Hey! Sonic question! What're your two cents on the Ken Penders(?) deal? I don't really know much about it so I'm curious about a Sonic Fan's opinion!
OH KEN PENDERS ... INTERESTING SPECIMEN, THAT ONE
so, the basic rundown is this: at some point in the past, this joker somehow got himself hired on the Sonic Archie comics as headwriter. a lot of the unpleasantness of the series can be traced back to him in one way or another. aside from being an atrocious writer and artist, he’s also antisemitic and a massive sexist, and has a lot of disturbing ideas of right and wrong. he’s also got no sense of what’s ethical to portray in a comic book for children. a cute cartoon bee dying of a drug overdose? overt and extremely disrespectful Holocaust references? child abuse framed as a-okay because it comes from a place of caring? making one of the primary romantic relationships incestuous? that’s all that Ken Penders brand flavoring, baby!
now, one of mr. Penders’ most unfortunate traits is that he is absolutely obsessed with Knuckles’ character. and I mean obsessed. he spent most of his time on the comics making stories about Knuckles. in his mind, Knuckles is quite literally the cartoon animal equivalent of Jesus (not a metaphor! yes, seriously). because he’s spent so long adding asinine lore to the character, he’s also convinced that on some level, he actually kinda owns the character. writing about Knuckles is apparently his life mission, copyright laws be damned.
then a funny thing happened back in the mid to late 00′s: real, completely decent writers saw his extensive work on the comics and thought “you know, maybe we can do something with this? we’ll dust off the sexism and the incest and the child abuse, and then we actually have a pretty cool plot! let’s see if we can salvage these ideas”
see, different Sonic media doesn’t tend to mix - the games are basically a source code that various spin-off stories pick up and alter to an extent to make their own stories. it’s extremely rare that anything from the spin-offs is re-incorporated back into the games, as I believe the copyright process gets tricky. however, back in 2008, a game called Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood was released, and unfortunately for everyone, it had the gall to try to adapt some of Ken Penders’ Knuckles-related lore in a copyright-friendly way that fit into the game series’ canon.
they never should have. Ken Penders, somehow furious that something he had created for a franchise he didn’t own was being used elsewhere in the franchise, filed a lawsuit against SEGA. and unfortunately for SEGA, the legal documents that stated that Penders didn’t have the rights to any characters he created for the comics were lost in a fire years ago.
the lawsuit was successful, Penders obtained the rights to his 100+ awful characters, the second Sonic Chronicles game was cancelled, and the Sonic Archie comics - a series which had been building up continuity and stories for over a decade - had to be rebooted with a giant chunk of its cast and stories missing.
since then, Ken Penders has been trying to make his own comics with his characters, and the art is uglier than ever ... also Knuckles is apparently still involved in the series somehow, because copyright only matters when it concerns characters that he made, it seems
on the one hand, the whole fiasco is a little funny. reading about all his horrible stories is entertaining and the man is now a laughingstock among Sonic fans. on the other hand, I feel really, really bad for the people who loved the Archie comics and followed them for years. I don’t like them, but other people do, and this one idiot single-handedly destroyed the entire series.
also, as much as I want to fist fight Ken Penders, the Sonic Chronicles adaption of his stories is ... good. it’s so good. it’s one of my favorite stories in the whole game series. I don’t know who the writers of that game are, but they took all the fun and potentially interesting parts of the comic lore and cut out all the bad stuff, and then added some really cool and creative elements, and I just
look. the central character introduced in that game - Shade - she really stole my heart when I was a kid and I still adore her. it’s been over a decade and the legal problems have never been resolved, her story was never finished, and she has never appeared in another game. she isn’t so much as referenced anywhere in later games.
Ken Penders is a fantastic source of unintentional comedy. he’s also a terrible person who, aside from being offensive, also just ruined a lot of people’s fun.
here’s a whole article about all the ridiculous shit he added to the comics, if you want to laugh at him with us. no existing knowledge of Sonic required.
