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

I do find it kind of hilarious that even though people keep looking at the Knuckles show and being like "omg Penders is gonna HATE this he's gonna be SO MAD" (particularly with the "Knuckles' dad" puppet that people keep claiming looks like him)... Ken's barely said a damn thing about the show. He made one tweet saying he didn't like the trailer and then seemingly just didn't watch it. He doesn't seem to care. He's off in his own little world hyping up the imminent release of the first Lara-Su Chronicles book

IDW's Fang the Hunter miniseries! All four issues are out now! I don't have as much to say about it as I did with the Knuckles show, but I do have some thoughts.

The Knuckles show

The announcement of a live action Knuckles streaming miniseries was surprising, to say the least. I mean, what would such a show even be about in a version of the Sonic universe with no Angel Island and barely any characters from the games around? Is he gonna go treasure hunting with the gang from Montana or something? Would a streaming miniseries have the CGI budget to squeeze in any new game characters, even briefly? Rouge? Amy? At least one member of Team Chaotix? Anyone?

Now the show is finally out, and it turns out what they actually made was a comedy show about bumbling deputy sheriff Wade Whipple, the minor comic relief character played by Adam Pally who you might not even remember all that well from the first two movies, with Knuckles as his sidekick. While, yes, Knuckles does get a decent amount of screentime and opportunities to punch bad guys and do cool moves from the games, large stretches of this show focus on Wade's personal life, to the point that a couple times I almost forgot I was watching a Sonic-related show. If you're judging it purely by the metric of how well it adapts and engages with its source material, this surely must be one of the worst adaptations the Sonic franchise has ever seen.

So then, despite some huge complaints... why do I kinda like it?

(This will contain full spoilers for the Knuckles show.)

I don't remember when the last time I did a game tier list was, but folks have been posting these on Twitter and I'm sure it's been a while. Not sure there's all that many shockingly spicy takes here lol

The wording of this headline is really funny. Like. It makes it sound like the IDW comics have been gone for a while and are getting revived with a complete visual overhaul. The main book has been on break for one (1) month, and the new designs in question are Sonic Riders outfits. Because the next arc is a Riders arc

The Knuckles show is here and it is, without a doubt... going to be a six-episode streaming show with movieverse Knuckles in it

I will say that while I definitely kept my expectations in check, knowing this would be a streaming show where they probably wanted to keep costs down by having Knuckles be the only CGI character present in most scenes, I'd be lying if I said part of me wasn't curious if they'd throw in someone like Rouge, who is, you know, Knuckles' longstanding rival and also a main character in the game that the next movie seems to be loosely adapting. But no. We didn't get this. Again, I wasn't counting on this, but given the second movie was so warmly received for leaning way harder into Actual Stuff From The Games there was a small part of me that wondered if we'd see Rouge or the Chaotix or literally any game characters we haven't seen before. Maybe even Amy or Metal Sonic, who remain conspicuously absent from the movieverse

Anyway, the actual show they made looks... okay. My expectations were very low based on the premise of "Knuckles trains Wade in the ways of the echidna warrior." It's mostly just comical to me how little this has to do with anything from the games. It feels like in order to get a third movie with SA2 overtones the scales needed to be balanced with six episodes of pure movieverse antics, where Knuckles hangs out with members of the human supporting cast and fights new human villains. (This is also a useful reminder that the third movie is not going to be a direct 1:1 adaptation of SA2's story. It'll take liberties with it.) Judging it on its own merits, it looks... fine? Not something I'd watch if it didn't have Sonic characters in it, but it looks fine

Also Pachacamac is here. I guess

Welp. I am nothing if not committed to the bit

(One way or another I have to buy the book to cover it for the blog)

As has already been reported elsewhere, Penders recently took to his personal blog to announce a major milestone...

The first Lara-Su Chronicles book (which is mostly a Mobius: 25 Years Later collection) is real. The proof copy has been manufactured. These will be in peoples' hands in a matter of months.

We've already seen the godawful cover art plenty of times before, but I'd like to highlight how bad the back cover blurb is here. It's mostly background info with very little about the actual story. "Some characters would be married with families of their own. Others walked different paths. The fate of a world would be determined." That's all it says about what happens in the comic! The rest is inside baseball stuff. Not exactly a great hook.

However, I feel like this weirdness may be because Ken had to very carefully design the front and back cover so that it isn't selling itself as a new Sonic book. As we've discussed before, Ken regained ownership of all the stories he wrote for Archie Sonic after the settlement with Archie, as well as all the characters he created for the series. He's allowed to do whatever he wants with his old work and his own characters, but he's forbidden from selling new Sonic-branded products. They have to be distinct at a glance. Per the settlement, Sega needed to make sure Ken's future works didn't "have a look or feel as though they were part of a Sonic universe." This is one of the reasons why the cast has been redesigned in a new (bad) art style for The Lara-Su Chronicles.

So while the old comics reprinted inside the book still contain Sonic characters, since Ken can still use that existing material that was forfeited to him in the settlement, you'll notice that nowhere on the new front or back cover does Ken show a character owned by Sega. The only characters shown using their appearances from the original comics are Julie-Su and Lara-Su, who Ken owns. Knuckles has been replaced with his TLSC equivalent, K'Nox, who's probably juuuuuust different enough to be considered a legally distinct character. In the blurb, Ken can mention that he wrote the original stories for Sonic and Knuckles-branded comics, because that's just a factually true statement, but he can't advertise that the book he's selling contains Sega-owned characters like Sonic, Knuckles, or even Sally. They're just... "some characters."

I remain fascinated by the weird needle Penders has to thread here due to the very specific copyright situation he's found himself in.

Sonic Prime Season 3: Final episodes, final thoughts

Well, here we are. The final seven episodes of Sonic Prime are out on Netflix, concluding the story of Sonic's adventures in the Shatterverse. I've previously shared my thoughts on the first and second seasons, which I was pretty mixed on, but there were still glimmers of hope. The fluid animation, Shadow being fun in all his appearances, Nine being fairly interesting as a jaded alternate version of Tails, etc. There was enough to make me believe that after some highs and lows there was still the possibility that this show could end on a high note - or at least a decent note.

This did not happen.

Sonic Prime's final season sucks. The ending sucks, and the road to get there sucks. It's left me wondering what the point of all this even was. There are still moments I like that I'll try to highlight, and the animators and voice cast are still clearly giving it their all, but these efforts sadly don't outweigh the overwhelming mediocrity of the story. I would barely even recommend other Sonic fans who are on the fence go out of their way to finish it. I won't begrudge people who got more out of this show than I did, but I think overall I just really, really dislike Sonic Prime.

...The problem, of course, is that all other discussion of the show has been overshadowed by needlessly hostile arguments over its place in Sonic's canon. So we've gotta talk about that, too.

(This post will contain full spoilers for Sonic Prime.)

Happy new year, everyone! Welcome to 2024, the year that will mark the 10th anniversary of Thanks Ken Penders. I'd like to go over my plans for the blog for this year.

First of all: in the very near future, I'll have a post with my thoughts on Sonic Dream Team, and I'm sure I'll write one last Sonic Prime review once the final episodes drop on the 11th. I've also been sitting on an unfinished piece about the Sonic LEGO sets. I wanted this to be longer and more detailed piece that not only reviewed the sets but also went into the weird disconnect between homogenized image of Sonic the Brand and the actual fiction it's based off of, but it'll probably end up getting cut down a lot just so I can put something out. Let's just say I did a fun little thing with one of the sets.

Second: yes, I would like to return to regular TKP updates this year. As I've said many times, I wanted to do this in 2023, but I've been suffering from creative burnout after finishing SLARPG and have generally been unable to focus on any of my creative goals this past year. I'm hoping that this year will be better and I'll be able to get back into the swing of covering Archie Sonic issues. Even doing one issue every week or so would be vastly preferable to continuing the hiatus. I'm still only halfway done!! But aside from burnout, my other main hurdle is that I need to reread my own archive to refresh myself on all these things after nearly three years away. This will take some time.

The thing is, though, this year I'll have an extra incentive to go back through my previous writing and brush up on all things Archie Sonic. Because you see...

I've decided that I want to make a video essay about Penders. The comics, the copyright battle, The Lara-Su Chronicles, everything.

For those who are interested in Sonic 2's mountain of cut content, Frank Cifaldi and the Video Game History Foundation just put out a fantastic video about how they've recovered and preserved some previously unseen material from Sonic 2's development by getting in touch with some of the American devs. They even have a brand new recreation of a cut level made using a hand drawn level layout and a tileset they found in their research! And if this stuff is new to you, Frank gives a great rundown of how the original pitch for Sonic 2 evolved into the game we know today. Definitely worth a watch!