Archie Sonic Comic Megathread

This thing was amazing. Now I understand how fragged up in the head Finitevus truly is.

 

Elliot S! Maggin and Scott Shaw! are going to be witnesses on Ken Penders' side of things? Well that's...something. Look, I'm all for Ken getting royalties for reprints of his work. That should have been something set up in the first place. It's just...everything else that bothers me. Ken, look. I know you're not reading this even though I'm addressing you, but...just let the Sonic comic go. You wrote for it for over a decade, yes. You grew an attachment to the characters, fine. We all have an attachment to the Sonic characters in some form or another, else we wouldn't be on this message board. But you were writing glorified fanfiction. Fanfiction you got paid for. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Eggman, Sally, Bunnie, Rotor, Antoine...those were never your characters. I don't care how many more you "came up with," but they really only mattered because they were in a Sonic the Hedgehog comic book. No one would have cared about "The Brotherhood" if you didn't have Knuckles and Angel Island and the Master Emerald hiding out in the back. People read that stuff for Knuckles, not for his father/grandfather/great-grandfather/great-great-grandfather.

I'm not sure what he's referring to with the whole Hershey thing (unless its simply a case of "she's not on screen because of a special assignment oh look Geoffry St. John is being a dick and she's his wife oh well" kind of thing) but all those characters he may or may not have come up with were just supporting characters in a comic about a blue hedgehog. What kind of a market would Ken even have for a comic that featured all of these characters but none of the principle ones? And this hatred for Ian Flynn that just seems to ooze out of everywhere...Ken, you had that job for years. Archie fired you, not Ian. I know you will claim to not hold any particular grudges against Ian, but to go out of your way and say that if you were to get back the comic, you'd simply ignore everything he had done? That's just silly. You've worked with the big guns before, Ken. Look at Superman. Look at Spider-Man. They've had thousands of issues dedicated to them, written by a multitude of creators. They didn't own these characters, and they were lucky if anything they came up with were to stick around for more than their particular run. How many stories have been retconed, rewritten, or outright ignored?

The fact that Ian took everything you did and kept it is phenomenal. He could have stepped in and changed a lot more than he did. But he didn't. For some reason, he decided to respect your entire body of work. Even though a lot of it, especially at the end, was incredibly poor, he decided to work around it. Build up from it. Make things progress in a couple issues that would have taken you over two years. See, that's the problem. Ken, you were too wrapped up in the Soap Opera aspects of the characters. You were writing about a video game character, which is primarily focused on action. You control the character. You make it do things. You don't sit there and read what is going on in his mind about his love life for thirty minutes. We want to see Sonic running around, fighting Eggman, maybe save someone and then act like a bit of a dick. That's who he is. Sure, you have more layers to it. But if you add too much, or stretch it out, or dedicate multiple issues to Sonic the Hedgehog being in school or dealing with Station Square politics or decide you want the 200th issue of a comic book to be about Antoine and Bunnie getting married after showing their engagement for the previous 25 issues...yeah. Glad that didn't happen, Ken.

You should only be fighting on getting royalties, Ken. Not for the characters themselves. You barely understood the principle cast in the early days...and you certainly didn't get them later on. I know you wanted to make "season 3" and in a sense you did. But after issue 50...your heard didn't seem in it anymore? Like you blew your load and then didn't know how to clean up your mess. At least with all the hatred that Endgame generated, people could tell you were putting your all into it. Not so much later on. Focus on your other ideas, or try and come up with something new. I know, not exactly an easy thing. Maybe you and Scott Shaw! can do something! I'm sure he'd keep you grounded. Maybe add a bit of levity to a situation.