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thankskenpenders · 2 years

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Comic-Con has come and gone! It’s been an exciting time for Sonic comic fans with news about the upcoming Scrapnik Island miniseries, a live mural painting from Adam Bryce Thomas, Gigi Dutreix, and co., and more. Also, Penders was there

For a while now Penders has been saying that SDCC 2022 would be where he released the new hardcover reissue of Mobius: 25 Years Later with an added extra chapter and a few names changed, now packaged as The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings. (Before anyone asks: yes, he has the rights to rerelease his old Archie Sonic stories following the lawsuit, and yes, he says he’s going to pay the artists royalties. Kudos to him for that, at least.) While I take every creative endeavor the guy announces on Twitter with a massive grain of salt for obvious reasons, I thought this one might have some small hope of actually happening because it’s mostly just a collected volume of some comics that already exist and not a whole new graphic novel

So, did that happen?

Nope!

But he did show off a new build of the iOS-exclusive The Lara-Su Chronicles motion comic app, which is the main way he plans on releasing these things. He’s shared a few new videos on Twitter, too, so let’s take a look at those. This is what he’s been working on all these years

Let’s tackle these in chronological order. First up: the M25YL “remaster.” (I'm just linking directly to the original tweet because Tumblr won't let me upload more than one video.)

From that first page it's immediately obvious that the hand lettering is gone, replaced with a font. Between the few character names changed to maintain consistency with TLSC and the many translations he's doing, digital lettering is probably just easier on that front. I won't knock him too much for that, although the fact that he kept the same random words bolded is funny to me

No, what really knocks me on my ass here is when we get to the second page and we see that the new motion comic format and the need to show more of the backgrounds means that not even this "remaster" is safe from Ken's horrible fucking photo backgrounds. Here's a direct comparison of how he ruined this panel, originally drawn by Steven Butler and colored by Jason Jensen:

I should add in here that I don't hate the use of photo backgrounds on principal. You can do some really cool things with mixed media! As is true of basically everything in art, any technique can be cool if it's used with the right intent. I was a Homestuck reader in its heyday, and it made cool use of color-altered photo landscapes and images taken straight off the internet mixed with the cartoony characters and original elements. But this is not that. This isn't trying to be mixed media or alternative or counterculture or whatever, it's just a shoddy attempt to save time on a hamfisted tribute to Silver Age comics

It's also worth noting that Angel Island, which looks extremely tiny here, is in fact the same shitty image Penders has been using as his personal logo for years

Next up, an excerpt from The Storm, the prologue chapter starring Geoffrey that will be included with the rerelease of M25YL. He's been posting previews of this for years

This one also has voice acting! Bad voice acting!

When asked what happened to Geoffrey's signature accent, Penders said that he only had access to an American actor, and that he'd rather not have him use a fake accent. The audio is apparently also temporary, although how much will or won't be changed in the full release is impossible to predict. Either way, the wooden voice acting does Ken's typically clunky dialogue zero favors here, and it continues to baffle me that he thinks all of these motion comic bells and whistles are somehow worth all the added time and effort when it's been over a fucking decade and he still hasn't released the first of seven planned volumes

Also noteworthy here is that we actually see the point where the timeline-altering energy wave or whatever hits? I guess? I assume that's what's happening, because the art style deliberately changes from Ken's best approximation of what he thinks Archie Sonic looked like (which already isn't great, although the dog girl is almost kinda cute) to his new style for TLSC, which. God. Look at that profile view of Geoffrey

Lastly we have a preview of the opening of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows, AKA the actual first volume of the series. It's the scene of Lara-Su walking on the beach and shedding a single tear over how Knuckles is dead, as one does

It's not as noticeable in the video, but I need to link to the full res version of the shot of Lara-Su sitting on the rocks so you can appreciate how truly fucking horrendous the jpeg artifacting is. At the risk of referencing Homestuck too many times in one post, this is truly some Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff level shit. I don't know how he did this

And, at the very end we have a special guest appearance from the one, the only... the unlicensed likeness of Anthony Mackie that he is still fucking using for this character. Despite his appearance changing slightly in other art, this page still very much just uses a redraw(?) of Mackie's IMDB profile photo

And that's it! If you've been following the updates on this project for years like I have, you may have noticed something

None of these pages are actually new!

I'm pretty sure we've seen every single one of these before. Some of them are from years ago. If there's actual new material in this preview build of the app beyond the addition of speech bubbles to some of these pages, it's not present in these videos. Penders says that his next priority after recharging from the con will be releasing TLSC Beginnings (the M25YL rerelease + that Geoffrey chapter), but it's hard for me to believe he's anywhere close to releasing anything in the state these previews are in, unless he's secretly sitting on a whole bunch of pages that he just didn't want people to read for free at his con table

As usual, though, Penders claims that the responses from Comic-Con attendees were positive, particularly in comparison to the constant dunking he's subjected to on Twitter. People were even buying his prints. (He also posted a photo of Karl Bollers visiting his table. I don't know what Bollers thought about the app.) My kneejerk reaction is that I find this kind of hard to believe, but it's also like... I dunno, people are just generally going to be polite at a con, nine times out of ten. Most people are not going to walk up to someone at an artist alley and be like "hey bro your prints look like dogshit." It isn't the place for that. They don't wanna cause a scene by getting into an argument in the middle of their expensive con trip. I also don't doubt that there are a lot of people out there who probably see the old Archie Sonic comics he always has for sale at cons and go "oh hey I've heard of that" or "oh I read some of those as a kid!" and then realize he was one of the writers and wish him luck on his new endeavors, blissfully unaware of decades of obscure Sonic drama. And while it's well documented that I don't like the guy or his work, I don't think that's a bad thing! People are allowed to be polite to him. I do not want him to get pelted with fucking tomatoes every time he goes outside

But the thing is, most of the feedback the guy's getting is either polite well-wishing within the context of a busy convention, or people spamming him with pictures of Donkey Kong and telling him to retire on Twitter. And so he's shutting out the latter, and taking the fact that people aren't beating his ass in the QRTs at the SDCC show floor as a sign that he's on the right track, and that Twitter is just full of haters looking for ammo

And like. He's not wrong on that last point! People blame him for all sorts of shit he didn't actually do and take many things wildly out of context and spam his replies for fun

But Jesus Christ, my guy. You've been working on these comics for a decade and the art looks like this

#tkp post

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