sally story that does not revolve around which man she should marry in at least some capacity? Hell, even Geoffrey's character bio in this thing treats Sally like her primary purpose was to be fought over by him and Sonic.

Moreover, is Penders too blind to see that all of his most vocal supporters on the internet (I won't drop names but y'all should know who I'm talking about) have less than favorable views on women? Or is he simply too blind to see what it has to do with his writing? Or is he simply so desperate for attention that he doesn't care who's supporting him, as long as someone is?

Actually, it almost certainly is that last option.

 

Do you wanna know what's arguably the most egregious part of all this?

Imagine the comic didn't have.... all that...

The $34 + shipping Lara-Su Chronicles, isn't actually entirely that.

Literally one half of this book is a reprint of an old archie Sonic comic strip!

So after 10 years, this grifter has only released a book with 50% new material in it! Of which, almost all the backgrounds are photographs and more people are claiming several panels are traced.