The entirety of every Sonic canon is happening in his head as he slowly bleeds to death on the forest floor.

have you been reading Grant Morrison, Caminante?

Here's a positive analysis of the Ken Penders affair:

http://www.corporate-sellout.com/index.php/tag/ken-penders/


And some hostile counterpoints:

http://forums.sonicretro.org/index.php?showtopic=21670



It seems like most Sonic fans consider him to be a heretic and an enemy of The Hedgehog, but I guess he's built a small following around his Mary Sue echidna character (she is the daughter of Knuckles, can control the Chaos Emeralds, and has all the powers of both Knuckles and Shadow, only better)

In other words he's like Chris-Chan, except he's made bigger waves beyond localized legal trouble.

He's the guy who killed Princess Sally.

"Penders artwork has also come under heavy criticism and has been universally panned as too human like for anthropomorphic characters."

OZ - speaking of that, here's a great example of said criticism, courtesy of SonicRetro:



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While I'm not a fan of how the comic is going CURRENTLY (the fish people idea is kind of dumb), I'll still take Flynn's take on the comic.


Eh. Marine life societies isn't inherently a bad thing, but the designers did to the fish people what Uekawa does to his MAMMALS, which is making them circle on oval/rectangle (though granted Charmy follows this design methodology but he gets points for trying to be adorable). When it comes to more reptilian or less mammal-like creatures, the official Sonic artists tend to focus more on long faces rather than compressed. Take Vector, he's all serpentine in his design, yet he still fits with the other characters in the series as a Sonic character. In fact his design's probably the most unique out of all the other animals in the series, but you could argue that's because he's the least mammalian of them.

Now you can also argue the artists are trying to avoid the disgust that was Penders and co's realistic animals bullshit that was probably started thanks to SATAM making that acceptable. The chicken in that Sonic Band concept that first showed Vector also had a more true-to-the-animal design, even if it was silly as hell. Bean has a duck bill, the Rogues have beaks, Bark actually looks pretty bear-like, etc.

What I'm trying to get at is the fish people themselves could definitely have some creative liberties that the designers chose not to take in favor of instead making them Sonic and Knuckles base templates + fins, but I digress. Really, I don't find the undersea stuff to be a problem at all, though while not the most original thing in the world it's definitely a first for this series as far as I know, and miles ahead the bs Penders coulda spat out :V

If it was just about royalties owed Penders by Archie Comics, no one would care about the man beyond "cool, someone was smart enough to assume ownership of created characters due to Archie's slapdash work-for-hire legal documents".

Unfortunately, his pitch material tends to look like this and The Lost Ones (http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=110853). His echidna characters constitute the one property that has a tangible fanbase, and that fanbase is Sonic fans. I don't know why he doesn't find that depressing as hell.

He really doesn't seem like that bad a guy! His videos are shit and his characters sound stupid, but the copyright move was great, particularly when you stop to consider that these days, copyrights rarely ever enrich the people who actually *created* the stuff you're reading/watching. You know, like copyrights are supposed to do! Instead, copyrights get claimed by the employing corporations, enriching company owners and leaving the actual creatives as little more than disposable meatsacks, to be sucked dry and then discarded once a property becomes sufficiently brandable to generate steady profits through reboots alone.

Of course, as far as Sonic fans are concerned, the whole thing's upside down. To them, Penders' characters were great (a whole tribe of magic echindas COOL); they're mad because he didn't show sufficient loyalty to SEGA and Archie Comics to just roll over and let them fuck him like they fuck everyone else.

That's a pretty good point. An uncle of mine invented something while working for GM. GM saved millions and my uncle got a gold watch.
If this Penders guy is fighting the power then more power to him.

Cena, I know a lot of greybeards who have similar stories. Most are OK with it, because the old bargain was basically that you'd be employed for life in exchange for the IP rights to what you invent for them. It's a tradeoff that most people found acceptable ( it worked for your uncle, no? )

Now that employees are disposable meat units, it's a pretty fucked up arrangement. Plus, around 1998 or so companies started in with some real draconian shit about owning everything you ever made or will make, with the only compensation being whatever you're paid today ( no future to bank on ). At the time I was working for a small firm and the president of the company came to me directly because he knew I'd balk at this garbage. Much to everyone's credit, we worked out an equitable arrangement. It worked because my outside interests were far away from what I was doing for them, so I was willing to do the contract with the stipulation that the only material covered was in their field of business.

Oh my God, you're right! He was!

http://www.commuterbarnacle.com/gonterman/sally1.html