Ken Penders

Ken Penders is an American comic book creator and writer. He makes his living as a freelance writer and artist, accepting assignments involving screenplays, storyboards, character design, backgrounds, website graphics, and some the magazine covers, portraits or commissioned work.^[1] Penders illustrated the cover of the complete series DVD set of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Career

Penders is known for his work on the comic series Sonic the Hedgehog, which is published by Archie Comics. He primarily worked on the former side-series Knuckles the Echidna before it was cancelled due to poor sales in 1999, though he continued to produce stories and artwork for the main title until 2006.^[2]

In addition to his work for Archie Comics, Penders has written and illustrated stories for other comic publishers including DC, Marvel, Image and Disney on titles as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Disney Adventures, Savage Sword of Conan, Captain Atom, and The Green Hornet among many others. He also branched out into other media, producing children's activity books and creating graphics for CD-ROM games.^[3]

Lawsuits

SEGA and EA vs Penders

In January 2009, Penders began copyrighting various stories, characters, and artwork that he created for Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog comic series and spin-off titles, and these claims were certified as of April 2010 by the US Copyright Office.^[4] Penders also filed a lawsuit against Sega and EA Games in 2011 for alleged copyright infringement in the game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.^[5] The case was dismissed without prejudice September 26, 2011, then again in February 2012, after the case had been refiled four days after it was originally dismissed, despite warnings from Judge Otis Wright who dismissed the case both times. In October 2013, the CA 9th Appellate Court upheld Judge Wright's initial ruling.^[6][7]

Archie Comics vs Penders

After declaring that he would "use every legal means at my disposal to protect and preserve" his works, Archie Comics subsequently filed a lawsuit against Penders in the fall of 2010 in an attempt to retain their copyright holdings of his characters and concepts.^[8] In the fall of 2012, Archie Comics fired its legal team and replaced it. Following this and a court settlement,^[9] many characters created by Penders abruptly ceased to appear in the comics.^[10]

Current writing

The Lara-Su Chronicles

In December 2011, Penders announced plans to utilize Echidna characters he created for the Archie comics in a graphic novel series entitled The Lara-Su Chronicles.^[11] Said series is planned to feature Lara-Su, one of his original characters created during his work at Archie, as its protagonist.On March 5, 2014, Penders announced on his Twitter account that his characters were no longer echidna but Echyd'nya, an alien species.^[12] Penders stated reasons for the change was that he needed to make some adjustments to broaden the audience while making certain longtime fans get answers and resolution and because of the difficulty he has seen with people pronouncing the word echidna.^[13]

Reception

Fan reaction to his plans for The Lara-Su Chronicles have been largely negative. Many members of the Sonic series see him as responsible for the removal of the characters he created for the comics., However after the settlement Archie comics was given the rights to use the characters under certain conditions. Some of these conditions include any story featuring Lara-Su which Archie Comics wishes to put into production must be reviewed and approved by Penders and nothing must contradict what was established in the Mobius: 25 Years Later stories he wrote.^[14] Penders stated on his forum "Those stories, especially Locke's death, are canon as far as THE LARA-SU CHRONICLES and [I are] concerned."^[14]

Rather than pay royalties for their continued use, Archie rebooted the comic, erasing and rewriting many of the remaining characters left. As a result, many ongoing stories were abruptly ended. This left fans divided, some welcoming the new changes and others reviling Penders for almost having the comic cancelled.^[15] Not missing a beat, Penders took this opportunity to purchase all now defunct comic characters from previous writers that were no longer owned by Archie Comics and incorporate them in his Lara Su Chronicles series.^[16]

Penders artwork has also come under heavy criticism and has been criticized as too human-like for anthropomorphic characters, as well as being riddled with severe anatomical errors and beginner artist mistakes.^[17][18] Much of Penders' influence over the western audiences of Sonic has been met with negativity over his actions. In 2005 it was revealed Ben Hurst, writer over the series Sonic SatAM had sparked interest with Sega executives over developing a possible movie to be the long desired conclusion to the series and was approached by Ken Penders, asking to be included. Unbeknownst to Hurst, Penders developed his own pitch and ideas and was subsequently turned away. When asked about this in his forum his response was "Ben Hurst doesn't know how movies are made in Hollywood."^[19]

In 2006 When Shout Factory Studios released the DVD collection of Sonic SatAM, a fan art contest was held to include their work for the DVD release. Penders approached Shout Factory offering to illustrate the cover, who was later discovered to have copy and traced much of the art from screenshots of the show. Fans were outraged at this turn of events with Penders denying to have copied, and that the screenshots were merely reference. However one clearly can see direct copying, with slight alterations on the cover artwork."^[20]

References

External links

• Ken Penders' official website
• Ken Penders' message board