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The Lara-Su Chronicles and Ken Penders topic - READ PAGE 164, POST 4096


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While, maybe, a lot of people who did check out his booth/app just happen to not use social media, I'm finding it really hard to believe none do or have nothing to say regarding it. Frankly, he could use some positive word of mouth at this point because there isn't much. I also like to think he could actually publish a screenshot or two, maybe an overview, of the app itself. If it's such an integral part of this whole thing, just hoarding it at his Comic-Con booth and telling everyone else that it's actually really cool and that people who were there totally loved it, really doesn't tell the rest of us anything. I have no interest in the app itself, but if he's going to push this, and not rely on any positive press/word of mouth from those that were there (since apparently none of them use social media...), then he should be telling us why it's cool or what it's supposed to do.

Unless he just assumes the second he publishes something we're all going to hate it and have nothing constructive to offer...

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He builds so much hype for it and yet he has nothing to show.

And also, those people kinda mirror Penders: He lives on a world of his own where the skies are pink with yellow stripes and the sea is made of coke-cola.

I would pray for his creation to flop miserably, but I would first have to wait for him to launch it, which is, at the same time, funny and somewhat sad.

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I'm a bit behind so I hadn't seen the preview page until that Spanish translation was posted. On a positive note I actually quite like the dog design, she looks nice, attractive, almost unstated, far better than the awkward and 'lumpy' E'kid'na (or however it's being spelled now) characters and closer to the simpler characters he introduced pre-Endgame.

But the screens Geoffery is looking at - one of them has a picture of Knuckles (it looks like 25YL Knuckles, it has no beard) that looks like an image taken from an Archie issue (it's certainly not Penders' colouring) firstly - can he do that (it looks like his pencilling)? Surely that's using the colourist work without asking/paying for starters? But more so it leads to something I've never quite understood about the whole Penders thing and I've never seen a definitive answer on, and while it's moot now I'd still be interested in how he justifies it to himself and others - many stories are co-written (mostly Mike Kanterovich, but others too, like with the Endgame saga) so if he were to use them (print them in a book, whatever) isn't he using someone else's work as well, if he uses pages from the Archie days that someone else inked and coloured isn't he using other people's work as well? isn't that contrary to his own idealogoy? Surely co-authored tales should be co-owned (copyright wise) by Penders and Kanterovich (or whoever else)

Futher - many characters debut in those co-written stories, and many are drawn by other artist - so how are they 'his' and his alone? I'm guessing the answer to some of that question is that as someone who can draw (how well may be up for debate but well enough) he drew the characters and co-writers and artists worked from those sketches but has that ever been stated/shown? Archie published designs by Pat Spaz for some Echidnas, implying that he designed them for Penders, for instance. Any characters like that should be co-owned by the artists, has he (or Kanterovich, or Spaz, or whoever) ever mentioned why they're not (if they're not, though that's hat's the impression I got)? I've never seen anything explaining this from him. I suppose really no matter who owns it, Archie doesn't so they can't appear in the comic, so it could be considered slightly irrelevant but it's just something i've always been confused/interested about. 

Edited by dwitefry666
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Penders is a walking inconsistency by himself. Let's not forget that he's doing what he wants with a setting that originally was SEGA's.

It doesn't matter if he made Julie-Su and the others, the universe he made these characters on is not his. And he's still trying to do this, using SEGA's creation as a base.

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And he's now claiming someone is a troll.

Oh doctor! He's suggesting that someone could be a troll for using a old saying like "Out of the woodwork."! My sides! 

Edited by Mightyray
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Hint : don't get used to that dog design.

I have the second page for translation purpose, but I won't post it obviously

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What, does she die horribly on the second page or something?  But still, progress is progress, so good on Mr. Penders for getting some content produced and managing the translations more professionally this time.

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But Penders is just so absolutely adamant that his characters stay exactly the same. He is determined to have them stay echidna thingys and to have the same exact back-story, with the same characters seen in Archie Sonic and the same style of anthros and everything. Why? Why is he so desperate to keep that connection to Sonic?

That's the thing that confuses me the most. :/

It's fairly simple really: He knows to a degree that Sonic is the only place where he ever found anything akin to actual success, and any attempts to do something on his own (Lost Ones being an example) has failed. Thus he wants to have his cake and eat it too by having his stories piggyback off the Sonic brand, while insisting that he's still separate to try to avoid getting into trouble with SEGA. Obviously this isn't gonna work, but good luck trying to convince him of that otherwise; he's incredibly stubborn.

Edited by SenEDtor Missile
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But it's not impossible for him to make something successful, isn't it kind of his own fault that he isn't listening to people clearly trying to help him?

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What, does she die horribly on the second page or something?  But still, progress is progress, so good on Mr. Penders for getting some content produced and managing the translations more professionally this time.

No death on the page :)

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It's fairly simple really: He knows to a degree that Sonic is the only place where he ever found anything akin to actual success, and any attempts to do something on his own (Lost Ones being an example) has failed. Thus he wants to have his cake and eat it too by having his stories piggyback off the Sonic brand, while insisting that he's still separate to try to avoid getting into trouble with SEGA. Obviously this isn't gonna work, but good luck trying to convince him of that otherwise; he's incredibly stubborn.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, that helps it make more sense to me. It's kind of petty and incredibly lazy though :/ Leeching off of the success and popularity of a previous series (that doesn't even belong to him) is rather skeevy.

But it's not impossible for him to make something successful, isn't it kind of his own fault that he isn't listening to people clearly trying to help him?

 I agree with you, Shaddy. There are tons of ways he could improve the series. It wouldn't necessarily make it good, but it would at least be less bad. He should also stop having constant arguments on Twitter. Seriously, it seems all he does on his Twitter is just have little spats with people over the dumbest thing. I've never seem a person just argue and argue and argue with potential buyers that much.

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Thanks for the reply. Yeah, that helps it make more sense to me. It's kind of petty and incredibly lazy though :/ Leeching off of the success and popularity of a previous series (that doesn't even belong to him) is rather skeevy.

 I agree with you, Shaddy. There are tons of ways he could improve the series. It wouldn't necessarily make it good, but it would at least be less bad. He should also stop having constant arguments on Twitter. Seriously, it seems all he does on his Twitter is just have little spats with people over the dumbest thing. I've never seem a person just argue and argue and argue with potential buyers that much.

 

That would actually require effort on his part, something he doesn't want to actually do despite his bellyaching. He treats the comic and the "franchise" he wants to make as a get-rich-and-popular scheme more than anything: Instant Fame, No Pain.

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You wanna make it a franchise, it takes more hard work and guts than Ken ever had.

Now, if I made something, I certainly wouldn't MIND it if movies and shows were made out of it. But as many said, best not to worry about that until AFTER the thing is out and available to the public.

Say what you want about Twilight, but even it had that in mind at least somewhat.

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He thinks he can survive off of reputation alone, but I can guess that a good sum of the people who know about who he even is now only know because of his lawsuits.

 

That's the case with me, at least.

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Even before the lawsuit, his reputation was dwindling. But after the lawsuit...if he had any positive reputation left, it's gone now.

So he's trying to ride on something he no longer has, assuming he ever had it to begin with.

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Guys, he really doesn't have that big a reputation. I didn't even know about him until after Worlds Collide, and that's because I took the time to look around Bumbleking and saw the thread that explained the reboot and how Penders was to blame for it.

 

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I'm a bit behind so I hadn't seen the preview page until that Spanish translation was posted. On a positive note I actually quite like the dog design, she looks nice, attractive, almost unstated, far better than the awkward and 'lumpy' E'kid'na (or however it's being spelled now) characters and closer to the simpler characters he introduced pre-Endgame.

But the screens Geoffery is looking at - one of them has a picture of Knuckles (it looks like 25YL Knuckles, it has no beard) that looks like an image taken from an Archie issue (it's certainly not Penders' colouring) firstly - can he do that (it looks like his pencilling)? Surely that's using the colourist work without asking/paying for starters? But more so it leads to something I've never quite understood about the whole Penders thing and I've never seen a definitive answer on, and while it's moot now I'd still be interested in how he justifies it to himself and others - many stories are co-written (mostly Mike Kanterovich, but others too, like with the Endgame saga) so if he were to use them (print them in a book, whatever) isn't he using someone else's work as well, if he uses pages from the Archie days that someone else inked and coloured isn't he using other people's work as well? isn't that contrary to his own idealogoy? Surely co-authored tales should be co-owned (copyright wise) by Penders and Kanterovich (or whoever else)

Futher - many characters debut in those co-written stories, and many are drawn by other artist - so how are they 'his' and his alone? I'm guessing the answer to some of that question is that as someone who can draw (how well may be up for debate but well enough) he drew the characters and co-writers and artists worked from those sketches but has that ever been stated/shown? Archie published designs by Pat Spaz for some Echidnas, implying that he designed them for Penders, for instance. Any characters like that should be co-owned by the artists, has he (or Kanterovich, or Spaz, or whoever) ever mentioned why they're not (if they're not, though that's hat's the impression I got)? I've never seen anything explaining this from him. I suppose really no matter who owns it, Archie doesn't so they can't appear in the comic, so it could be considered slightly irrelevant but it's just something i've always been confused/interested about. 

I'll try and cover some of your questions, as I've been observing the guy in action for a looooong time. 

To start off with, yes, that art utilized from the comic would indeed be using the colorist's work as well without having asked permission, to say nothing of the fact that the character is indisputibly Knuckles and not his threadbare-but-vaguely-distinct 'Praetorian K'Nox'. He has a bit of a history of this, having in the past used photographic background images without crediting the person who took the picture and, back in the days of the comic, plagiarizing a holocaust poem without copyrighting the original to the original author. These things do indeed fly in the face of his stated 'creator's rights' schtick, achingly so at that. While in theory one might be able to justify the use of the Knuckles art by claiming that the image shown is not for sale and as such falls under 'fair use', it is still a fairly sizable breach of ethics and ettiquette to give no credit to the colorist for using their work. That being said though, Penders has explicitly stated that he does not view colorists and inkers as being as 'essential' to the creative process as pencillers and writers, or something around those lines (an extraordinarly condescending attitude to take in comics, made all the worse that his most extensive non-Sonic work has been as a colorist and inker precisely). 

Regarding Co-Ownership, I cannot recall where I saw it, but I'm fairly certain that he did once explain that he had full-ownership over the things that were co-created by him and Kantevorich, and one thing he has consistently mentioned is that he is close friends with the guy... now it's entirely possible that he might have a rosier interpretation of things than most would, as he tends to do, but there's little reason to doubt that he would indeed have covered the copyrights that were co-creations before pressing forward on his claim. Further, he has mentioned more than a few times that he cannot touch the creations of Mike Gallagher, whose character Athair is fairly integral to his entire mythos, and because of this he has created a gender-bent stand-in called 'Auri-On'. If he would go through the trouble of bothering with Gallagher, then it stands to reason that he would indeed have asked Kantevorich's permission and have been granted full copyright... though again, my memory is a bit fuzzy on the issue. 

As for the artists who first drew his characters, one theory that has been bounced around from time to time is that the reason he's been heavily redesigning certain characters because he technically might not own the original designs due to them being depicted by artists other than himself. Course, that's just a theory. Anything else can be explained by one simple thing; hypocrisy on Penders part. Penders will talk up a storm about ownership and creator's rights, but very little of that will actually apply to himself... he only ever talks about the other people who worked on the book whenever somebody else brings it up, and never, ever affords them any real credit or acknowledgement, unless doing so will counter the perception others have that he doesn't take the works of his co-workers into consideration. There will never be a straight explanation for him as to how this is meant to work. He doesn't even acknowledge that much of his work still copies certain things that are unique to SEGA (IE, everything regarding the design of the Echydnya species and the fact that their names are phonetically the same). 

You could always try asking him yourself, but I doubt you'll get far. He never goes to his forum anymore, and twitter really isn't the best format for this kind of in-depth discussion... and even then, he'd either ignore you or try to change the subject away from the core of the argument, largely because a real discussion would be extremely inconvenient for him given his past statements. 

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Going further into Penders and the other creators, he also never gives the current creators any type of credit for what they've done, and always tries to spins to try convince people that they should in fact be giving Penders the credit for their stories. Usually by making tweets like ''People give the current team so much credit, yet they never stop and think that without me and other creators, they'd be no book''.

Yes, he does believe he's the reason there's a book in the first place, and second, he never seems to mention the fact he wrote during the time where Sonic was unbelievably popular, while Ian had to write the book and keep it going during the dark ages like with Sonic 06 and Rise of Lyric.

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So evidently the people who bought it don't use twitter or any kind of social media at all... oookay, that's rather odd, and convenient. The only people being able to comment on the thing not evidently having the means to do so. 

There are actually a couple reasons why people wouldn't say anything about the app on social media, and they're not all because they don't use social media. It's possible these people don't really know Penders or his history, or what they saw wasn't impressive enough to mention beyond their initial discussion with Penders himself/whoever was manning his booth at the time.

He also may be reading a bit too far into whatever polite responses he got. Unfortunately we can't really know for sure unless someone gets a chance to go sit in a booth with him all day and see the reactions themselves.

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There are actually a couple reasons why people wouldn't say anything about the app on social media, and they're not all because they don't use social media. It's possible these people don't really know Penders or his history, or what they saw wasn't impressive enough to mention beyond their initial discussion with Penders himself/whoever was manning his booth at the time.

He also may be reading a bit too far into whatever polite responses he got. Unfortunately we can't really know for sure unless someone gets a chance to go sit in a booth with him all day and see the reactions themselves.

But according to Penders, these people who tested the app claimed ''it was the top of the mark comic app and totally raised the bar''. If it was that good, wouldn't you think they'd mention it?

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But according to Penders, these people who tested the app claimed ''it was the top of the mark comic app and totally raised the bar''. If it was that good, wouldn't you think they'd mention it?

Did he really say that other people made claims that his app was really that good? I wish he understood that it's hard for me, or anyone else for that matter, to simply take his word. I'm sure these people can speak for themselves and tell anyone online that the app raised the bar. Does he expect everyone to assume he's being truthful? He really can't make the excuse that none of them have accounts through which they can praise Ken's hard work. None of them use Facebook or tweet occasionally? I find that to be very suspicious since they know enough about phone apps to rate his so very highly comparable to everything else on the market. You'd think they'd have some social media outlet if they know that much about these programs and their applications. I'm not here to call Ken a liar. I just simply can't take his word for it. I need to hear it from the people themselves if I'm going to take these criticisms seriously. 

Edited by Killtank
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If I recall correctly. He said the people who tested the app said it was great and it raised the bar massively for comic apps.

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If I recall correctly. He said the people who tested the app said it was great and it raised the bar massively for comic apps.

Well, to your point, they should say it themselves and not rely on others to convey their opinions. Do none of them have access to, or interest in, social media? None of them know how to effectively describe their feelings on Facebook or anywhere else? I'm sorry, but there's no way I can accept this excuse. It's highly implausible, and Ken should know how this sounds. Ken isn't an unbiased source, so of course I'm not going to assume that everything he says on this issue is true to life. I don't want to make an argument that Ken is a compulsive liar, but if he said exactly that, then there's no way I'm going to accept his word that other people think it's that good. 

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Well, to your point, they should say it themselves and not rely on others to convey their opinions. Do none of them have access to, or interest in, social media? None of them know how to effectively describe their feelings on Facebook or anywhere else? I'm sorry, but there's no way I can accept this excuse. It's highly implausible, and Ken should know how this sounds. Ken isn't an unbiased source, so of course I'm not going to assume that everything he says on this issue is true to life. I don't want to make an argument that Ken is a compulsive liar, but if he said exactly that, then there's no way I'm going to accept his word that other people think it's that good. 

That's not to mention the fact that there's absolutely no way that Penders should even know if they use social media. I mean, what did he do? Ask every single random person who came to the booth if they were on Twitter or not? 

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