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

[Promethean0416]

4 hours ago, DaddlerTheDalek said:

What happened to Ken Penders Webpage & Forum? I'm not up to date.

From the looks of it, it is currently in the process of being moved to another server.

[horridus]

Yeah, he announced that a while ago, due to his top moderator and 'Tech Guru' having health problems. Whether or not he actually updates the damn thing so that it no longer looks like a refugee from the 90s remains to be seen. 

[DaddlerTheDalek]

Okay. Thanks for the info.

[horridus]

Wellll now, this here is quite the surprise. 

Looks like my initial assessment was way off. Why he didn't feel the need to announce this from the start, I'll never know, but still. Assuming she is doing the art in its entirety and provided he stay far, far away with it, this might actually be the first time we get a look at something LSC related that isn't a monstrous eyesore. 

 

[Tylinos]

I hadn't even considered Dawn, despite her being a seemingly obvious choice in retrospect, mainly for the reason that it makes no sense to keep the artist a secret when it's actually someone whose work people like.  Just saying it was Dawn from the get-go would have actually made people more interested than it being a mystery artist.  Doing this is just bizarre, especially when it was secret for less than six days.  Weren't you were supposed to be a self-proclaimed marketing expert, Ken?

[horridus]

Are you really that surprised to see such behavior from the man whose 'business savvy' dictates him to create tie-in products for a book he hasn't released? Or whose artistic insight tells him that photographed backgrounds, traced celebrities and lifting images off of google search is A-Okay and totally professional? Penders demonstrating the complete opposite of things he claims expertise in is par the course by this point. 

It's awful generous of Best to do art for him and have her name connected to his project given the unapologetic hack-job he did on her pencils and the damage to her potential career that it caused. Hopefully he's finally wised up about his art and will start paying her to do stuff on the book. It's the only chance he'll ever have of getting a little positive attention. You know, if he ever actually intends to RELEASE the damn thing within this century....

[Zaysho]

I'm a little confused by the wording (and it's late) but is he changing the direction of the art now and having Best illustrate it, or is she just doing some graphics/illustrations for this app nobody's still seen?

Granted, based on the two pages he's released it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to get someone else to handle the art duties (provided he's not going to color it).

[Tylinos]

3 minutes ago, Zaysho said:

I'm a little confused by the wording (and it's late) but is he changing the direction of the art now and having Best illustrate it, or is she just doing some graphics/illustrations for this app nobody's still seen?

Just some art for the app.

[horridus]

 

Yep. Pretty certain if he could afford it, he'd have hired Dawn Best on from day one, and probably have spared himself a loooooot of ridicule in the process. Or so I assume, given that common sense solutions don't appear to be Penders' strong suite in general. 

[Agie]

I can guarantee you, all of this could have been avoided if Penders had simply decided to take criticism. Or move on. But no, Penders has an ego that's difficult to fathom.

 

But then, we always knew logic wasn't exactly his strong suit. But at this point, he's lost all respect he ever had, and quite frankly, he's fallen so far down he's never, ever gonna get it back. He could completely change his attitude tomorrow, and it still wouldn't make a difference.

[Tylinos]

19 minutes ago, SurrealBrain said:

I can guarantee you, all of this could have been avoided if Penders had simply decided to take criticism.

And on that note:

No you haven't, Ken.  Much of this thread itself has been a testament to that.  That, and how you never actually shown yourself being critical of your own work.  Seriously, I can't recall him ever being particularly critical of his past works, outside of mild statements about how he could have done things a bit differently.

Maybe you shouldn't just "shrug off" the critique of others 100% of the time.

[Sidronas]

I have actually more faith in Dawn Best than Ken

[horridus]

4 hours ago, Sidronas said:

I have actually more faith in Dawn Best than Ken

Seeing as how Dawn Best is actually very, very good at what she does, this is only natural. 

6 hours ago, Tylinos said:

And on that note:

No you haven't, Ken.  Much of this thread itself has been a testament to that.  That, and how you never actually shown yourself being critical of your own work.  Seriously, I can't recall him ever being particularly critical of his past works, outside of mild statements about how he could have done things a bit differently.

Maybe you shouldn't just "shrug off" the critique of others 100% of the time.

Heh, no kidding. I've never seen Penders cop to any of his ideas or creative decisions being bad ones or ill-conceived, and when called on something being less than stellar he is often all too eager to pass the buck to someone or something, be it the editors, his co-workers or nebulous circumstances being out of his control. Remember his excuse for why the Brotherhood never tried to stop Robotnik or help in the war against him despite the fact he nearly destroyed the ISland? "Obviously they were dealing with a greater threat", which happened to never get mentioned or even hinted at at ANY point in the Knuckles comic.

Heck, I have clearer memories of him getting defensive and snippy when people tried to point out how the Brotherhood's actions were a tad less heroic than Penders wanted people to see them, even going so far as to justify why they were in the right for attempting to murder Monk over his bullying of Knuckles. He has concocted numerous, sometimes contradictory reasons for why Sally HAD to die during Endgame, and absolutely refuses to even acknowledge why people might have had a problem with it. Introspection there is litte of, but excuses? Penders has enough excuses to last a lifetime. 

That entire chain of responses tweets is pretty much Penders parroting feel-good crap for the explicit purpose of not having to confront the issues in his own work while simultaneously absolving himself any wrongdoing when it came to the low quality a lot of his work suffered from. Which I should add included things like a major character learning her life was a a lie and that she had had her memory wiped out twice, only for these revelations to impact nothing about her or development (talking about Julie-Su here). 

[King Scoopa Koopa]

I kind of hate that Dawn Best is working in this, if only because now there might be a "but..." when tearing it down. That is, assuming Penders doesn't lend his own "personal touch" to it again.

[Adamis]

Wasn't Dawn working on a comic with Ian some years ago ? I remember it featured bat-like characters. What happened to that ?

[horridus]

Sadly, I believe that the kickstarter failed, so that wasn't able to go anywhere. 

 

[SBR2]

http://gloryhound.info/sylvanna/

She's still working on it. I think she's a full time nurse going off her Facebook though.

[Sidronas]

12 hours ago, Adamis said:

Wasn't Dawn working on a comic with Ian some years ago ? I remember it featured bat-like characters. What happened to that ?

I think its called Sylvannia?

[horridus]

19 hours ago, SBR2 said:

http://gloryhound.info/sylvanna/

She's still working on it. I think she's a full time nurse going off her Facebook though.

Aaah, that's good to know. Thanks for info. 

9 hours ago, Sidronas said:

I think its called Sylvannia?

Yep, it is indeed called Sylvannia!

[Agie]

I kinda dropped out of Sylvanna, if only because the pages took a long time to come out. I get it; life gets busy and all. But I think it could have benefitted from a good chunk of the comics being ready before putting up the first page so that even if they couldn't make the latest pages right away, they had content they could put up in the interim.

 

But what's done is done, and again, I get that life gets busy, and that things don't always work out as hoped.

[horridus]

Cool story bro. Now maybe you could SHOW us? Through the book? That you said was coming soon in 2012?

[Tylinos]

So, what he's saying is that all it takes is adding a bridge between M25YL and TLSC to provide the bridge to TLSC.  Okay.

Seriously, all that tweet explained is that he needs to tell more of the story.  Which is, well, obvious.  So, thanks for that, Ken.

[horridus]

I myself am looking forward to him justifying using a story that clearly features and stars SEGA owned characters in order to open his book. And betting that TLSC wil begin with Lara-Su opening up 'as if from a dream'. 

Seriously, I will never understand this obsessive need to literally pick up exactly where he left off. He'd be served so much better by just ignoring the M25YL stuff and starting a new wholesale, but nooo....

[King Scoopa Koopa]

2 hours ago, horridus said:

I myself am looking forward to him justifying using a story that clearly features and stars SEGA owned characters in order to open his book. And betting that TLSC wil begin with Lara-Su opening up 'as if from a dream'. 

Seriously, I will never understand this obsessive need to literally pick up exactly where he left off. He'd be served so much better by just ignoring the M25YL stuff and starting a new wholesale, but nooo....

He'd be better served by just ignoring Sonic altogether and creating expies of the characters he made, but...

[BlueSky]

I suppose his tactic could be to just stir the Sonic fanbase up so much as he can for us to keep talking. If there's continuously noise, someone might get interested in on it, it's a vast world.

Though, in that case he really should actually make some progress in the meantime, otherwise the attention he's getting will cool down and he gets nothing out of it. From the looks of it, it seems more and more as if he gets ideas but somehow stuff doesn't get on paper. Or maybe he's stockpiled it all and wants to release it all in one go... like I would know... all the talk about bridges and such point to the other direction after all...

Gee I love speculating about things...