Thanks Ken Penders

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[thankskenpenders]

Hello! Welcome to Thanks Ken Penders. This is a pinned post.

An introduction for this blog can be read here.

And you can read the archive from the start here.

I'm currently on hiatus from Archie coverage, taking time off after finishing a video game. In the meantime I still post here and there about new Sonic releases.

The TKP ask box is currently closed so I can focus on other things without getting a dozen questions about Sega mandates a day. Sorry!

[thankskenpenders]

I forgot to mention this here earlier this year, but back in January I had a very interesting conversation with my best friend Jake and his wife Kaley on the way to our friend Derek's wedding. I learned that Kaley, who illustrates licensed children's picture and coloring books and things like that for a living (you can see some of her work on her Bluesky), is coworkers with none other than the one, the only, Archie Sonic cover artist extraordinaire Patrick Spaziante. In recent years he's also been doing licensed children's picture and coloring books and things like that, you see. And they work together. Small world! Wow!

Anyway so this week Jake told me I had a surprise package coming, and I opened it to find this very special item Kaley got for me

[thankskenpenders]

Also on the subject of feline-themed DC characters in DC X Sonic: Metal Legion issue #2 I of course have to highlight how Adam drew the Wonder Woman adversary Cheetah as a full-on furry woman who's ripped as fuck with huge, gnarly fangs. She's awesome. God, he's killing it with these crossovers

[thankskenpenders]

DC X Sonic: Metal Legion continues to be the gift that keeps on giving

look at these incredible Catwomen Adam drew

[thankskenpenders]

Did a long-overdue bit of housekeeping: the desktop blog's theme has been overhauled! It now has a heavily modified version of Ocular, the same theme I recently switched to on my main blog.

At a glance it looks very similar to the old theme, since I kept the aesthetic as close as I could. But it has a slew of improvements including but not limited to: a search bar at the top, wider posts so that images display larger, full support for Tumblr's modern post formatting so that reblog additions are no longer nested like in the old days and article link previews are actually legible, and inline like and reblog buttons on every post!

I might tweak it a little more if any other issues pop up, but otherwise, enjoy!

[thankskenpenders]

IDW Sonic: On Lanolin the Sheep, and the problem with Sonic Twitter

A deep dive into the story of one of the most controversial IDW Sonic characters, and how algorithmic social media and fandom expectations m

Here it is! My deep dive into the story of Lanolin the Sheep, one of the most controversial IDW Sonic characters, and how algorithmic social media and fandom expectations made her so controversial in the first place. Yes, this is it, at long last: my big thesis on why the Sonic fandom on Twitter is like that, and my concern that it's starting to bleed into the comics.

[thankskenpenders]

IDW Sonic: On Lanolin the Sheep, and the problem with Sonic Twitter

A deep dive into the story of one of the most controversial IDW Sonic characters, and how algorithmic social media and fandom expectations m

Here it is! My deep dive into the story of Lanolin the Sheep, one of the most controversial IDW Sonic characters, and how algorithmic social media and fandom expectations made her so controversial in the first place. Yes, this is it, at long last: my big thesis on why the Sonic fandom on Twitter is like that, and my concern that it's starting to bleed into the comics.

[thankskenpenders]

My aforementioned big post that discusses Lanolin's arc in the IDW comics and then uses the fandom response to it as a spingboard to discuss why the hell Sonic Twitter is such an endless pit of misery should be going up tomorrow, probably. It's over 12,000 words long. Please look forward to it

[thankskenpenders]

State of the blog update 2026

I haven't really been active here on TKP in a while. I figure it's probably long overdue for me to post a general status update for the blog, to let y'all know where I'm at.

The TL;DR version is that further coverage of the Archie Sonic comics is still on hiatus. I'd like to get back to reading and discussing the rest of Ian's run, I just don't know when it'll happen. But it will happen. Eventually. It'd be really nice if it was this year. No promises, though.

The long version is that a lot of time has passed. It's been over 11 years since I started this blog and almost five years since I paused my Archie coverage to focus on getting @slarpg done. Things have changed a lot in that time.

I've changed, for one. I've changed as a person and a critic. I still love Sonic, but my perspective, my thoughts on storytelling, my familiarity with things that influenced these comics, my choice of words, all of this has changed over time. I'm now 32, and while there's a lot I still stand by, it's inevitable that I'm going to look back on things I wrote at age 20 at the start of this blog and cringe at things I didn't articulate well, or fannish takes about how it's bad writing when things I don't like happen to my faves, or things that feel like a relic of a different era of feminist pop culture criticism, or cheap "is this the writer's thinly veiled fetish?" jokes, or complaints that I hammed up for comic or dramatic effect.

Because it's been so long, it's kind of hard to fight the urge to just... start over, in some way? I already toyed with this in the format of the four TKP Addendums I wrote in 2021-2022, going back over the first three issues of the main series and also the Endgame arc in greater detail and nuance. But truly starting the whole thing over would probably be insane. I've covered almost 300 issues, and it would be foolish to redo all of that, even if I cringe knowing that the recommended chronological reading order of this blog means starting with a bunch of writing from when I was barely out of high school before getting to the stuff I'm really proud of. So how much I do and don't want to retread old ground is something I'm still considering, especially since I need to reread everything anyway as a refresher before I get back to analyzing Ian's continuity-dense run.

But perhaps more importantly, Sonic has changed in those intervening years, and with that change comes a very different cultural context for these comics.

When I began this blog, the Archie comics... well, they were still being made, for one thing. But they were also just a niche curiosity off to the side of the mainline Sonic franchise. They were a self-contained evolutionary offshoot of regular Sonic for the small subset of weirdos who were into them. Now, though, the IDW comics are canon, and the people making them are major contributors to the wider franchise. And make no mistake, I think they've absolutely earned it and that they're doing great work. But the level of scrutiny even the defunct Archie comics are under is completely different now that their most prolific writer is now the go-to writer across the franchise.

In other words: the constant needlessly heated discourse about Ian Flynn (and the rest of the western contributors) is fucking miserable, and it's made thinking about the Sonic comics significantly less fun for me. Not to the extent that I wanna quit, but, like, man. It sucks.

It used to just be some weirdos on DeviantArt posting unhinged Pepe Silvia conspiracy boards about how that damn Ian Flynn killed their ships because of his SJW agenda. Now that the IDW comics are canon and he's writing the games, it's everywhere in the fandom. For a lot of people, you can just disengage, just read the comics and ignore the internet and touch grass. But I run this blog, and that inherently means partaking in The Discourse and having people declare their Sonic opinions at me all the time. I can block fandom reactionaries and people will still just send me asks on Tumblr about my thoughts on their rage bait. Younger fans online also seem to be increasingly hostile towards the Archie comics and their fans as a whole in this climate where canon compliance is treated as the most important thing in the world. It's tiring, to say the least.

Almost a year ago now I started writing a longform post about this state of things, using the then-recent Lanolin discourse as a springboard to discuss how it's become miserable to talk about the Sonic comics online, and how I worry that that constant deluge of bad faith criticism anytime anything interesting happens is affecting creative decisions made on the IDW series. That should be the next big Sonic-related thing you see from me, whenever I get around to finishing it. I delayed it partially to see how the stuff with Lanolin played out long-term. But also, again, this shit is just such a drag now that I would usually rather focus my attention elsewhere, such as the various other things I write about on The Ponett Gazette. I'll get it done, though, because I think there are things in that post that need to be said.

Also, as a side note, the big video essay I announced the intent to do a while back is probably not going to happen, for anyone still waiting for that. I felt motivated to do it after thinking about all the times my writing about Archie Sonic has been ripped off for some clickbait bullshit in the wake of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video, and also Hbomberguy literally personally encouraged me to do it. But I am not a video essayist, and I need to prioritize my gamedev work. Maybe I'll still make it happen someday, but it won't be anytime soon. I also haven't felt the need to keep posting updates on Ken's Archie Sonic reprint collections because I feel like I'd just be repeating myself. Though the plagiarized variant cover for the hardcover collection he's doing of all his Shadow stories is at least ostentatious enough to be funny. It's always something with him. I just don't want this blog to devolve into a Penders callout blog in the absence of regular updates.

But, yes. Thanks Ken Penders will return. I just might need to rethink how I want to approach it a little, and also rediscover my passion for these comics in this strange new era we find ourselves in.

[thankskenpenders]

good things are still possible

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Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds review - It's great, but...

Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds is here! I felt a bit lukewarm on the road to its launch. Now that it's out... well, look, this review's late, we

New on the Ponett Gazette: It's my overdue review of Sonic Racing: Crossworlds! After a few weeks of playing, it's clear that this is the best Sonic racing game ever... but when it's so close to perfection, the few aspects that are lacking only stand out to me more.

[thankskenpenders]

So! I haven't posted on here in a while. Crossworlds is out. It's good. I still have mixed feelings on the post-launch updates focusing on random crossover characters with no voices over adding more deep cut Sonic characters, but the actual kart racing part of the game is excellent, as everyone playing is no doubt aware, and all the rival interactions are fun.

I'm not here to talk about Crossworlds in this post, though. I've been informed that Penders recently shared an academic paper he co-authored and submitted to the Berkeley Journal of Entertainment and Sports Law. So let's talk about that.

You can read the article for yourself, if you're interested. It's 36 pages, but it's a double-spaced PDF and half of it is footnotes, so it's not that long of a read. It's also not very good. Lots of rambling, some glaring typos and capitalization errors, many run-on sentences in desperate need of additional commas. It switches between a more straight-laced, formal tone outlining broader context for the history of comic copyright battles (this is, after all, meant to be published in an academic journal for lawyers) and a more casual, fannish tone that presumes familiarity with Sonic. What does the bold claim that the movies "restored much of the Western Sonic canon" mean? Beats me! The primary author of the article is listed as one Nicholas Stamates, who seems to be a lawyer, but is decidedly not a copyright lawyer—I think he's just someone with a law degree who happens to be a fan. So without much of his own perspective, he's largely just parroting Ken's usual version of events for the lawsuits. Nothing too new here.

The funniest part of the paper is its attempts to paint Ken's win against Archie as "a pivotal moment in the history of comic book creator rights under the law," which it obviously wasn't. Ken won on a technicality because Archie was comically incompetent and lost their contracts in a warehouse fire. (The paper specifies that it was a fire. I know fans have thrown around that possibility for years, but I can't remember if it had ever been confirmed before this paper.) Ken is right in his assertion that comic book publishers treat their creatives like shit and that more creators should own the rights to their own work, but his win was so specific that it really hasn't moved the needle at all in the decade since.

I wouldn't hold your breath, bud!

The abstract of the paper also hypes up the fact that the lawsuit had this huge impact, "affecting even the recent highly successful Sonic the Hedgehog movies by Paramount." In the actual paper this amounts to reminding us of the time Ken went on Twitter and threatened to sue Paramount for giving Knuckles a dad and saying an echidna gained power from the Master Emerald one time (just like Enerjak!!!!) in the second Sonic movie. And then Ken didn't actually sue. He just tweeted about thinking about suing. But maybe someday he'll change his mind and try to sue again! You never know!

Of course, as always, while Archie gets torn a new one, Ken mostly gives fawning praise to Sega and avoids placing any of the blame on their shoulders in hopes that they might someday work with him again. The paper outright points to the alleged Sonic Blitz datamine months back and says that they should license some of his characters for that, too. After all, as one footnote proudly proclaims, he sold over 500 copies of the first Lara-Su Chronicles book! If that's not proof positive that his work is still unironically beloved and that there's high demand for his characters to return, I don't know what is.

Anyway I lied. The actual funniest part of this paper is that it cites me twice.

[thankskenpenders]

I have to admit that the more we see from CrossWorlds, the less enthusiastic I am about it. Mostly thanks to all the crossover DLC.

Early on, following its announcement and the public playtest, CrossWorlds was pitched as this big celebration of Sonic in kart racing form. A big roster of characters, a bunch of tracks based on locations across the series, even the return of the Babylon Rogues and Extreme Gear for Riders fans. It seemed like it was doing everything right.

And then they started announcing the crossovers.

First they announced the first few Sega guest characters who'll be added for free. And that was fine. That made sense. It's all Sega stuff, and seeing Ichiban and Miku racing against Sonic characters is funny.

And then right after that, they announced... Minecraft. Minecraft Steve will be in the Sonic racing game, along with a whole Minecraft track, as part of the season pass that's being announced months before the game is even out. It seemed very arbitrary, just doing a crossover with something super popular as a marketing stunt.

And then, as had been previously leaked, we got the SpongeBob announcement. SpongeBob and Patrick will be in the new Sonic racing game, along with a Bikini Bottom track. And like, yeah, I love those first few seasons of SpongeBob as much as the next late-gen millennial, but does that mean I think SpongeBob makes sense to include here? No. And later in the season pass we'll also be getting TMNT and Avatar crossovers, because of course we are. Nick characters are literally half of the season pass. I will admit that the turtles are a good fit for Sonic, but the rest? Come on. But please be sure to pay $90 USD to get the Digital Deluxe Edition so you can play as Aang, everyone!

The current fan favorite (Sega-developed) Sonic kart racer, All-Stars Racing Transformed, also had its fair share of random third party guest characters. I didn't mind it there. The difference to me is that the selection there was so random and asinine that it was kind of charming, and easy to ignore. Including Danica Patrick, Wreck-It Ralph, and one of the guys from the YogsCast in a Sonic racing game was so stupid that it was funny. It was also easy to ignore in a game that already had such a hodgepodge crossover roster.

But here it feels cynical. It's a generic corporate synergy move in what was pitched as purely a Sonic game. Viacom will shove SpongeBob, the turtles, and Aang into every game they can as cosmetic DLC, from Fortnite to Fall Guys to Smite and beyond. We're not getting these characters because someone at Sega thought they'd be the best fit for Sonic, but rather because Viacom owns the Sonic movies and they wanted to do cross-promotion of their Most Valuable IP with Sega. This wasn't a decision made by a creative, it was made by a boardroom. And also they had to do it on the cheap, I guess, because they couldn't pay to get Tom Kenny or Bill Fagerbakke to provide voice lines, or even get the rights to use stock clips of theirs. So SpongeBob and Patrick are just going to be mute in this racing game that places a huge emphasis on having a ton of voice lines and interactions for the Sonic cast. There's a very real chance we're just gonna see lobbies full of mute crossover characters when playing online. Sonic is simply a part of the Viacom corporate machine now, whether we like it or not. And Minecraft is here because it's the most popular game in the world and its movie just made almost a billion dollars, I guess.

It just feels like it's watering down the identity of the game so much. I like Fortnite, but I don't need every other game in the world to turn into Fortnite with all these corporate crossovers. It's fucking exhausting. I won't go as far as going "slot crisis" mode here and assume that these DLC characters have taken slots from other characters I'd rather see included, but like... If the game comes out and Tangle and Whisper aren't in it, but SpongeBob is? Sorry, but you're never going to hear the end of it from me lmao

(I know fans have already datamined an Extreme Gear for Whisper that seems to point to their inclusion, but that's not exactly a confirmation. It could literally just be the Extreme Gear thrown in as a nod to the comics and nothing else. Also now that we have all these mute crossover characters part of me worries that they wouldn't even bother casting voice actresses for them, which is half the reason why I'd be excited to see them in a game in the first place. I know it's a whole different rights situation with the Nick characters, but still, the thought is in my head.)

So yeah. I dunno. It'll probably still be decent. But these last few announcements have kind of killed the excitement for me.

At least I still have Ring Racers.

[spiritsonic]

sparkFLAME #1 is out now!

If you haven't heard, I and a bunch of my friends (mostly from the official Sonic comic-making world) from the have put together a comic anthology sampling all of our original projects! The PDF is available for download on itch.io-- that's 70+ pages of comics of all shapes and sizes, for free! (although we'll happily take tips)

My contribution is a five-page preview of my story, Ensouled! Here's a sneak peek:

[thankskenpenders]

I refuse to believe this bit in DC x Sonic #3 is anything other than an absolutely diabolical Archie reference on Ian's part

Sure, there's the quip where Beast Boy calls Knuckles an otter so that he can write it off as merely a joke about the ultra-obscure fake Sonic character Rankles the Otter. Gives him plausible deniability with Ken's copyright bullshit, since it takes so little for him to threaten litigation. But come on. Come oooonnnnnn. Where is a Sonic comic reader's mind going to go when there's a joke about green Knuckles?

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Random bit of news: apparently IDW Sonic is now getting officially uploaded to Webtoon! They've got the first few issues up now, and will be adding more regularly.

This is neat, but if you'll allow me to complain... the formatting here is attrocious lol. I hate this for the same reason that I hate it when people tell me they read comics via YouTube uploads: they weren't drawn to be read one cropped panel at a time! Page layouts and the way the story flows are important! They're a key structural element of the artist's intent! To fit Webtoon's mandatory phone-friendly vertical formatting they've literally had to cut everything up, insert a bunch of white space, and even rotate some wider panels 90 degrees. It's attrocious.

But, hey, it's an officially sanctioned free way for people to start reading the comics, so that's probably a net win, even if the old purist in me hates Webtoon's formatting. And it's fun to see the enthusiasm for the series in the comments.

[thankskenpenders]

I can't believe after all the speculation they just randomly dropped a TailsTube episode with Professor Victoria appearing in the flesh on the same day as a Nintendo Direct