CleverSonicUsername

Finished Encore, didn't care for it. If you love Sonic Mania a whole hell of a lot, then five bucks isn't asking for much. I mostly came out the other end feeling deflated, but at that price point, I don't feel burned or anything.

You could not pay me to put that on my body.

In Flying Battery Act 2's boss in Encore mode, getting killed with a character suddenly unloaded the boss and all assets from the arena, hung for a few seconds, then killed my backup character off screen before sending everyone back to the last checkpoint. I'm not sure if this happens in *just* encore mode, but that's where I encountered it.

See weirdly enough I got the opposite vibe, since "hero overlooking a beautiful vista, destruction, or other awe inspiring scene with their back turned to the viewer" is so overdone that the BoW cover just came off as derivative.

I mean that's pretty much what I'm getting at. He can't directly say it's Sonic or Knuckles and using descriptors like "blue hedgehog" would be far too specific, so he thinks he's being more clever than he is by skirting around that in an attempt to appropriate those characters.

I just really like how he can't even seem to use stuff like "echidna" or "blue hedgehog" as descriptors because they're probably a bit too specific.

Look, I'm not much of a writer myself, but everything about this reads like someone is having a stroke.

My favorite party of the Geoffrey and Hersey romance was when Hersey died off screen and was never heard from again.

I think, as pointed out earlier, it's that this might be from before or around the legal battle, and Penders may have been drawing things closer to what would be on-model for Archie. That's just a guess though. Plenty of Sonic characters don't wear clothes and it's not really questioned since they're obviously harmless mascot characters, but the more you try to warp them into human proportions the more it just looks like you drew someone with mumps naked.

Microtransactions in my Sonic game? What will they think of next, DRM? Oh...

Observations: Line art, while rough, looks less mangled than what we've come to expect. That said, Penders almost always destroys what good line art he has when coloring. More live photography with cartoons, and I cannot imagine it being any less discordant when colored. Beaches are also not that hard to draw so this just comes off as especially lazy. As you mentioned, no mirroring of the same walking sketch. You *could* argue that this is just a thumbnail and a general outline of where Penders wants to go with the page, so he's overlayed the same image to cut time, and will later refine it and put in new art for the final two panels. I would then argue that this is Ken Penders, a bum. On the same subject, in my own work I've had panels that follow the same sort of style. Static background, same framing, but the character's action is different. It's not hard to composite an image like this, and it saves so much time when you just have to do a background and two different pieces of character art. Every second I catch up in this thread I pray for death and it never comes. Yep. If a huge swath of your cast is related it would be better to not include it in a sheet like this and make a separate document summarizing the family tree. The said, considering how expansive her family seems to be, I seriously question how relevant some of them are actually going to be. I would almost make that some sort of ongoing document where you fill it in as characters are introduced, because if you have like five to ten dudes who don't matter to the story or don't even show up then whoooooo cares.