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

[Verb & Noun]

Before I mention anything, I'm new... sort of. Had an account once before but I was a smelly teen then.

 

I read over those tweets from Ken earlier and I began to wonder who his project is really for, his folks, or a captive audience? The way he just dismisses any criticism really points toward the former, at least in my opinion.

 

Ten Blenders claims he has a huge audience constantly well wishing him that is looking forward to LSC, but that we never see them because they're don't want to get into scuffles with people online (literally a 'my audience is too mature to do that' type of claim).

 

The thing is, no fanbase is completely 100% mature, and no fan who feels passionately is going to not say anything at all to defend someone if they truly care about someone's work.

 

The only person we have really who passionately defends Ten is RoyMustang, though I suspect he's around because he's a troll that got banned from Ian's board.

 

You don't really see legitimate fans sticking up for Ten Blenders other than a very small handful on his board, but they've been there for years and years already. And even then, some of those people who've been there for ages aren't exactly unanimously supporting Ten's work, either.

 

Not to mention, a silent majority who refuses to speak up for you is a silent majority that is quietly agreeing with the vocal minority through lack of action. If they do exist, they're not doing Ten any favors by being quiet. You can't really find any positive information about Ten Blenders basically anywhere on the net. That's not going to help Blenders with his endeavors and his 'silent majority fans' are doing him a disservice by not speaking up.

 

Or by not existing. Either or.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Who wants to hear more stupid crap about Evil Sonic and also another thing confirmed for his book.

 

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488474669461155840

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488497068596412416

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488494891840708608

[horridus]

Cripes, Penders, everybody knows Evil Sonic came first. Why do you feel the need to reiterate this fact?

 

Aside from heaping resentment that Scourge was far more popular than Evil Sonic ever was. 

 

And oh how cute; he's being inclusive. I wonder what offensive, retrograde stereotyping he'll employ for THIS gay couple? 

[Yoshizilla-Rhedosaurus]

Every single little thing Nen Flenders does recently is making him more like a real life Wario.

Except without going on adventures. Or being anywhere as likeable.

[antyep]

Dear sir, that is just an insult to Wario! Say your sorries! XD

[Disonoid 3000]

I really, really want to see someone make some kind of webcomic or something with Evil Lara-Su, just long enough to see if Ken complains about it or not. Seeing him call Evil Sonic "my character" on his forum is painful. 

[Tenko]

Haha that would be a really great prank actually, create an Evil Lara, expand and change her personality and then trademark the hell out of it. I wonder what he would say.

Also..its nitpicking I know..but wasn't it Anti-Sonic back in #11 not Evil...I know its pretty much the same guy but yeah..

[ThatSpookyGuy59]

I noticed Ken tried to sidestep around that, "Socially awkward" comment, even though he used it to justify Rotor's sexuallity years back.

[Kuroha Ai]

Hello, I'm new here

I initially visited this forum to catch up with Sonic-related news (still do), then I stumbled into this thread. I kind of lurked on this thread for the last few days and boy, the guy is a genuine trainwreck.

 

To be honest, I didn't know about Ken Penders and wasn't interested in him (I never read Archie Sonic before because of I can't obtain the said comic here in my country). But then I saw the... awful LSC!Lien-Da's render circulating on the web. I just... is it really something considered as a professional-level work? I am no professional but even I'm sane enough to know that there's something wrong with the render.

 

The more I read about this guy the more concerned I become. I know Ken doesn't work for the comic anymore, but the fact that he ever worked on it and his "characters" were originally belong to the comic may caused confusion for the Sonic fans. I'm even confused with the stance of his current project; is this count as a fan work or as an original work? Because from what I see his character design is not very original to begin with...

[Disonoid 3000]

Hello, I'm new here

I initially visited this forum to catch up with Sonic-related news (still do), then I stumbled into this thread. I kind of lurked on this thread for the last few days and boy, the guy is a genuine trainwreck.

 

To be honest, I didn't know about Ken Penders and wasn't interested in him (I never read Archie Sonic before because of I can't obtain the said comic here in my country). But then I saw the... awful LSC!Lien-Da's render circulating on the web. I just... is it really something considered as a professional-level work? I am no professional but even I'm sane enough to know that there's something wrong with the render.

 

The more I read about this guy the more concerned I become. I know Ken doesn't work for the comic anymore, but the fact that he ever worked on it and his "characters" were originally belong to the comic may caused confusion for the Sonic fans. I'm even confused with the stance of his current project; is this count as a fan work or as an original work? Because from what I see his character design is not very original to begin with...

 

Ken has a completely different definition of "professional level" than the rest of the English speakers on the planet. For us, it means something done with the skill and quality of a professional. For him, it means anything made or sanctioned by him. So it's only professional level in Ken World.

 

As for whether or not it's a fan work or an original work, he vehemently insists it is one hundred percent disconnected to Sonic. Except for Not-Knuckles, the character designs and the fact that he says it still fits with canon. Completely. Once again, it makes sense only in Ken World.

[Verb & Noun]

Hello, I'm new here

I initially visited this forum to catch up with Sonic-related news (still do), then I stumbled into this thread. I kind of lurked on this thread for the last few days and boy, the guy is a genuine trainwreck.

 

To be honest, I didn't know about Ken Penders and wasn't interested in him (I never read Archie Sonic before because of I can't obtain the said comic here in my country). But then I saw the... awful LSC!Lien-Da's render circulating on the web. I just... is it really something considered as a professional-level work? I am no professional but even I'm sane enough to know that there's something wrong with the render.

 

The more I read about this guy the more concerned I become. I know Ken doesn't work for the comic anymore, but the fact that he ever worked on it and his "characters" were originally belong to the comic may caused confusion for the Sonic fans. I'm even confused with the stance of his current project; is this count as a fan work or as an original work? Because from what I see his character design is not very original to begin with...

 

Men Renders believes that because he's worked at some professional capacity before that it means everything he does is de facto professional in every way. However, it's extremely obvious that he has a very distorted capacity to even understand quality and his own limitations.

 

Exactly how professional he even is is hugely questionable anyway- the only thing he's known for is Sonic, and he only got that job because he told someone 'Oh hey my kid plays that game' and because he's got connections (in fact, connections are very tightly tied to why he's gotten -anywhere-). No one really expected the Sonic comic to still be around to this day- it was expected to be a short lived, cash grab comic in the same vein as Archie's other licensed comics. Is it because of Men Render's 'spectacular writing' that it lived on? In my opinion, no. I'd say it'd have more to do with Sonic's absolutely gargantuan fanbase- the Sonic comic continued to survive even during the period when it's art and writing was absolutely abysmal as part of my evidence for that. Am I completely dismissing that he contributed anything? No, he did write in some interesting world building, when he could be bothered to remember what he was writing for, but his best stories were written in collaboration with other writers- not on his own.

 

Sonic was really the best he could do, and it wasn't great. His attempts to go anywhere outside of Sonic have all failed. His Lost Ones comic series, which he claims to be a smash hit 'best selling comic book series', only sold one issue when Image looked at the sale figures and decided to can it- and that was with him constantly teasing the series in the Sonic book and roping Jim Valentino into a Image/Sonic crossover deal because Valentino wanted to draw a Sonic comic for his child.

 

Not even mentioning Renders's other projects like "The Republic" (which is dead in the water). If you compare Renders to Bollers, a fellow writer on the series who left the comics around the same time Renders did, Bollers has had an amazingly successful career and has been nominated for an Eisner for his writing.

 

As for if his new project, Lara-su Chronicles- is it a fan work or an original work? Renders claims it's an original work. Which is fair enough and I'll tentatively agree to, as a lot of his writing had absolutely nothing to do with Sonic because he persistently used Sonic as his own personal playground with no regard to established characters (who looks at Knuckles, a guy living alone on a flying island guarding a big giant glowy rock, and goes 'ah yes, he's the product of divorced parents'). The designs for his work, however, are extremely derivative to the point of looking like fanart. It's due to his inability to understand the basics of design and having absolutely no idea what quality is. He doesn't understand that just changing the style the characters are drawn in isn't the same as changing the features that makes them echidnas. They still look like Knuckles despite him stretching them out, giving them pug faces, and making them very... chin-y. So it's original work that looks like fanart.

[LilMissSam]

Hello, I'm new here

I initially visited this forum to catch up with Sonic-related news (still do), then I stumbled into this thread. I kind of lurked on this thread for the last few days and boy, the guy is a genuine trainwreck.

To be honest, I didn't know about Ken Penders and wasn't interested in him (I never read Archie Sonic before because of I can't obtain the said comic here in my country). But then I saw the... awful LSC!Lien-Da's render circulating on the web. I just... is it really something considered as a professional-level work? I am no professional but even I'm sane enough to know that there's something wrong with the render.

The more I read about this guy the more concerned I become. I know Ken doesn't work for the comic anymore, but the fact that he ever worked on it and his "characters" were originally belong to the comic may caused confusion for the Sonic fans. I'm even confused with the stance of his current project; is this count as a fan work or as an original work? Because from what I see his character design is not very original to begin with...

Welcome, first of all. I too am a newbie (well, returning after I had an account over a year ago I no longer have access to), and also because of the train wreck that is Ken.

Second, everyone's assessment of the man's pro-status is right on. Karl, as someone mentioned, got an Eisner nom! People ken claims to be working with like J Axer, Dawn Best and Spaz are all well-established in the art fields of their own. Heck, Spaz still works for Sonic! Doubt Ken's offering anyone, pay-wise, either. Probably one of those "when it's finished you'll make money" deals. Totally pro.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Hello, I'm new here

I initially visited this forum to catch up with Sonic-related news (still do), then I stumbled into this thread. I kind of lurked on this thread for the last few days and boy, the guy is a genuine trainwreck.

 

To be honest, I didn't know about Ken Penders and wasn't interested in him (I never read Archie Sonic before because of I can't obtain the said comic here in my country). But then I saw the... awful LSC!Lien-Da's render circulating on the web. I just... is it really something considered as a professional-level work? I am no professional but even I'm sane enough to know that there's something wrong with the render.

 

The more I read about this guy the more concerned I become. I know Ken doesn't work for the comic anymore, but the fact that he ever worked on it and his "characters" were originally belong to the comic may caused confusion for the Sonic fans. I'm even confused with the stance of his current project; is this count as a fan work or as an original work? Because from what I see his character design is not very original to begin with...

Welcome to the forums! As everyone else said, Kenny Boy can't take any criticism about his work. When he does something stupid such as the use of a certain poem in a Sonic issue or ripping off Knuckles, he always comes up with some stupid excuse as to why he can get away with it. He's even admitted that he knows he ripped off Knuckles by saying ''I'm in my rights to do so'' and ''because I created M25YL, I own Knuckles' future design''.

 

Ken is also not known for even being able to work well with other people. Archie Sonic around Issue 50-160 was a team effort with Karl Bollers and Ken Penders both writing during that time. Karl in my opinion was the better writer at least when he introduced characters like Mina into the comics, she was at least likeable off the bat unlike Ken's characters that needed either Karl or Ian to write for them before they got interesting. The biggest known examples of this is first when Ken wrote that he considers everything not written by him as non-canon. 

 

The most known example is back in the arc named Return to Angel Island. Ken had written this whole silly Echidna world that more or less he claimed was the best of Mobius, as being far more advanced for example. Karl had written this arc and in doing so had changed some things about Ken's version of Angel Island in order to have it tie into the games a bit more (Something Ken never did as he never even bothered to look at any of the games). Now in Issue 134, Karl had introduced Antoine had changed and was planning to have a big reveal that something had changed Antoine and turned him evil but Ken being so petty over Return to Angel Island decided to get Karl back and so wrote a stupid two issue arc where Antoine was revealed to be Patch/Evil Antoine while Sally was forced to marry him because her father who was clearly sick and not thinking straight told her she had to marry Antoine and in doing so, Ken ruined Karl's idea for the reveal.

 

Ken also has a huge ego problem, believing himself to be the savior of the series and just outright dismisses any other people's contributions to the comic and even took credit for things he didn't do. For example, he took credit for introducing the romance between Bunnie and Antoine when really It was another writer who had done so and this fact was even mentioned in one of the archives.

 

There's also the fact he constantly puts out low quality work and almost always comes out with bad stories and yet claims them as high quality work. A big example being the pitch for a Sonic movie, here's a post of where I went more in depth about it a few pages back. I'll repost it here.

 

Repost starts here:

 

Considering the low budget horribly filmed and drawn storyboards/video and how he tried to pass that off to Sega as ''professional'' along with a powerpoint that more or less stated what Sega already knew rather than saying why should Ken make this film and why Sega should even give this guy a minute of their time, I very much doubt that Ken even noticed that the intro doesn't make sense.

 

Plain and simple, Ken did low quality shitty work like getting a blurry still image straight from Sonic Adventure from a TV rather than actually just going to Google Images and finding a high quality picture of the Sega logo, having bad lighting and crappy work filming, and also had bad voiceover along with the completely unneeded crap about ''My Daddy knows the real version of how this story happened'' along with a random intro which introduces us to nothing about Sonic. For example, who's Uncle Chuck? Where is this place Sonic lives, how do these characters have what's needed for creating a hovercraft?.

 

There's also the lazy work that just makes this a completely laughable effort, that logo which is created by lazy photoshop effects, badly drawn storyboards, Ken claiming that he is the one who knows the true version of these events, the horrible filming and lighting, and the completely stupid Sci-Fi setting all show exactly how bad this project would have been and words don't describe how smart Sega were to just can the entire project then and there. 

[Big Panda]

Are we sure he's not talking about Mace when he says "there'll be a gay couple"?

[Disonoid 3000]

Are we sure he's not talking about Mace when he says "there'll be a gay couple"?

 

It says "among Lara-Su's group of friends", so probably not. 

[Your Vest Friend]

Are we sure he's not talking about Mace when he says "there'll be a gay couple"?

He said that the couple is amongst Lara-Su's friends, and I think Kneecaps would be a bit too old for the story.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Great. He's talking about more crap about Rotor in M25YL among other things.

 

The Rotor stuff:

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488541974190759936

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488574516583362561

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488575684927709184

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488576980346875904

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488728094853709827

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488728784334368768

 

Other things he said:

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488542497967075328

https://twitter.com/KenPenders/status/488542783087448066

[Your Vest Friend]

I don't think in generic stereotypes

 

Are you kidding me. 

 

 

I don't even get what he's on about with the other point. 

[SoundBunnie44]

Well getting into sonic because of non-gaming media is true enough, I'll give him that, I got into Sonic as a kid because of AOSTH.

But that stuff about Rotor is BS.

[-Mark-]

You know, I was discussing this with my brother yesterday, and an interesting point came up. How long has he been trying to push this crap now? 2-3 years? How the hell is this taking him so long? 

 

You can write a novel from scratch in that time. In terms of an ongoing comic, he should at least have been able to get it out of the gate by now. Considering US comics seem to release monthly, he'd at least need to put out an issue a month.

 

Sure, you can argue he wants to plan ahead as much as possible, but surely, if he was actually taking this seriously, surely he'd have put out at least one issue by now, in the 2-3 years he's been going on about it. How has this been a work in progress for so long with nothing to really show for it? Even fan projects move faster than this, and that's from people who do it in their spare time. For someone who supposedly makes a living out of making comics, how the hell has he not been able to put out even a single issue yet? It's ridiculous.

[Your Vest Friend]

You know, I was discussing this with my brother yesterday, and an interesting point came up. How long has he been trying to push this crap now? 2-3 years? How the hell is this taking him so long? 

 

You can write a novel from scratch in that time. In terms of an ongoing comic, he should at least have been able to get it out of the gate by now. Considering US comics seem to release monthly, he'd at least need to put out an issue a month.

 

Sure, you can argue he wants to plan ahead as much as possible, but surely, if he was actually taking this seriously, surely he'd have put out at least one issue by now, in the 2-3 years he's been going on about it. How has this been a work in progress for so long with nothing to really show for it? Even fan projects move faster than this, and that's from people who do it in their spare time. For someone who supposedly makes a living out of making comics, how the hell has he not been able to put out even a single issue yet? It's ridiculous.

 

 

Oh, but don't you know? It's not a comic, it's a graphic novel. That apparently absolves him from the responsibility of a sensible release schedule.

[-Mark-]

And what, Western graphic novels usually collect 4-6 issues worth of material? Even at a stretch, that shouldn't take him this long to put out one volume. 

 

Also, hasn't he said at one point that he's basically going to make, use and recycle stock art for this comic rather than draw every individual panel from scratch? If that's the case, not only is that absolutely pathetic for a so-called professional, but makes the fact he's taking this long even more laughable.

[Big Panda]

Pretty sure "gays get all the ladies" is a stereotype... (In reference to Mace)

[ThatSpookyGuy59]

The hell is a 'generic stereotype'? First time I heard that. Ever.

[horridus]

He has inferred that he's going to be using CGI imagery for his comic rather than traditionally drawn, if only because his statements wouldn't make sense otherwise. 

 

It gets all the worse when you consider that, to our knowledge, Ken doesn't have any kind of job or profession he's working at on the side. His free time has been all but limitless, and yet he STILL has precious little to show for any of it.