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

[baba_944]

Even Penders seems to get annoyed with the guy every now and then. Course, he has yet to tell the guy to shut his trap, and he doesn't seem to mind when BobR pulls the paranoid conspiracy pitbull bit on his forum... 

What guy and forum?

[CrownSlayers Shadow]

I still think Mustang is just trolling, myself. Trying to get Archie fans riled up and Penders is none the wiser.

Either that, or he is one hell of an ass-kisser.

[mistercokehold8]

Ok.....is there anyone who can honestly stand up for this pathetic excuse of a man now?

[anna]

Answer: no. Not unless they honestly, truly believe him. Unfortunately, there are those people. I'm willing to bet most all of his real fans don't follow his social media, though...

[biznizz]

https://twitter.com/trublusonicfan/status/486169545233539073

 

Mmm'kay. I fully admit that I'm not really familiar with how certain royalties work, so I'd appreciate it if someone could correct me on this.

 

Ken was hired by Archie, most likely, to work on the Sonic books as a work-for-hire "freelance" writer/artist, of which his contibutions would be officially part of SEGA's intellectual property. Archie, known for some of their unscrupulous creditiing problems, either loses or did not have official proof that Ken was WFH, and thus had a legal standing for an expectation to own his work.

 

Would a WFH contract allow for additional royalties following the initial payment for pages made to the writer in terms of reprints? Even if they don't legally own the characters/concepts they created?

 

Because, and perhaps this is because I was tired, I thought that Ken seeked out copyright infringement for the Dark Legion/Nocturnus similarities, after he had trademarked nearly/all of the things he did for the Sonic book behind Archie's back in preparation for the lawsuit against SEGA & EA/Bioware, at which point Archie joined in & countersued Ken as well. I didn't think that royalties played as big a role in Ken's suits as his characters did.

 

I mean, I'm sure it probably did, but I have no idea how royalties work with WFH, so that's why I asked.

[PKKiss]

Honestly I don't know how royalties and WFH contracts go either, I'm making educated guesses here. But at this point this idiot's just spewing any bs and accusing me of stuff I haven't actually said yes hello I'm PKKiss94. Like the condoning theft thing.

 

Ken was hired by Archie, most likely, to work on the Sonic books as a work-for-hire "freelance" writer/artist, of which his contibutions would be officially part of SEGA's intellectual property. Archie, known for some of their unscrupulous creditiing problems, either loses or did not have official proof that Ken was WFH, and thus had a legal standing for an expectation to own his work.

 

This sounds about right though. And as far as the royalties' role in the suits go, he obviously needed the money to continue work on his series.

[Delta Starfire]

I take my eyes off this topic for a couple of days and I miss all the drama... Oh well, it seems to have passed, so I shan't revisit the details myself. Not when Zaysho, SuperLink, horridus, and Hogfather have already said what I would have said.

 

Looking at that page from The Lost Ones, the thing that stood out to me the most is that, while Penders seems to have done some research into the Trinity test firing, he's totally oblivious to the fact that the US Air Force did not exist in 1945; instead, it was the US Army Air Corps, rather than a separate entity, like the Royal Air Force. That sort of thing is pretty inexcusable... like using the 1801 Union Jack in a film set in the 1760's... I'm looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. 

 

Also, including The Lost Ones in a page from StH or KtE wasn't an isolated incident. 

 

 

This was in StH #65's really lengthy backup story about the history of the Kingdom of Acorn and the Great War. Fascinatingly, in issue #74, Bollers had to write a one-page intro to the part of the story featured in that issue to explain why Uncle Chuck was at the library in the backup story, while the main story showed he'd been captured and reprogrammed by Robotnik. Basically, Amy and Nate just watched Sonic and co's shuttle blast off and expositioned about how Amy had just been at the library with Uncle Chuck only the day before. It's like Bollers was having to tidy up after Penders, because Penders was too busy trying to write his own version of Sonic and had no interest in collaboration. 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

It's even got Penders signature underneath the title of The Lost Ones book in Sonic.

So more or less. He's writing himself into the Sonic comic canon?

[Delta Starfire]

It's even got Penders signature underneath the title of The Lost Ones book in Sonic.

So more or less. He's writing himself into the Sonic comic canon?

 

Hey, it's a post apocalyptic future Earth. That kinda works?

 

Except there's no reason The Lost Ones should come in a volume that thick. Unless he's planning on writing more?

[Verb & Noun]

Clearly Hen Renders is god king of the Sonic universe.

 

Also according to Fen Wender's twitter:

"One other thing I've done while here in FL is actually get some drawing done for TL-SC graphic novel cover and website. Look for both soon."

 

He had enough free time to draw for TLSC. I think it's safe to say he didn't get a whole lot of traffic and had plenty of free time, as he's apparently not the world's fastest artist.

[Disonoid 3000]

I take my eyes off this topic for a couple of days and I miss all the drama... Oh well, it seems to have passed, so I shan't revisit the details myself. Not when Zaysho, SuperLink, horridus, and Hogfather have already said what I would have said.

 

Looking at that page from The Lost Ones, the thing that stood out to me the most is that, while Penders seems to have done some research into the Trinity test firing, he's totally oblivious to the fact that the US Air Force did not exist in 1945; instead, it was the US Army Air Corps, rather than a separate entity, like the Royal Air Force. That sort of thing is pretty inexcusable... like using the 1801 Union Jack in a film set in the 1760's... I'm looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. 

 

Also, including The Lost Ones in a page from StH or KtE wasn't an isolated incident. 

 

 

This was in StH #65's really lengthy backup story about the history of the Kingdom of Acorn and the Great War. Fascinatingly, in issue #74, Bollers had to write a one-page intro to the part of the story featured in that issue to explain why Uncle Chuck was at the library in the backup story, while the main story showed he'd been captured and reprogrammed by Robotnik. Basically, Amy and Nate just watched Sonic and co's shuttle blast off and expositioned about how Amy had just been at the library with Uncle Chuck only the day before. It's like Bollers was having to tidy up after Penders, because Penders was too busy trying to write his own version of Sonic and had no interest in collaboration. 

 

Ya know, I could see this as vaguely cute (or, at least not annoying) if it was a one time thing, and the guy hadn't proceeded to shove his characters into the comic. But no, he just had to keep going. 

[goku262002]

So heres somebody that actually did go to Pender's booth and did actually get a bad experence off of it, GeneHF from Retro:
 

I spoke with Penders on Sunday at Miami Supercon.

It did not end well. For the record, I found it hilarious that he was placed almost directly across the Freedom Planet booth, which was getting extremely healthy attention all show, and most of the time his booth was...



He is the Virgil of the Sonic Community, for you wrestling fans out there. Give this hack no attention.

To keep a long story short, it was mostly some Mobius 25 Years Later inconsistencies DavidTL brought up when I was pooling for some questions. Admittedly, I wasn't looking for a serious interview like I gave the Freedom Planet guys (post coming soon, once I transcribe it) but being told I was wasting time when clearly there's no on else to occupy the time aside from a few children, strange old men, and some really idiotic fans that somehow like his work unironically (really, I feel it's safe to say the pictures on his twitter is roughly equal to actual number of guests he got across all four days)... yeah, he deserves all the crap he gets and then some. None of those were a factor while I was there.

I offer no impartialness to him. Hope this crashes and burns hard.

His wife, who I assume was with him sometimes at the booth, seems very nice though.

Thats why all the Sonic fans are passing his booth, Freedom Planet is not too far away.

[Verb & Noun]

Their booth was across from his booth, actually. So he probably benefited a lot from Planet Freedom- he probably wouldn't of gotten the same traffic without them.

[SuperLink]

Gene is a relatively respected member of the community, so I don't see much reason to doubt this tale. It makes sense too. But man, somehow it's not surprising that a mostly non-profit fangame like Freedom Planet is getting more attention than someone trying to make a profit of ripoff characters and pretending they're totally original.. sigh.

 

Also wow Penders is either extremely stressed or he just doesn't sound like a very pleasant guy to be around. How can you be at a con full of kids and fans if you're going to be rude or turn away anyone who's even remotely inquisitive? That's not gonna win him any popularity points..

[Verb & Noun]

Gene is a relatively respected member of the community, so I don't see much reason to doubt this tale. It makes sense too. But man, somehow it's not surprising that a mostly non-profit fangame like Freedom Planet is getting more attention than someone trying to make a profit of ripoff characters and pretending they're totally original.. sigh.

 

Also wow Penders is either extremely stressed or he just doesn't sound like a very pleasant guy to be around. How can you be at a con full of kids and fans if you're going to be rude or turn away anyone who's even remotely inquisitive? That's not gonna win him any popularity points..

 

He can turn them away because they weren't praising him. Anyone who is remotely critical (Gene was asking about inconsistency questions) is basically an idiot in his eyes.

 

His whole table front featured Sonic Archives and other Archie stuff he worked on so people could buy it and sign it.

 

(From Gene at Sonic Retro again)

As suspected.

[Zaysho]

https://twitter.com/trublusonicfan/status/486169545233539073

 

Mmm'kay. I fully admit that I'm not really familiar with how certain royalties work, so I'd appreciate it if someone could correct me on this.

 

Ken was hired by Archie, most likely, to work on the Sonic books as a work-for-hire "freelance" writer/artist, of which his contibutions would be officially part of SEGA's intellectual property. Archie, known for some of their unscrupulous creditiing problems, either loses or did not have official proof that Ken was WFH, and thus had a legal standing for an expectation to own his work.

 

Would a WFH contract allow for additional royalties following the initial payment for pages made to the writer in terms of reprints? Even if they don't legally own the characters/concepts they created?

 

Because, and perhaps this is because I was tired, I thought that Ken seeked out copyright infringement for the Dark Legion/Nocturnus similarities, after he had trademarked nearly/all of the things he did for the Sonic book behind Archie's back in preparation for the lawsuit against SEGA & EA/Bioware, at which point Archie joined in & countersued Ken as well. I didn't think that royalties played as big a role in Ken's suits as his characters did.

 

I mean, I'm sure it probably did, but I have no idea how royalties work with WFH, so that's why I asked.

I wouldn't know the details myself, but going off of this post, which is a basically a rundown of the entire situation from both sides, his contract likely didn't cover royalties/reprints and it's unlikely it would have.

 

 

Archie Comics maintains that Penders signed a Work for Hire contract. Under Work for Hire contracts, a creator is paid a flat fee for producing content. All artwork, stories, characters, plots, symbols, etc. become the property of the employer (or a third party, which would be SEGA in this example).  Under Work For Hire, a creator does not receive further compensation/royalties if their work is reprinted, if their characters are reused due to popularity, or even if their work results in merchandise/mass media. This is not a salaried position – at any point a publisher can decide to simply stop asking a creator to submit work. These “no royalties” contracts are no longer the norm in the industry for creators working extensively on titles.

 

And there's this:

 

 

When asked to elaborate on working for Archie, Ken Penders later stated that unless a creator’s “contract allows for him to be paid royalties, he isn’t seeing a dime from any of the new reprint releases in any format featuring his work. He also more than likely doesn’t have a health care program paid by the company, nor can he collect unemployment insurance in the event he were cut loose. Chances are there’s no vacation pay or reimbursement for expenses either.”

 

So it probably depends on the conditions set in the contract, and since the work was almost never reprinted up until fairly recently, it's unlikely their contracts would've had something along those lines. It also seems that Penders knew this, but still decided to go after everything when he realized Archie fucked up with the contracts. I think royalties would likely only cover reprints more than anything, since Archie and most comic companies effectively own whatever creators contribute (they're lucky if they're acknowledged, it seems, going by the sad case with DeCarlo--but these were original characters/stories, not material created for a licensed property), and in the case of Sonic, SEGA would've been the rightful owner of those characters and concepts (since that's basically the reason why Archie can make the book in the first place, SEGA would have to own everything in that book).

 

I'm not going to claim I have that good an understanding of all this, but as far as the WFH, royalty situation, it seems to boil down to: "Is it in the contract?" and since it probably wasn't, he wasn't going to be seeing anything from it then, but since reprints were likely never covered in the contracts, that may explain at least Scott Shaw's case against Archie, for example (we'll ignore Scott Shaw's other nuttiness for the time being). It's unlikely, however, that that would apply to characters and concepts, though. Somebody else is welcome to correct me if I'm missing something.

[Dejimon11]

*slow claps* congratulations ken I don't know how you do but your able to make yourself look worse. I've said before that there are times where I feel sorry for the man but he always does something to make me realize he deserves it this time I have nothing but complete hatred for this man. It still baffles me how this is still thing. How is he getting away with this Scott free?

A year ago I was upset that we may never see these characters in the sonic book but seeing what's doing with them I really don't care anymore he can keep them for all. As for Lara su's dad you can't tell me that is an original character that is knuckles a SEGA owned character what is thinking that's just asking for a lawsuit. I seriously hope this project bombs and blows up in his face cause this guy needs the biggest slap to reality.

As for that trailer how old is that? Is this the sonic movie he pitched to other studios with that horrible concept art? Or is this the movie he pitched to SEGA and ultimately killed all chances of the SatAM movie?

[Disonoid 3000]

By the way, is he selling Sonic stuff or just showing it? If it's the first one, why is he allowed to do that, exactly?

 

(Sorry, I don't really know how conventions work.)

[horridus]

Oh yes. EVERYTHING he sold is Sonic Stuff. Sonic Stuff that he did, true, but Sonic Stuff that he had to *buy* from Archie in order to resell. 

 

The irony, she is delicious. 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Well that explains how there were people at this stand and also explains the Sonic thing. Most were probably at the Freedom Planet stand and then saw the Sonic books and decided to go over and get them and then Ken probably suckered them in for a photo op. 

 

But seriously? Any tiny little bit of criticism and he decides that his time is being wasted which from the sound of it with only a few people there along with him having enough time to do TL-SC artwork, along with the pictures all being Sonic stuff very clearly shows me that no one is taking a interest in this awful rip-off which means at least most people have the sense to look at the shitty art and crappy script previews to decide It's bad. But as usual, Ken takes little things and blows them out into massive successes.

 

Also Horridus is correct. All the pictures showed Archives and Legacy and Select books aka the books Archie is putting out. Even at that, you could see Sonic Archives 22 (The one with Super Sonic and Knuckles) and didn't Ken only do the back up stories in those issues?

[Gabz Girl]

So even when someone asks a simple little question regarding his comic, they are ignored or turned away by him? That's pathetic. As an artist you deserve critique, you can't have people kissing your ass and praising you all the damn time, it's not right!

 

Now it also makes sense why there were people at his stand, it being right opposite Freedom Planet's stand (which is ten times better than his rip off of a comic book!) and the fact he was selling Sonic comic books, obviously luring them in. I just hope they didn't actually think his LSC project looked good, because anyone with good sense would see it and be turned off by it immediately!

[horridus]

Also Horridus is correct. All the pictures showed Archives and Legacy and Select books aka the books Archie is putting out. Even at that, you could see Sonic Archives 22 (The one with Super Sonic and Knuckles) and didn't Ken only do the back up stories in those issues?

 

That would be from the time that Karl Bollers was main writer, which means yes, Penders only did backup. 

 

Penders being Penders, he more than likely views that as the more valuable  and worthwhile material, despite taking up less of each issue's story. 

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Well I only got Archives 19,20, and 21 (More or less from Modern Sonic intro-Sonic Adventure adaptation or at least the first 4 parts of the adaption) Honestly, Knuckles' part wasn't really that good (Wasn't half of it taken up to tell some stupid story about the Chaotix and Julie-Su getting kidnapped leading to Locke to save their asses?)

[horridus]

Basically yeah, of which was to set up Ken's shoehorning of the Knuckles clan into the pre-exisitng Echidna mythology he had created. 

 

Even taking into account that a lot of what was wrong with the Adventure saga was the end result of them being made to do it while simultaneously only have a japanese language copy of the game to do research, that one still stands out as stupid to me if only because of how much simpler it would have been to just say 'Oh yeah, this group of Echidna were a separate culture to the ones from Albion/Angel Island'. 

 

But no, they just HAD to be connected somehow, despite how ludicrous their origins are.... seriously, they were the warriors of a high tech society who, for some reason, just tossed aside all their modern stuff to live life as quasi-Mayan warmongers? The hell?

[Zaysho]

Also Horridus is correct. All the pictures showed Archives and Legacy and Select books aka the books Archie is putting out. Even at that, you could see Sonic Archives 22 (The one with Super Sonic and Knuckles) and didn't Ken only do the back up stories in those issues?

It's funny about that Archive volume; IIRC that's when creator credits started showing up on reprints and even though he wasn't the main feature writer at that point, for whatever reason Penders is billed above ALL the other creators, including Bollers, on the cover. I have to wonder if Archie did that to appease him should he raise another stink about it...