(Video link is here, since I canāt do both a custom thumbnail and a link.) So evidently, Ken Penders is making a reprint of Mobius: 25 years later. After almost a decade of owning his OCs he got back from Sega, heās finally going to be doing something with themā¦and itās a reprint of the old Archie comics, specifically, the Light Mobius Arc, issues 131-144. Granted, he will be adding on a section to replace what would be the normal end of 144 that diverges from the canon ending so that itāll tie into his Lara-Su series, but thereās a lot in there that he simply doesnāt own.
Originally, I was only going to post the video here, but I had a lot of questions after watching it. Was he even the one who drew the art for this comic? Was he going to attempt any superficial changes to avoid getting sued? I did some digging beyond the video, and found that he has his own website dedicated to this thing.
So he didnāt draw most of the art in the comics, and a lot of it seems to have been drawn by other artists, like Steven Butler. I rooted around a bit in the archives on Penderās site, and it seems like heās planning on redrawing at least a few panels for his comicālike this one here:
(In case it wasnāt obvious, the art on the right is by Ken Penders, the left is by Steven Butler.) He said here that he redrew this scene to better match the context for his new series, so it seems like he might be doing more than just reprinting the old comics. Which honestlyā¦I guess itās good that heās not profiting off of other artistsā work without compensation, but at the same timeā¦the new art is uncanny as hell.
Also, it wasnāt really clear just from looking at his website whether he was going to rename any of the other Sonic characters not owned by him (e.g., Rotor, Sonic), or if he was just going to keep their names. But in some of the archives, Knuckles was reffered to a Kānox, so itās possible the other characters were changed too.
Thereās been a lot of discourse about this lately, and itāll beā¦interesting, to say the least, to hear about what the final comic will look like (cause I sure as heck aināt buying it!)
(Iād like to note that Iāve never actually read the Light Mobius arc myself, and most of my research came from Ken Penderās website, the r/FuckKenPenders* subreddit, and, of course, the linked video.
*Link goes to rdx.overdevs, a Reddit mirror created by the awesome [email protected] so you donāt have to give Reddit more clicks than you have to :)>
Thatāsā¦wow.
Whatās wow? The fact that heās reprinting a comic that he pretty much has no legal right to print? His uncanny valley echidnaāsorry, āEchydānyaā art? The fact that the guy has a whole subreddit dedicated to bashing him? The fact that we donāt have a whole community dedicated to bashing him? I must know!
āA lot,ā is what it is š„“