Mobius: 25 Years Later, 13 Years Laterer

July 4, 2024 10:24 PM

Ken Penders has finally published a "Lara-Su Chronicles" comic about the Archie Sonic characters. Bobby "Ponett" Schroeder reviews the contents and explains why this is legal.
posted by one for the books (20 comments total)

This was a hell of a read, about a topic I had effectively zero familiarity with. It's like something hbomberguy or Dan Olson might put together, and the ending really does kind of sum things up perfectly.

but boy, though, the general inscrutability of the topic itself makes it kind of like reading the Rosetta Stone recreationally (I loved it)
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:47 PM on July 4 [3 favorites]

I found this riveting as well despite knowing nothing about it. A couple inducements:

• Penders took on a corporation and won. He wrote the stories years ago and the courts said he owned them and can continue them.
• The end result is kind of amazingly terrible.

posted by zompist at 2:02 AM on July 5 [5 favorites]

it’s eleven pages of characters standing around and talking while nothing [expletive] happens… (I censored these myself[)]… yeah, it’s kind of a shocker… Who is this for?
posted by HearHere at 2:35 AM on July 5

To quote Golden Globe and Academy Award winning actress Mary Steenburgen, “What the fucking fuck?”

That was… upsettingly compelling. Like trapped at a dinner party of strangers that are getting divorced except I could have stopped reading at any time but didn’t.

I am creatively inspired by the idea that this person feels no imposter syndrome, so why should I?

What is it about Sonic the Hedgehog that is so unfathomable to me? I played the video game on the Genesis when it came out and it was fun! But at no point in time did I think it would become a rabbit hole of almost pathological creativity.

I want to see a collab with Rob Liefeld so it can be renamed sonic characters standing in pools of water because of an inability to draw feet.
posted by Skrubly at 3:01 AM on July 5 [6 favorites]

I know absolutely nothing about this, but that was fascinating. I also know nothing about art or comics, but even I can tell that the artwork in that comic is so bad. So, so bad. I really appreciated the reviewer's conclusion: Go make your art, because if THIS guy doesn't have imposter syndrome, no one should. That's an oddly powerful conclusion for something so obscure.
posted by damsel with a dulcimer at 3:07 AM on July 5 [4 favorites]

that art is so bad i want to put it on the fridge
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:57 AM on July 5 [2 favorites]

Sure, but was it Erol Otus bad?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:03 AM on July 5 [2 favorites]

saw someone rather aptly describe Penders's art style here as "pre-redesign Movie Sonic"
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:03 AM on July 5 [1 favorite]

was it Erol Otus bad?
posted by JustSayNoDawg
no dawg
posted by HearHere at 6:04 AM on July 5 [3 favorites]

Penders took on a corporation and won. He wrote the stories years ago and the courts said he owned them and can continue them.

Not just the stories, but the characters he created for the stories too. He created a whole legion of echidna and their society, and a few others -- royal bodyguard Geoffrey St. John seems to be a favorite of his -- all of which are now his legally because Archie misplaced the contract they had with Penders.

And this is what he did with them.
posted by gc at 6:37 AM on July 5 [1 favorite]

Like most of you, I came to this with zero familiarity with any of it. Aside from being aware that there is a videogame character called Sonic the Hedgehog, and that there are Archie comics which must presumably be published by some company, which I guess is called simply Archie Comics.

So now having read about how this all came to be, it's the courts I feel sorry for. I can see the judge going back into chambers at the end of another long day of Ken Penders v Archie Comics, reflecting on all those years of devotion to the law, the hard work and sacrifices to get on the bench, and just putting his head in his hands and sobbing.
posted by Naberius at 6:50 AM on July 5 [2 favorites]

This is rather what I'd imagine Chuck Austen would do if he got control of his X-Men stories.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:51 AM on July 5 [1 favorite]

Archie Sonic is like, Knuckles as Jughead right? (I refuse to learn otherwise.)
posted by joeyh at 7:35 AM on July 5

What is it about Sonic the Hedgehog that is so unfathomable to me? I played the video game on the Genesis when it came out and it was fun! But at no point in time did I think it would become a rabbit hole of almost pathological creativity.

This actually has very little to do with the video games and goes back thirty years to the "good" Sonic cartoon which aired on Saturday mornings and is often referred to as Sonic SatAM. Without falling victim to nostalgia, it was a slightly better-than-average show which accidentally combined a bunch of then-current tropes in children's animation in an interesting way. Star Wars-style rebellion? Check. GI Joe vehicles and weapons? Check. Robots. Check. Teenage protagonists who are slightly older than the target audience being responsible and living with no adults to boss them around? Check. Talking animals? Check.

When the producers licensed a video game about a blue hedgehog who runs really fast, I don't think they intended to create a furry version of the Boxcar Children fighting all by themselves in a planetary rebellion, but that's what they ended up. It wasn't Batman: The Animated Series, but it did carry some good emotional beats and was different enough from everything else in children's programming at the time to appeal to a diverse group of people who probably weren't watching Batman: The Animated Series. (I wasn't)

Even though the comic had originally started off as it's own thing, when the show was cancelled after two seasons leaving an abrupt cliffhanger, the comic realigned itself to be a continuation of it and Ken Penders kind of let this go to his head declaring himself to be the keeper of SatAM's legacy. A combination of Sega being off in the wilderness and not giving a shit about it's licensed IP and the comic having really good sales allowed Penders to do whatever he wanted. At one point there Sonic the Hedgehog crossover with Spawn. Ken also had a habit of inserting some....highly questionable material...into a comic whose primary audience was preteens.

Ken was eventually let go from the comic and then he prevailed in the lawsuit and here we are. He's still carrying the torch for a thirty year old saturday morning cartoon show made for children.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:56 AM on July 5 [11 favorites]

I was marginally aware of the Ken Penders situation (which RonButNotStupid summarized above), but as for the latest update, wow and also lol. Thanks for the post!
posted by May Kasahara at 8:10 AM on July 5

I was trying to figure out how there were *two* people willing to do a deep dive into this while reading the "...highly questionable material..." Medium link RonButNotStupid, but lo and behold:

Me. My name is Bobby Schroeder, and I’m stupid enough.

Five years ago, I started a blog to archive my journey through Archie Sonic. I jokingly gave it the name “Thanks, Ken Penders.”

posted by sagc at 8:17 AM on July 5 [1 favorite]

Wow, I'd read a few times over the years the Ken Penders saga. There's part of me that wants to buy this just to keep encouraging him. Art this bad and this genuine doesn't come along often... actually, it comes along constantly, probably most of the time, but it's rare it's presented before a wider audience for consumption by a corporation that accidentally did the right thing and didn't get to have any of the rights that obviously no abstract entity should ever be allowed to own.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:28 AM on July 5 [1 favorite]

I was ten when Sonic SatAM first aired and I had Internet access early enough to have a front row seat for some of the fandom's early infamous works which I often printed out on tractor-feed paper to read offline (and fortunately/unfortunately I haven't been able to find any of them, including some missing fics that I know I once held in my hands...). Since then I've largely stayed out of Sonic fandom and never really got into the comic except for a brief period in college when I could buy it off the rack at the grocery store and use the self-checkout to hide my shame. But like a lot of people, I do try to keep up with what the latest drama is.

I appreciate Bobby's take on things. She's a refreshing voice in a fandom that throughout the 90s and 2000s was dominated by guys who were already middle-aged when the Sega Genesis was released. There are so many reviews from that era (originally posted to USENET and listservs, natch) where the reviewer crawls up their own ass trying to explain how some obscure reference or half-assed allegory to real-world events proves without a doubt that the comic is actually being written with adults as the primary audience and kids just aren't able to appreciate the profoundness of it because how would they know that the title of the story references an old folk music standard from 1864?

I wouldn't be surprised if so much of Ken's questionable creative decisions were made because of an unhealthy feedback loop with adult fans who were constantly craving justification for being into a comic about a talking blue hedgehog who could run really, really fast.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:35 AM on July 5

Finally finished the piece in the link that RonButNotStupid posted (the "highly questionable material" one) and while it's pretty long, it's still absorbing in the manner of some of the better longform YouTube videos--Jenny Nicholson's Evermore and the more recent Star Wars one, hbomberguy's RWBY--on things that I normally wouldn't know anything about. The art is better than that in The Lara-Su Chronicles; it's better suited to the characters, being the usual sort of clean-line comics art that most funny-animal characters are done in. But, somehow, that makes the writing even worse; someone who thinks that They Have Something Important To Say and is creating A Deathless Work of Art, but doesn't seem to have the requisite talent or perspective on their own shortcomings. (The bits about the dads in the comic are especially sad.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:48 PM on July 5

Left a bit off my comment above: since the art is better, or at least competent, it doesn't distract from the bad writing in the way that the bad art in The Lara-Su Chronicles does.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:50 PM on July 5