Archie Sonic ... Oh, Here We Go.
Okay, I’m going to bump and butt some heads with people here but good God this grinds my gears.
Okay, so I’m sure that a lot of Sonic fans out there are familiar with the Archie comics debacle with Ken Penders.
In regards to that, let me say that I’ve read and researched quite a bit on this topic ... Especially because of everything and anything about Sonic is my special interest.
Now, let me get out the facts here. Sonic Archie was the longest standing comic for a video game and won a Guinness Book World Record.
The writing on these comics was a hit or a miss. Some things were good, some things were bad, and some things were just down-right weird. Most of the story was written by Ken Penders who had pretty much free reign to do what he pleased with no repercussions.
When Archie and SEGA started to want a say in the comics because of popular media reasons and trying to actually get involved Penders didn’t like that. He really didn’t like that. He left the comic book and that’s where Ian Flynn took the helm and tried to detangle the convoluted mass that was Archie Sonic canon.
In this regard, he fixed a lot of things I had found tiring in the comics, especially Penders’s open-ended plot points and fixing characters that had no depth.
So, Penders's response to his characters being used was to start copyrighting them. Which, he had no right to do working for a licensed property where any and all of his creations were the property of the said licensee.
Now, Archie should have kept up with their contracts, which is definitely on them and is what cost them the lawsuit for the characters Penders took with him. But the subsequent CR and lawsuits with Archie shouldn’t have happened.
Penders, 1, should’ve just walked away and stayed away. Now we have this twitter nightmare of him gloating about these Sonic characters he pretty much stole and made them into these ugly uncanny valley-esque characters that are just so nauseating to look at. I mean, seriously, these LSU comics are not going to come out. Penders has no deadlines to meet, no pages to show, and even though he’s tried every which way to separate these aliens in design you can still tell that they are based of Sonic and are Knuckles recolors.
But, there are people out there, the small devout few who stand with Penders saying that he had every right (Which he did not) and that those characters were his property. His pettiness is what caused an entire comic run to crash. He caused the continuity reboot and subsequent canning of the comics by SEGA from Archie.
Of course, this could've been avoided by these things. 1) Archie actually giving a damn and backing up their worker freelancing contracts and keeping a hold of the copyrights. 2) actually trying to rebuff Penders in his copyrighting and stopping him from doing so since he had no right in the contract stipulations of writing for a licensed property. 3) Paying Penders his royalties for reprints of his stories, which is not unfair. 4) Keeping a reign on Penders from the very beginning so he didn't have so much creative freedom in the first place so his ego wouldn’t run wild leading to said events.
Then there’s this doozy of a conspiracy theory which some fans of Penders state that Flynn was sent in by SOJ (Sega of Japan) to disassemble the SOA Sonic continuity and get rid of the Freedom Fighters and reboot the series from the ground up to make the games the only continuity, and that being the Japan games.
Now, this theory makes me laugh because Ian was brought on to clean up Penders’s mess. Yes, he had some questionable things in his past with fan comics, but what fan of any series hasn’t written some strange stories?
But let me break it down for you. Penders is the one who was in the wrong and he cast the first stone by copyrighting contracted properties under the licensed brand. He’s the one who got over 200 characters removed from the comics, and he’s the one who gloats on technicalities. Ian gets shit-talked for trying to fix something that got broken. He had to deal with the aftermath of long convoluted political story plots and 1-dimensional romances in a Sonic comic. A comic about a blue anthropomorphic hedgehog with a need for speed.
Put blame where it belongs, which is on Archie and Penders. Penders for being a petty jerk and Archie for not having their shit together to keep their property. It’s no wonder why SEGA won’t touch the FF and other companion stories after this fiasco.
