Does Ken Penders Own ANYTHING!? 

Let's also not forget that Penders is responsible for killing Ben Hurst's attempt to revive the SatAM.

I think Penders shouldn't own anything BUT since Archie didn't explicitly stated that on a contract Ken got away with it and still keeps bragging about it. The fact that he cannot move on from Sonic shows how uncreative he is.

I can't forgive Penders for sinking Ian Flynn's work in the middle of his on-going storyline... He sunk all the reworking efforts done by the writers up 'til the Super Genesis Wave, helped erode the Archie-SEGA partnership, and having such a petty demeanor make him an easy enemy in my eyes.

W video, honestly Ken being the reason the story from Sonic Chronicles will never have a conclusion is CRAZY (the game is kinda meh but I would wanna see a second game with more improvements to the game play and more importantly, the music of all things)

Lowart (the guy who did multiple retrospectives on the Archie comics) mentioned and even showed an online forum where ken admitted that all legal ownership of the characters that he created for the Archie comics went to Sega. The fact that no one has ever brought this up is quite shocking.

I know it's a crappy claim from the start, but the most important that wasn't mentioned about Penders is he doesn't own and never claimed ownership of OG SatAM Freedom Fighters. That misinformation is so viral to this day that even he himself debunked it several times.

Ken Penders doesn't actually own any of the characters he made. Since the lawsuit ended up being settled out of court, the characters have been pretty much in legal limbo.

Nothing will ever sum up the sheer level of delusion at play with Ken Penders as well as him assuming that Geoffrey St John was a rich, layered, well-loved character and not still the butt of constant jokes about author self-inserts.

The reason why Mr. Flynn did not introduce new characters was probably because there were already a literal shitton of characters to work with. Some of his first acts were actually trimming down the amount of characters that were relevant. Plus he was a fan of the comic so it seems reasonable that he would want to work with the characters that are already there.

This ending was something quite interesting Looking forward to Penders 25 years later arc

Penders did make a rather compelling story but when you take time to read it when you're not a child, you can see how messed up things can get. Of course the real origin of this story came from Benjamin Hurst (Who Ken also screwed over to an insane degree). I don't imagine any of this could be recovered unless he actually tried to pick a fight with Sega, who could in fact do so since all the Echidna characters stem from Knuckles.

You can’t have an unhealthy obsession with Ken penders. That’s ken’s schtick.

Penders admitting that every characters he created it is own my Sega, but it seem he couldn't keep his own word.

Honestly I don't think he does. He may own names, but not the designs themselves. He can go on and on about how he owns the characters but he doesn't. Ken just has a massive ego. I still think that scourge comic was shutdown because of sega behind the scenes sending a C&D and they didn't say anything about it because it would hurt kens ego.

Okay, interesting ending... ...we going to be seeing a time-travel "What if?" video in the future?

As someone who more grew up with the reboot (and Archives, albeit out-of-order), this context does help explain Ken's behaviors, at least in how the ownership is in this limbo custody.

1 - Happy Birthday Ken! 2 - I've just spent the last few hours going down the Penders rabbit hole. Dear god, how many sixes did that muppet have to roll in order to get this ending?!

Yeah your right about Ken Penders actually not owning the characters and Archie can simply just choose to use them but not to. In an obscure tweet Ken Penders said "When I signed the settlement, it clearly allowed Archie to continue using the characters. That they didn’t was their choice. (I’m not supposed to publicly say this but as Archie never fully held up their end of the deal, I really don’t care.)"

Sega doesn't care about the old SatAM/Archie generation of fans. Flynn has said as much. Even the characters they do own that are still insanely popular cash cows like Sally they do squat with. Ken may be right on in saying Sega NEVER cared. It really rubs me the wrong way. I would buy merch of the OG Freedom Fighters but they just leave that cash on the table

I'm 4 minutes in and I _really_ want to cite Mr. Incredible's "We get there when we get there." 🙃

"Long dead version of sonic not liked by the wider community " doesn't sound right to me. As far as i was aware it was fairly popular.

Just subscribed because this is a really good analysis. I plan to check out your other stuff as someone who only got a couple Sonic Super Digest comics at Publix near the end of Archie Sonic's life.

I love archie sonic. It's one of my favorite versions of sonic

Basically the whole thing went down the way it did because SEGA didn't give enough of a shit to fight it. They then got mad at Archie for the whole thing, and for Penders' subsequent attempt to sue them over Chronicles, and pinned all the blame on them, basically because they couldn't be bothered to exercise the bare minimum of effort it would take to shut Penders up. Archie aren't blameless, they rushed in half-cocked, and they didn't learn their lesson, leading to the second lawsuit with Fulop that finally motivated SEGA to pull the plug. I basically dropped out of Sonic entirely after Archie died, but when it finally collapsed, I was already basically only hanging on out of nostalgia for the SatAM cartoon, and I put most of the blame for what went wrong in its dying days at the feet of SEGA. True, some of the humble pie belongs to all the other parties, Penders for his ego, Flynn for trying a 25-issue arc when the plotline really didn't have the legs for longer than 8-10 parts, Archie's legal team for being incompetent, but there was a visible decline in the book's quality that started from right around the time they renegotiated the contract and brought in the heavier mandates on what the writers were allowed to depict, in 2010. That's the irony of it. Much of Archie's problems in the pre-Flynn era happened because there was no control. The book was a free-for-all with no head writer, stories were submitted and approved and then shelved for years because they didn't have room for them, the editor was buying stories off of himself under a fake name, Penders was running roughshod over everyone else's work and inflicting stories like Issue 150 on us, and the most competent guy there, Bollers, didn't actually get to finish the storyline about Sally's long-overdue mental break, so she just languished in the angst zone for _years_ until Flynn turned up. That era of the book _needed_ SEGA's heavier hand. By contrast... Flynn really didn't. He did much of his best work on the franchise before 2010, and his successes after the fact were more in spite of SEGA's influence than because of it. Not to say there weren't duds in his early reign. "Let's give Charmy brain damage so he can act more like his game counterpart" was... a choice. But overall, he didn't need SEGA. And that's something that's only grown since. IDW Shadow, anyone? So yeah. Good job, SEGA. A+ support there.

2:15 of all of the songs to hear in a video about Sonic I didn’t expect “The Red Army is the Strongest”

I’d say that if any legal argument was settled in kens favor it would open the flood gates for other potential lawsuits the the comic book industry doesn’t want to deal with. Could you imagine the lawsuit a Batman writer could have if DC lost a work for hire contract?

Everything he did was based on previously created characters and universes. He is just a more civilized Chris Chan.

The Saturn Dry Spell was hell for Sonic Fans. No real Sonic games for Saturn as Sonic Team was too busy with both NiGHTS and Burning Rangers.

When you make a character under the United States copyright laws, there are a few things needed for a copyright to be valid. The character must be unique and can not be a copy past design of another preexisting character protected by copyrights. So if I were to try to make a character named "Evil Batman" and use the same design but slightly altered, the copyright would not go through and would be dismissed. So, with that being said, you can make a character similar to Batman, but it can not be an alternate version of Batman. In order for Ken to use Evil Sonic, he would have to change *everything* about the character to the point where it is not Evil Sonic. So with the settlement, Ken can really only use characters that are unique, which is why he was able to take most of the knuckle's family away, Geoffrey, and exedra. Now, the version of Evil Sonic named "Scourge" could be used by Sega, but his story would have to change completely and could not be related to Kens Stories. Instead of Scourge being Sonic from another timeline, he could be a perfect clone made by either Eggman or another character. Now I have heard that Ken tried to claim ownership of renditions of Scourge that he did not make, and I'm still trying to nail down if he could do that legally. So yeah, that is the grey area. He owns the unique characters, and the rest are in a grey area. Also because of copyright laws, TV shows like invincible had to get rid of Spiderman and make "knock off" new characters in order to keep the plot of the TV show similar to the comics, It's what Ken failed to do with Laura Su Chronicles. (Edit, I would like to clarify that I am not a lawyer and if there is anything you can add to this or correct, please do.)

It sad because it was lose lose situation for everyone and everything. To franchise, to the fans, to the games, comics whatever it all had some what an impact to everything. And it makes me wonder what we would’ve had If ken left and not get egged on into the lawsuit. We may not have gotten sonic being a corporate shell of himself. It took the idw comics ,frontiers the movies to bring sonic out of this rabbit whole. With what Segas been doing lately it may not be perfect some people may not even like some decisions and some decisions are just inherently bad but after 30 years it feel like the franchise it’s heading in the right direction after this scuffle

As far as I’m concerned, Ken’s characters and concepts belong to SEGA. He created them for a comic commissioned by SEGA, so SEGA should hold the rights to them. If Ken has a problem with that, he can go curl in a corner.

23:20 The voice sort of reminds me of Fang.

I thought more of the video would be about what Penders might own or not

No he doesn't

I wonder what you got planned. That ending got me real curious now...

I’ll treat this as a gift 😊

Don't get me wrong I don't like Archie Sonic, I just think it's a very interesting subject

I have issue eleven signed by Ken Penders

Nice informative video, haven't really been into sonic much these days, but I used to play the games alot, read alot of the comics.... yeah Ken Penders was a odd guy 😅 Also I like your fursona design, apologies if I've confused you for a furry if you're not one 😆

I'm just annoyed that because of Pendork, there's zero chance of seeing any of the SatAm characters even in a cameo appearance in the IDW run. They don't have to tie in to any of the Archie stories, they were toons before comic characters for pete's sake. *takes a deep breath* sorry, I'm good now.

Penders might as well own the name Robotnik since Ian Flynn and IDW *REFUSE* to use the name Robotnik and insist that he’s only known as Eggman and has always been Eggman. Flynn and IDW: “THERE IS NO ROBOTNIK!”

The only character he does legally own is Imperator Ix, and I did not like that character at all. If he wanted to write an evil albino character, he could have at least diverted from the stereotype by making him a tragic villain, but he was a completely one-dimensional bad guy with no motivation other than wanting to eradicate the Knuckles Clan.

Ken penders do own some an scourge that evil Albino echidna but he can’t own the ones that are parent to them ashura and that glitch red an white knuckles I forgot his name but ya an should have bring scourge back first than bring the echidnas ~

ken penders talking mad shit for someone that has a artstyle that looks like him like fr what was he thinking while drawing that disgusting face "oh yea people will love looking at this thing" because ive seen nothing but people throwing up whenever i show em his comic cover

Why are you complaint about getting an individuals personal court case for a large amount of money is crazy like outside of this video when would you need someone legal documents if you’re not a lawyer? Would you want your cases to be so easily found? Such a weird point just to make a “joke”

why did you start he video with a bad ai voiceover? waste of my time watching this is what that tells me! goodluck on future endeavors actually try next time!

He actually didn't I've emailed the guy and asked about it. He has no paperwork from Archie or Sega giving him control of anything, and according to the US Patent Office website, he only owns the characters he created for his one issue wonder with Image Comics and the PUBLISHING rights to stories he wrote for Archie Sonic, which he cannot use due to the fact that he needs the publishing rights AND the Sonic license