horridus

Hmm... on the one hand, anything from an Anon isn't something that should be taken at face value. On the other hand, given everything else I've ever seen of Penders and his behavior... this does sound like him and correlates with a lot of his behavior. Assuming this is factual, then I extend my sympathies to the commissioner for going through all that.

You know what the 'best' part of it is? None of it is done for the benefit of the Freedom Fighters themselves. Penders clings to them because they were a part of the time when he was at his most successful and because he's all too aware that there's a segment of the fanbase that'll always sing his praises if he panders to them. It's not about what's good for the Freedom Fighters or for Sonic or the book in general- it's about what's good for HIM and him alone. It's why he tried to prolong the status quo of his choice in the Archie book for so long and when taking over after Bollers left did everything in his power to reverse the changes he didn't care for, regardless of how little sense any of it made. Penders couldn't care less about the Freedom Fighters as characters. He tried to permanently kill off Sally, succeeded in permanently killing off Robotnik, opined about desiring to kill off Antoine due to his inability to think of anything to do with, and on and on it goes. It's all just a cynical, self-serving ploy born of him thinking he can coast on the 90s forever.

As TKP notes, this isn't even the first time Penders has pulled something like this- remember that Comic-Con commission of Shadow that was copied from the Sonic Chronicles game art? It's not tracing, but it IS copying. Copying pre-existing art and then selling it as a commission, at that. It is at once hilarious, pathetic and incredibly scummy. This guy touts his professionalism and his credentials as a pro and yet he's reduced to doing THIS. Like, holy lord, what more can you say?

I think its less a matter of him genuinely not realizing IDW is a different continuity, so much as it is that he legitimately thinks that his half-assed attempts to bridge the continuities are all that it would take to incorporate stuff like the Freedom Fighters despite the fact it wouldn't make a lick of sense. Back when the Sonic film first came out, Penders speculated about how his asinine Dark Legion could fit the film series- While this isn't a direct attempt to bridge (his work on) Archie with the world as presented by the Movie, it does go a long way to illustrate his mentality to making disparate elements fit together. The High Tech Dark Legion would OBVIOUSLY not trust their new recruits with the technology that defines them, and would eagerly send their new recruits armed with arrows, spears and nets to try and capture a super powered child who is essential to whatever nebulous evil plans they have. It's kinda like how he reconciled the lore he devised for Knuckles with what Sonic Adventure presented... by having the Knuckles Tribe from which Knuckles gets his name into being DESCENDED from the high tech civilization of Albion that he had created and being a colony of theirs that stuck behind to continue fighting the native Felidae. Who, within a few generations, descended into being not that different from the Felidae. Yeah, both times he pretty much puts his stuff 'above' the materials from the other medium. Nothing new and its an aside, but still. Point of order, Penders methods of 'bridging' things like this leave a lot to be desired because in the end he's not really looking at it from an outside perspective. Because HE'S satisfied with an idea, others will be satisfied and won't bother to scrutinize the myriad ways it won't work. So I wouldn't say he's 'delusional' about what the IDW book is. It's just that he's so self-absorbed and ultimately dismissive of the readers that he can't bring himself to see why any of this would be a problem.

I can guarantee you that he has not. Penders couldn't even be bothered to really read books written by his co-workers on Archie, and has repeatedly expressed disinterest in anything pertaining to the games. The only commentary he's offered on IDW has been about covers, while boasting about how things were done at Archie. Words really cannot BEGIN to convey this man's disinterest in anything Sonic related that he personally didn't write.

It was indeed brought up, but eh, there's been little discussion fodder as of late. But yeah, this is a pretty revealing look into Penders' mindset- specifically his stagnation as a writer and how out of touch he is with what the majority of the fanbase wants and where the Sonic franchise itself is at this point of things. Honestly it's kind of hilarious how he's revealed himself with this- for all that he touts his writing? He is basically completely relying on the idea that people would be so eager to see the Freedom Fighters and such that they'd just ignore everything and immediately clamor for the characters. Sure, there are some who'd operate that way- but that isn't the majority of the fanbase. It wasn't that way then, and it isn't that way now. It's just so indicative of his entire writing style and his mentality when it comes to writing. He honestly thinks he has a winning formula with this, and that since it worked in the 90s, it'd clearly allow him to glide through things just like back at Archie. Though honestly, it's not surprising. Look at LSC, at his entire Knuckles' run and all that he talks about in connection to that. The guy just wanted to do nothing but endless variations of Knuckles vs the Legion, without any real progress, and even in a future 25 years later he's pretty much decided to do just that again, only with Lara-Su instead of Knuckles. He's just... so completely entrenched in his comfort zone and his delusion that everyone LOVES it that he can't really do anything else by this point.

So far? T-Shirts Coffee Mugs And Phone Cases https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PRAETORIAN-iPHONE-5-CASE-as-seen-in-THE-LARA-SU-CHRONICLES-Ken-Penders-/282909387595 To say he's counting his chickens before they hatch is putting it mildly. In theory it would likely be a class about the technical and business aspects of creating a Graphic Novel- such as how to plan a graphic novel and how to keep focused on goals and making consistent progress and so forth, and then on how to promote your work and ways to get attention for it. That sort of thing. It wouldn't necessarily be a class about how to draw or how to write, or at least not primarily. At least, that's how I would imagine it. Even so... you can't really teach something if you haven't done it at least once, and Penders hasn't even given a vague hint of when this Graphic Novel is going to be published. And given his attitude towards being challenged on twitter, I really can't imagine him having the patience to deal with being questioned. Especially if anybody were to do any research on him and discover his non-existent track record in the area he's meant to be teaching.

Not really an update per se, but baffling all the same- I uh... unless something happened and no one said anything literally anywhere, Penders hasn't released ANYTHING of his graphic novel (outside of some crappy tie-in products). Like... wouldn't the one prerequisite to teach a class about something? To have successfully DONE the thing you're teaching? This is like taking a cooking class from someone who has never successfully cooked anything complicated, or a publishing class from someone who never actually got anything published. I swear the guy is looking for reasons to not get things done at this point.

My apologies for the double post, but this is something I feel that needs addressing- I should like to remind everyone that contrary to what Penders is saying here, there really isn't an arrangement of any sort that would have benefited any of those companies. See, Penders didn't JUST want royalties. A long ass time ago he laid out exactly what he felt he should be reasonably entitled to, back in the days of the forum, and this here provides some keen insight into what Penders REALLY wanted from the lawsuit- http://web.archive.org/web/20140303010031/http://www.kenpenders.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2595 And since I know links to the archive can be funky here, here's the skinny of it- Take note that this is less than two years after the trial concluded, and these are the kind of things Penders wanted- supervision over characters like Julie-Su, Locke and Lara-Su, with Lara-Su being 'untouchable', and effectively demanding that the future of 25YL as he wrote it be made into the One True Future for the comic book. In essence, he would be permitted to dictate terms to a book that he was no longer working on. Likewise, there is also this little tidbit- To say that this was staggeringly naive of Penders is an understatement. It is difficult to grasp that any grown man, let alone one who frequently claims to be some kind of insider into the inner workings of Hollywood and film production, would ever think something like this is reasonable. It is functionally a demand that SEGA invest a great deal of money funding a vanity film project that would feature niche characters from a single corner of their wider franchise, one that they themselves never saw fit to incorporate into the games proper, and then release that film, with absolutely no guarantee of making back what was put into it or turning any kind of profit. All that in addition to Penders being permitted to use one of their flagship characters in nebulous 'various projects'. So yeah, it must be re-iterated- the only person in all of this who is short sighted is Penders, and never forget that no matter what he says? What he ultimately wants is something that no company or corporation would ever reasonably give to any creative, regardless of how talented they are. And Penders is far, far, FAR from talented.

Eh, so what else is new? Penders has been hyping that trial ever since it ended and has done everything in his power to try and play it off as some kind of major, game changing event within the wider comics industry, even going so far as to refer to it as 'groundbreaking' or even 'legendary'. The fact that absolutely nothing about it has been spoken off in comic news publications since its end is kind of telling in of itself. Hell, he constantly compares the events of his trial to a MYRIAD of incidents and trials, past and present, in an effort to make his slap fight seem more important and relevant than it really is. This is a man who sincerely compares his trial to the Maria Altmann case. You know, the Jewish lady who had to flee for dear life from the Nazi's and then sued the Austrian government to regain a family heirloom that had been plundered? TOTALLY the same as a slap fight over Knuckles in cosplay. It really doesn't matter how much he tries to play himself off as a kind of legal strategist who defied the odds against a corporation- the bottom line is that Archie did not in fact have the contracts. Being able to triumph in the face of such sheer incompetence is absolutely not the same thing as re-enacting David and Goliath. Yeah, there's no doubt that if this ever WAS going to be released, it'd get real ugly real quickly. Penders has never, ever cared for writing for teenagers or shown even a vague understanding of how to write one, and certainly does not really think they're actually capable of being the heroes of their own stories. Look at what he did to Sally and Knuckles. Look at the emphasis he placed on Geoffrey St. John. Hell, look at the entirety of 25YL- a storyline literally meant to be all about The Next Generation, and he still decided the most important thing was the now grown Knuckles rather than the new batch of potential teen heroes. I can guarantee you there'd be nothing flattering to be found in this. Again though, we're never going to know because honestly, at this stage its never going to happen. Well yeah, duh? What else would he do? Actually make substantive progress on the comic he's been promising for literally almost ten years now? Don't you know ANYTHING about being a professional? ...but yeah, he's gonna cling to that one til the day he dies regardless of how little it really factors into anything. He's literally the only Archie creator involved with that entire mess who goes on about it or talks about it at any length or even seems to care. Everyone else has pretty much moved on.

Penders has repeatedly claimed that that was, in fact, what he was after... unfortunately though that's not really the case. In addition to royalties Penders wanted to retain ownership of his characters, and the problem with THAT is that Archie could only publish Sonic so long as everything they made for the book was owned by SEGA. Penders retaining ownership of his characters would essentially make him a secondary licensor on the book, in violation of Archie's contract. And that's without getting into the fact he wanted control over decisions made about characters such as Julie-Su and Locke... or the fact he attempted, in lieu of money, tried to get his Knuckles' movie made instead... Point of order- despite how Penders tries to play it, his demands were never, ever reasonable. And yeah... all that grief that happened with Archie has pretty much officially happened for nothing, because it's pretty clear at this point that Penders is never going to deliver on any of his grandiose promises.

Oh, most definitely. I regret that we will not witness him bending himself into a pretzel justifying why he still has nothing for Comic-Con, but we knew it would be this way one way or the other.

Oh, most definitely. One of the major themes of this entire escapade (asides from Egomania and Unrealistic Expectations in general) has been Ken wanting to have his cake and to eat it. He's trying to cast as wide a net as he can with regards to the pre-reboot continuity despite all the logical factors keeping it from actually being able to harmoniously exist as a canon with his current direction. It's little more than a cynical attempt to draw people in with something he can't really use.

My my my, it has been nearly a month since we posted here. Well, do pardon me for dusting the old place off, but we've finally gotten something that provides a bit... insight? I suppose? On TLSC. That's nice, Ken. I mean sure you've announced your intention to replace Athair with a woman called Auri-On, but sure, whatever you say. Until you actually get this story out, we don't really have any way of actually verifying anything you say regarding this, and given the vast swathes of things you don't own, it's a tad dubious to believe that this is in fact the case.

This has been mentioned to him before. In the end he's all too aware that the Sonic stuff is the only thing that makes him even remotely noteworthy or brought him any kind of fame. It's not about vision or wanting to continue the stories he started in Archie- it's about desperately trying to monetize whatever popularity he had in those days in whatever way he can. Personally I'm still giggling at him talking about producing and directing films as if any of his works have been released in any capacity. That's akin to talking as if having written a manuscript makes you a writer. You must have some VERY childish friends, Penders. Both for having asked something that asinine and for them believing that you are in any way capable of actually addressing something like that.