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

[Johnny Boy]

Came across this little theory over the whole debacle. What do you guys think? https://chaotix-croc.tumblr.com/post/640022710134669312/ken-penders-doesnt-want-to-make-the-lara-su

[King Scoopa Koopa]

4 hours ago, Johnny Boy said:

Came across this little theory over the whole debacle. What do you guys think? https://chaotix-croc.tumblr.com/post/640022710134669312/ken-penders-doesnt-want-to-make-the-lara-su

Save for the odd bit or piece, I don't think any of that is a new idea, and I think most -- aside from "doesn't want to do LSC" -- has been all but confirmed in some way or another.

I just don't think I've seen it all brought together like this.

That said, it's kind of funny to imagine Ken seeing the Archie Sonic shutter and being like "oh crap, now I actually have to do this! All the eyes in the world are watching me!*"

 

* Almost none of the eyes in the world are watching him.

[horridus]

*dusts off thread*

In a truly shocking development, Penders has posted... an entirely NEW page!

 

Well, the lines of one at least. Given that he's usually content to just re-post the same stuff over and over, this is actually kind of surprising... though not as surprising as the Echydn'ya corpse. Eesh. So much for THAT being a background gag. 

[SBR2]

Boy if there's one thing I never needed to see in Sonic adjacent anything it was an autopsy. 

[horridus]

1 hour ago, SBR2 said:

Boy if there's one thing I never needed to see in Sonic adjacent anything it was an autopsy. 

Ah, but then however would Penders prove he is in fact a Big Boy Writer if he didn't include Big Boy Writer things? 

[RadicalLaRuby]

"So I'm working on a comic."

Yeah man, we know.

[Sidronas]

9 hours ago, horridus said:

*dusts off thread*

In a truly shocking development, Penders has posted... an entirely NEW page!

 

Well, the lines of one at least. Given that he's usually content to just re-post the same stuff over and over, this is actually kind of surprising... though not as surprising as the Echydn'ya corpse. Eesh. So much for THAT being a background gag. 

why on earth would he show an autopsy scene out of all things, which is gruesome in itself, except if it is meant for a horror themed like HP lovecraft

[horridus]

28 minutes ago, Sidronas said:

why on earth would he show an autopsy scene out of all things, which is gruesome in itself, except if it is meant for a horror themed like HP lovecraft

Same reason as why he would have things like a first person POV of surgery or include a poem about the Holocaust in the Knuckles' books- to make himself look like a more 'mature' writer who is able to handle more mature subjects. "THIS ISN'T YOUR DAD'S LARA-SU" or some such, that sort of thing. 

[SBR2]

58 minutes ago, Sidronas said:

why on earth would he show an autopsy scene out of all things, which is gruesome in itself, except if it is meant for a horror themed like HP lovecraft

I mean it doesn't have to be for horror exactly. Though I am scratching my head at exactly what purpose this shot serves for the story at all.

It's just some jacked Echidna guy with his brain hanging out. 

[AlienBunny]

...No PPE? Like there's a lot that bothers me here, but the lack of PPE is the main one considering there's a brain sticking out.

[Rabid-Coot]

I wonder which celebrity got the honour of being the corpse.

[prettyinplague]

20 hours ago, horridus said:

Ah, but then however would Penders prove he is in fact a Big Boy Writer if he didn't include Big Boy Writer things? 

Nobody: 
Nobody at all: 
Not a single soul: 
Ken Penders: Ah yes, this calls for my edgy autopsy scene. 

[King Scoopa Koopa]

On 3/21/2020 at 12:48 PM, Zonic 2099 said:

I decided to keep reading and this tweet caught my eye. This point makes absolutely no sense.
I don't think SEGA was concerned with the potential of Knuckles having an ongoing comic book when they were making him for Sonic 3 & Knuckles. No one needs to know who Knuckles mother and father are, never mind every last grandfather he has. He doesn't need a girlfriend he doesn't need Echidnaopolis and he doesn't need the Dark Legion. All of these things made Knuckles into the polar opposite of who he was. Knuckles has plenty to work with to have a day in the limelight but a full ongoing series dedicated to him? Not really, in fact I don't think many Sonic characters can hold an ongoing for very long, in fact I think that's why Sonic Universe was a stroke of genius on Archie's part.

 

On 3/21/2020 at 1:03 PM, SBR2 said:

Yes because there's absolutely nothing you could have pulled from the level design of Sonic 3&K. Definitely nothing you could have based a narrative off of.

 

On 3/21/2020 at 1:52 PM, SkullPirateMike said:

When I was talking to him he said Sega provided him materials showing the teleporters in Hidden Palace and Sky Sanctuary and he ignored them because they seemed too advanced for an ancient civilization. The details of the material he was provided changes based on what suits him at the time.

 

On 3/21/2020 at 4:02 PM, KingScoopaKoopa said:

No, you see, he wrote that, by channeling his essence and using Angelo DeCasare as a vessel.

But seriously, though, even his early stuff had jokes, too. Remember the "welcome mat" Knuckles fired at Sonic and Tails?

And how long was that insipid "zoot chute" around for? I'm pretty sure that one doesn't even make sense out of a baseline pun that only someone with the vaguest notion of 1940s culture would understand-- perfect for young kids in the '90s.

Penders might...

This says it all, with reference to the above tweet. There's stuff there, he just chose to ignore/dump it in favor of his own take, even when it would help serve to tie his ideas to the source material.

I always wondered how bottomless pits were made, and watching Penders continue to dig that hole for himself answers my question.

Okay, so this stuff has been driving me crazy. Not just when it was brought up last March, but for a long, long time prior to that. So I did something I've been meaning to do for some time now.

Over the past year, between other projects and stuff I've been working on, I've been chipping away at the following: Basically a list of virtually every major component of the Sonic the Hedgehog video game franchise that was available to the writers of the Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog publication at the time. That means no cartoon stuff, no anime, no Japanese game materials. We're talking the games released in the US, their manuals, and their contents.

SEGA didn't come up with anything that would support an ongoing comic book series. One needs more than a floating island, a Chaos Emerald & an echidna named Knuckles to base a series on. -- Ken Penders

Okay, fine. I'm ready to play ball. Let's see how much more there is that went untouched -- all before Ian came along, mind. He was kind of a game changer (no pun intended) in that respect.

I have over 8,000 words, about 20 pages of material here. And it's not even being especially thorough! But it is more than I feel like could be reasonably posted here, so I've attached it as a .txt document for anyone brave enough to go through it.

Oh, and please forgive the formatting -- it was intended to be a forum post here, until I finished and saw the size of what I'd created. Just attaching it seemed like the best compromise.

SonicStuff.txt

[horridus]

On 2/5/2021 at 11:37 PM, KingScoopaKoopa said:

Okay, fine. I'm ready to play ball. Let's see how much more there is that went untouched -- all before Ian came along, mind. He was kind of a game changer (no pun intended) in that respect.

I have over 8,000 words, about 20 pages of material here. And it's not even being especially thorough! But it is more than I feel like could be reasonably posted here, so I've attached it as a .txt document for anyone brave enough to go through it.

Oh, and please forgive the formatting -- it was intended to be a forum post here, until I finished and saw the size of what I'd created. Just attaching it seemed like the best compromise.

SonicStuff.txt 48.3 kB · 11 downloads

A valiant effort, very valiant indeed. Though in the end this might have been a bit of a fruitless endeavor, for the simple fact that Penders excuses are just that- excuses. Not too long ago he got into a twitter argument over the presence of teleporters on Angel Island and his contradictory reasons for not including/acknowledging them in his written work when he evidently knew about their existence, eventually blocking the guy who brought it up when it became clear that Penders had no real justifiable reason for doing it, to say nothing of how badly it dismantles his arguments regarding the value and originality of his conceit of being the one to introduce the idea of the Echidna being a scientifically advanced people. 

The bottom line is that Penders was more than perfectly capable of researching these things on his own. He had the means and the excuse (his son) to look into Sonic stuff. He just couldn't be bothered to really do so, as in the end he wasn't really interested in actually adapting the games in any significant way. Nor has he ever bothered to have any real idea of what the Franchise provided for fodder- this is a guy who was convinced in the late 2000s that Sonic had only 'a few dozen games' at best and that the Archie books were this huge, international smash seller that is evidently more pronounced in the global consciousness than the games themselves. He literally lives in his own little world, and nothing is gonna dislodge him from it. 

Anyway... got a bit of a not update here.

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/1361837091638759424/photo/1

Yep. That's right folks. Lara-Su Chronicles will be available in POLISH now. 

Yep. Polish. Still no hint of when this will ever be released, but fret not- Polish people can now have their literary sensibilities offended like the rest of us when the time does come. 

[King Scoopa Koopa]

10 hours ago, horridus said:

A valiant effort, very valiant indeed. Though in the end this might have been a bit of a fruitless endeavor, for the simple fact that Penders excuses are just that- excuses. Not too long ago he got into a twitter argument over the presence of teleporters on Angel Island and his contradictory reasons for not including/acknowledging them in his written work when he evidently knew about their existence, eventually blocking the guy who brought it up when it became clear that Penders had no real justifiable reason for doing it, to say nothing of how badly it dismantles his arguments regarding the value and originality of his conceit of being the one to introduce the idea of the Echidna being a scientifically advanced people. 

The bottom line is that Penders was more than perfectly capable of researching these things on his own. He had the means and the excuse (his son) to look into Sonic stuff. He just couldn't be bothered to really do so, as in the end he wasn't really interested in actually adapting the games in any significant way. Nor has he ever bothered to have any real idea of what the Franchise provided for fodder- this is a guy who was convinced in the late 2000s that Sonic had only 'a few dozen games' at best and that the Archie books were this huge, international smash seller that is evidently more pronounced in the global consciousness than the games themselves. He literally lives in his own little world, and nothing is gonna dislodge him from it. 

Thanks, and yeah, I quoted the bit about the teleporters in my post.

It's not just Penders, though, as I demonstrated throughout  -- he just gave the line that kicked things off, but the majority of the people working on the book similarly ignored what was there in favor of making up their own stuff with little interest or effort regarding the source material. Penders just gets to be the flag bearer of, for lack of a better term, willful ignorance.

[horridus]

1 hour ago, KingScoopaKoopa said:

Thanks, and yeah, I quoted the bit about the teleporters in my post.

It's not just Penders, though, as I demonstrated throughout  -- he just gave the line that kicked things off, but the majority of the people working on the book similarly ignored what was there in favor of making up their own stuff with little interest or effort regarding the source material. Penders just gets to be the flag bearer of, for lack of a better term, willful ignorance.

D'oh! I missed that part. My bad there, my bad. This is a less than stellar day for my reading comprehension I fear. 

 

[AuroraRedwinters]

So, what will come out first?

The Winds of Winter or The Lara-Su Chronicles? 

[King Scoopa Koopa]

I don't know what "The Winds of Winter" is, but I'm putting all my money on that.

[SenEDDtor Missile]

5 hours ago, KingScoopaKoopa said:

I don't know what "The Winds of Winter" is, but I'm putting all my money on that.

It's the next book in the book series "A Song of Ice and Fire" that the Game of Thrones TV series is adapted from, and the author, George R. R. Martin is NOTORIOUS for his schedule slip. To put things in perspective, the book prior to the Winds of Winter, "A Dance with Dragons", came out back in 2011.

There's also a worry that the author will die before the series is ever completed due to his chronic procrastination, given how old he is.

[dwitefry666]

I'm pretty sure how Kenneth was planning to use Shade isn't copyright infringement: cheeky references aren't illegal. If you want proof of just how far you can push 'cheeky reference' in comics and text, then go see League of Extraordinary Gentlmen where 'cheeky reference' can extended to 'just flat out having James Bond, Fu Manchu and Harry Potter in your story if you don't name them'. He's wrong about everything else relating to this and copyright/ownership but he should be completely ok - legally speaking - to say that Julie-Su used Shade as a psuedonym. 

Also as far as I know, Liscenced products can fall into the public domain - I believe there was a time when Captain Midnight's comics (from Fawcett) were public domain but Captain Midnight himself wasn't for instance.

Also also - Kenneth: Nigel Kitchen was able to use Knuckles' set-up from Sega and make stories out of it just fine in Sonic the Comic and Sega themselves have got stories out of this set-up for decades of games now, so I guess they did do enough. 

[Zonic 2099]

I almost forgot to post about these.
https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/1357491943329026049?s=

Except no you won't. Like it or not Ken, you are going to have to make them new characters. Alicia Acorn can't be Sally's evil counterpart if you can't use Sally. You could make her the evil counterpart to your Sally Expy but then as I said your making a new character. It just doesn't work.

Um... won't he have to redraw large portions of all of those comics to make that work? I sincerely doubt SEGA will be okay with him profiting off of their characters. He'll also need to ask Mike Gallagher too won't he?

[SBR2]

Technically It isn't impossible I guess. I mean several Mickey Mouse Newspaper strips were legally released separate of Disney but had to make no reference to Mickey by name in the cover. Now granted those might have been in the public domain so that could be a whole other kettle of fish.

[Rabid-Coot]

Really feels like those "conversations" are just a framing device for posting ideas on twitter.

[King Scoopa Koopa]

8 hours ago, SenEDDtor Missile said:

It's the next book in the book series "A Song of Ice and Fire" that the Game of Thrones TV series is adapted from, and the author, George R. R. Martin is NOTORIOUS for his schedule slip. To put things in perspective, the book prior to the Winds of Winter, "A Dance with Dragons", came out back in 2011.

There's also a worry that the author will die before the series is ever completed due to his chronic procrastination, given how old he is.

Ohhhh, that stuff. Yeah, I've heard about that and how notoriously long he's taking.

Hm... can I double my bet?

[antyep]

1 hour ago, KingScoopaKoopa said:

Ohhhh, that stuff. Yeah, I've heard about that and how notoriously long he's taking.

Hm... can I double my bet?

I'll raise you a Mega Man Legends 3 and Half-Life 3. Seriously, those two games will be out by the time Penders puts up his book. Oh, and I'll throw in a FF7 complete Remake