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

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Don't know if this was brought up in this topic before, but if it was, I missed it.

I was reading through the Thanks Ken Penders tumblr, and found this fun pitch from Penders about how he'd do IDW, and how it'd totally be better than Ian's writing.

Literally the exact same fucking melodramatic garbage found so heavily in the Dark Age of Archie Sonic. It's amazing how this guy honestly and truly thinks that he's such a good writer, and so dearly missed and wanted that IDW and SEGA wouldn't slap any restrictions on him, and let him do exactly as he pleased. Y'know, essentially what Penders got away with in the 90s.

This man is just all kinds of utterly deluded. 

[Nintenboi]

On 8/13/2020 at 12:52 PM, horridus said:

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. 

When I saw the T-Shirt, I no longer felt safe.

[horridus]

6 hours ago, Ryannumber1gamer said:

Don't know if this was brought up in this topic before, but if it was, I missed it.

I was reading through the Thanks Ken Penders tumblr, and found this fun pitch from Penders about how he'd do IDW, and how it'd totally be better than Ian's writing.

Literally the exact same fucking melodramatic garbage found so heavily in the Dark Age of Archie Sonic. It's amazing how this guy honestly and truly thinks that he's such a good writer, and so dearly missed and wanted that IDW and SEGA wouldn't slap any restrictions on him, and let him do exactly as he pleased. Y'know, essentially what Penders got away with in the 90s.

This man is just all kinds of utterly deluded. 

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. 

 

[Silvereyes]

Do you think he has even read any of the IDW issues?

[horridus]

1 hour ago, Silvereyes said:

Do you think he has even read any of the IDW issues?

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. 

[Zaysho]

The more I'm looking at this this sounds like a weird retread and combination of the stories that Sonic did save the FF when the Badniks strapped them to a time bomb, "Beat the Clock," (which happens to be a back up to the story that introduced Scourge, er Evil Sonic, issue 11) and when Sally was nearly married off to Patch, excuse me Evil Antoine (155/6).

And, yes, both of those stories were written by Ken Penders. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but these ideas sound weirdly familiar to me.

[Zonic 2099]

The Archie universe was literally built for the Freedom Fighters to share the spotlight with Sonic. The IDW comic isn't, so having them take over as main characters again would alienate every reader of the IDW Comic, even if they are fans of the characters.

I can't see them in the IDW comic as anything but recurring supporting characters Sonic may run into on occasion. Probably another albeit smaller faction of the resistance. Sally might not be a princess anymore since there wouldn't be too much time to focus on finding her royal father and deal with her royal duties. Let alone tackle her love life for the umpteenth time

 

[antyep]

12 hours ago, Zonic 2099 said:

The Archie universe was literally built for the Freedom Fighters to share the spotlight with Sonic. The IDW comic isn't, so having them take over as main characters again would alienate every reader of the IDW Comic, even if they are fans of the characters.

I can't see them in the IDW comic as anything but recurring supporting characters Sonic may run into on occasion. Probably another albeit smaller faction of the resistance. Sally might not be a princess anymore since there wouldn't be too much time to focus on finding her royal father and deal with her royal duties. Let alone tackle her love life for the umpteenth time

 

Or she could still be a princess. We don't have to dwell so much into that, but maybe her kingdom forms a GUN-like military to take down Eggman after forcing them to defend against his robots in Forces, and the whole Zombot thing plaguing their kingdom. They don't have to be main characters.

But this isn't the thread to talk about that. This is about Penders and his many recycled excuses.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

3 minutes ago, antyep said:

Or she could still be a princess. We don't have to dwell so much into that, but maybe her kingdom forms a GUN-like military to take down Eggman after forcing them to defend against his robots in Forces, and the whole Zombot thing plaguing their kingdom. They don't have to be main characters.

But this isn't the thread to talk about that. This is about Penders and his many recycled excuses.

In fairness, it's representative of a bigger issue with Penders, which is how comically out of the touch he is with the state of the franchise. Again, this is the man who genuinely believes that not only was Archie Sonic (as written by him) a global phenomenon, but he truly thinks it's more popular than the games.

He genuinely seems to think that the FF being main characters again would be this massive impactful deal when it just really wouldn't.

[antyep]

19 minutes ago, Ryannumber1gamer said:

In fairness, it's representative of a bigger issue with Penders, which is how comically out of the touch he is with the state of the franchise. Again, this is the man who genuinely believes that not only was Archie Sonic (as written by him) a global phenomenon, but he truly thinks it's more popular than the games.

He genuinely seems to think that the FF being main characters again would be this massive impactful deal when it just really wouldn't.

In a way, they probably would...just not maybe positively (depends on who you ask)? But no doubt, he thinks they be a impactful deal...written by him.

[Dr. Detective]

On 9/12/2020 at 11:58 AM, Ryannumber1gamer said:

Don't know if this was brought up in this topic before, but if it was, I missed it.

I was reading through the Thanks Ken Penders tumblr, and found this fun pitch from Penders about how he'd do IDW, and how it'd totally be better than Ian's writing.

Literally the exact same fucking melodramatic garbage found so heavily in the Dark Age of Archie Sonic. It's amazing how this guy honestly and truly thinks that he's such a good writer, and so dearly missed and wanted that IDW and SEGA wouldn't slap any restrictions on him, and let him do exactly as he pleased. Y'know, essentially what Penders got away with in the 90s.

This man is just all kinds of utterly deluded. 

"On top of that he has to discover where they were and why they have surfaced now. Did he know and kept the secret? Why?"

Yes. WHY? Why the fuck would he do that?

This is the thing that jumped out at me reading this passage as someone who's been trudging through the sewage of Penders' old stories in Archie. The man is obsessed with not just drama, but drama fabricated specifically from characters being assholes by keeping secrets and having no good goddamn reason to do so. Instantly, when he decides to bring back the Freedom Fighters for IDW, instead of trying to organically have it make sense for what the book is doing and re-introduce them, he's gonna make the fact that they were absent a plot point that Sonic knew about and the rest of the cast just... decided never to once bring them up or question why they were gone.  

You can't re-establish the old continuity with this book, especially at this point. And I know he's not talking about starting the book over from his last end point  at Archie and pretending the current IDW stories didn't happen because the plot line of Sonic having kept their absence a secret would make zero sense if he did. As presented in these posts, he seriously believes there's an organic way he can write the Freedom Fighters in so that they were there the whole time and their whereabouts were kept a secret by the main character. 

It's like that shit where he wrote a story where Sonic found out Antoine's dad was alive and roboticized and decided he wasn't going to tell Antoine about it and made Tails keep quiet too. Then when Bollers was writing for Sonic, he had Sonic tell Antoine about it immediately because he knew not to write him like a fucking asshole. He'd have also been a hypocrite since he was also lied to about his parents being alive and got mad about it himself. Yet he was super on board for doing the same thing to Antoine. 

 

[horridus]

1 hour ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

You can't re-establish the old continuity with this book, especially at this point. And I know he's not talking about starting the book over from his last end point  at Archie and pretending the current IDW stories didn't happen because the plot line of Sonic having kept their absence a secret would make zero sense if he did. As presented in these posts, he seriously believes there's an organic way he can write the Freedom Fighters in so that they were there the whole time and their whereabouts were kept a secret by the main character. 

Try to keep in mind that Penders ideas of what 'organic' storytelling is are vastly, vastly askew with pretty much anyone else's. Look at his Knuckles books. The more we learn about the Legion/Brotherhood conflict the less sense it makes, and the less sense the Brotherhood's MO becomes. He came up with the ideas of the Brotherhood and the Legion BEFORE thinking about the deeper implications, and throughout the series it's clear he's making it up as he goes along. This is a guy who, when confronted by the fact the Brotherhood did nothing to aid in the fight against Robotnik despite the very clear threat he posed to their home and to them, answered that 'obviously, they were fighting a much greater threat at the time'. A threat that is never mentioned, never referenced or even alluded to, but because he said it here and now, in his mind it must be so. 

THAT is Penders' notions of 'organic writing' on display. If it satisfies his flimsy standards, that's all that is needed. Anyone else's insights or objections are not worth considering. 

Quote

It's like that shit where he wrote a story where Sonic found out Antoine's dad was alive and roboticized and decided he wasn't going to tell Antoine about it and made Tails keep quiet too. Then when Bollers was writing for Sonic, he had Sonic tell Antoine about it immediately because he knew not to write him like a fucking asshole. He'd have also been a hypocrite since he was also lied to about his parents being alive and got mad about it himself. Yet he was super on board for doing the same thing to Antoine. 

And thus you have summarized the trick of a one trick pony. For a guy who likes to shriek against 'suits', his mentality when it comes to writing is far more in common with that kind of 'plot by committee' mentality a lot of executive types have- namely that his approach to writing is steeped in a cynical understanding of the audience and the belief that if he pushes the right buttons over and over again, he'll get the same result over and over again. For him, this sort of thing 'worked', and so it became his chief crutch, and many of his stories ultimately became permutations of the same thing. And that's without getting into the weird, too-personal-for-comfort window to his mindset when you consider how many of these plots amount to a parent manipulating their child... and the narrative essentially telling the readers that the kid in question should be grateful for it. 

Point of order? The guy's a hack. At the end of the day he has his favorite formula and his unshakeable belief that what worked in the 90s will work for him today, no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. 

[King Scoopa Koopa]

6 hours ago, Dr. Detective Mike said:

And I know he's not talking about starting the book over from his last end point  at Archie and pretending the current IDW stories didn't happen

I have no idea how you can know that, because that sounds like precisely the sort of thing he would do. Might need to nip this or tuck that, but considering how he's handling The Lara-Su Chronicles -- he could have made it an alternate universe similar to Archie Sonic, but no, he insists that it is Archie Sonic (now with 100% less Archie and 50% less Sonic) -- I can see him making it a convoluted continuation from where he left off.

After all, he always said if he'd returned to Archie Sonic, he'd basically ignore everything that came in-between. Heck, he practically did that when he took over the book before Flynn came on, effectively making Return to Angel Island all but completely inconsequential.

Why should we think he would treat this any different, even if he has to pull some sort of Steve Gerber craziness to make it work?

[SBR2]

On 9/14/2020 at 9:56 PM, Dr. Detective Mike said:

"On top of that he has to discover where they were and why they have surfaced now. Did he know and kept the secret? Why?"

Yes. WHY? Why the fuck would he do that?

This is the thing that jumped out at me reading this passage as someone who's been trudging through the sewage of Penders' old stories in Archie. The man is obsessed with not just drama, but drama fabricated specifically from characters being assholes by keeping secrets and having no good goddamn reason to do so. Instantly, when he decides to bring back the Freedom Fighters for IDW, instead of trying to organically have it make sense for what the book is doing and re-introduce them, he's gonna make the fact that they were absent a plot point that Sonic knew about and the rest of the cast just... decided never to once bring them up or question why they were gone.  

You can't re-establish the old continuity with this book, especially at this point. And I know he's not talking about starting the book over from his last end point  at Archie and pretending the current IDW stories didn't happen because the plot line of Sonic having kept their absence a secret would make zero sense if he did. As presented in these posts, he seriously believes there's an organic way he can write the Freedom Fighters in so that they were there the whole time and their whereabouts were kept a secret by the main character. 

It's like that shit where he wrote a story where Sonic found out Antoine's dad was alive and roboticized and decided he wasn't going to tell Antoine about it and made Tails keep quiet too. Then when Bollers was writing for Sonic, he had Sonic tell Antoine about it immediately because he knew not to write him like a fucking asshole. He'd have also been a hypocrite since he was also lied to about his parents being alive and got mad about it himself. Yet he was super on board for doing the same thing to Antoine. 

 

This is the thing that cracks me up about Penders ideas for IDW he clearly hasn't read it or researched it because he genuinely believes that it's the same continuity as the Archie comic when it very much isn't. 

If you were to try and make it either pre or post reboot all you would do is make it an overly complicated mess. And I say that as someone who read too deeply into the nod to the Hooligans in #3 but even then as the book developed it became clear it was it's own thing.

But that doesn't matter to Ken. He doesn't care if the story makes any sense he just wants to tell his stories to stroke his own ego and nothing else. 

[horridus]

On 9/16/2020 at 12:22 PM, SBR2 said:

This is the thing that cracks me up about Penders ideas for IDW he clearly hasn't read it or researched it because he genuinely believes that it's the same continuity as the Archie comic when it very much isn't. 

If you were to try and make it either pre or post reboot all you would do is make it an overly complicated mess. And I say that as someone who read too deeply into the nod to the Hooligans in #3 but even then as the book developed it became clear it was it's own thing.

But that doesn't matter to Ken. He doesn't care if the story makes any sense he just wants to tell his stories to stroke his own ego and nothing else. 

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. 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

It also helps to mention that Penders almost never thinks through his plans, and always goes for core concepts without connecting them. 

Like, you have to keep in mind, this is the man who decided he wanted to have an arc where Knuckles ends up forsaking the Echidnas, and the Brotherhood, and teaming up with the Dark Legion. A decent idea in of itself, yeah?

The set-up is already there, the Brotherhood have done increasingly shady, creepy, and outright awful stuff, stuff like letting Robotnik run amok for god knows how long. Stuff that Knuckles should be opposed to (and better writers like Flynn and Bollers have done before). All the secrecy and hypocrisy could easily allow the Dark Legion to trick Knuckles into thinking they want the best for everyone, right?

Instead, Penders' idea for it was the Dark Legion to literally show off in front of Knuckles about how they caused the disappearance of Echnidaopolis, and the Brotherhood, and everything else. I mean - blatantly show it to Knuckles, so he knows the Dark Legion is bad...and yet they still have him join them when they claim they want to bring them back, as well as also having Knuckles' big final moments (his death, and end of Chaos Knuckles) being in favour of Dimitri, and the Legion, even though Knuckles KNOWS they are the villains.

Penders rarely, if ever bothers to ensure the pieces connect in logical ways. This is the exact same. He wants the Freedom Fighters in IDW, but it can't be the simple or easy explanations - like Sonic just meeting them. Oh no, it has to be a situation where Sonic knew all along, and they had to keep it a secret for some reason??  

[King Scoopa Koopa]

To Penders' credit (what's that burning sensation when I say that?) -- and to be fair, I'm probably misreading it in such a way that my mind can comprehend it -- I figured it ran like so:

-Dark Legion yeets Echidnaoplolis into another zone, but loses their means of doing/fixing it

- Knuckles is here, he's angry, and oh yeah, he's a god now

- Dark Legion: "You're a god now, guess you're calling the shots now, because if we don't do as you say, you'll yeet us out of existence. But, uh, your yeeting methods look like they could use some precision tuning, maybe we can help with that (and find a way to use you to our advantage)?"

- Knuckles: "I'm a god now, so I can do pretty much whatever and yeet these fools if they get out of line. But they know how to use my yeet powers better than I do, so maybe I'll just play along for now until they teach me how to yeet fool's properly."

And then Mogul happened and that was a waste of time.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

6 minutes ago, KingScoopaKoopa said:

To Penders' credit (what's that burning sensation when I say that?) -- and to be fair, I'm probably misreading it in such a way that my mind can comprehend it -- I figured it ran like so:

-Dark Legion yeets Echidnaoplolis into another zone, but loses their means of doing/fixing it

- Knuckles is here, he's angry, and oh yeah, he's a god now

- Dark Legion: "You're a god now, guess you're calling the shots now, because if we don't do as you say, you'll yeet us out of existence. But, uh, your yeeting methods look like they could use some precision tuning, maybe we can help with that (and find a way to use you to our advantage)?"

- Knuckles: "I'm a god now, so I can do pretty much whatever and yeet these fools if they get out of line. But they know how to use my yeet powers better than I do, so maybe I'll just play along for now until they teach me how to yeet fool's properly."

And then Mogul happened and that was a waste of time.

Not really. After Knuckles does bring back Echidnapolis, the remainder of the arc is about Knuckles doing everything he can to protect the facist Dark Legion. He makes up bullshit stories and fakes taking a bullet for Dimitri to get them sympathisers, and Knuckles ends up giving up his entire life to save Dimitri, and only Dimitri.

The Dark Legion to that point did nothing to deserve Knuckles' pity, or his help. For starters, Knuckles trusting the Legion who claim they just want Echidnaopolis back is absolutely dumb, and doesn't even help shit in the end. He's an overpowered god, and quite literally just pops them back into existence after several failed trips back in time.

The Dark Legion caused this, and Knuckles believes them hook line and sinker when they claim that they just want to be reaccepted back into society. This happens literally a few issues after Penders uses them as a WW2 allegory. It doesn't fit.

[King Scoopa Koopa]

Yeah, I forgot about a chunk of that. My bad.

[SatAMhog]

If Ken took over the comic again, it would literally be "The Shattering" of continuity all over again.  We already had that with Archie and we don't need that again.  The Archie era, even though it is sacred to me, is over.  It had it's time as did SatAM.  It's the IDW era now and we got great characters in Tangle, Whisper, Starline, etc.  It's time for them to shine.  If anything, Ken would be a regression.  No THANK YOU!

[Zonic 2099]

8 hours ago, SatAMhog said:

If Ken took over the comic again, it would literally be "The Shattering" of continuity all over again.  We already had that with Archie and we don't need that again.  The Archie era, even though it is sacred to me, is over.  It had it's time as did SatAM.  It's the IDW era now and we got great characters in Tangle, Whisper, Starline, etc.  It's time for them to shine.  If anything, Ken would be a regression.  No THANK YOU!

Ian fought to keep the Freedom Fighters in the Archie comic probably to not further alienate fans of the comic. I love these characters as well and wouldn't mind seeing them in IDW from time to time but I completely agree their time as main characters is done.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Looks like Penders has taken inspiration from Butch Hartman, because he's now apparently copying his paid commissions from other sources. Thanks Ken Penders pointed out this one:

Source: 

https://thankskenpenders.tumblr.com/post/629893657985744896/i-feel-like-that-bunnie-on-ken-penders-most

[Zaysho]

Well he also traced Spaz's cover art and simplified it just enough to be able to tell people they don't know what they're talking about when the people who point it out were all diehard fans of the Archie book, so that tracks.

[horridus]

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?

[Zaysho]

This is probably veering off topic but it's especially funny to me he copied Chronicles art.

 

I mean, I get it. You're at a convention, on the spot and pressed for time, need quick reference for a drawing, that's what you gotta do. I've done that at local conventions, I've seen dozens of artists do it. And maybe you're not familiar with the subject matter (lord knows I've gotten requests that are way outside my comfort zone, but I'm getting chipped a few bucks to draw something for somebody's kid, I'll figure it out). That's all perfectly fair! I'm more surprised that someone who spent over a decade working on this franchise, and more in the comic book industry, couldn't do anything slightly more interesting than just copying some static stock art.