Whose Story Is It?
Rondo of Blog - Published: June 27, 2024
As of writing, The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings is officially out in the world. Author Ken Penders is doing his best to keep up with the surge in demand, as people seem to finally have come to the realization that it’s true - he did it. Over a decade after it was first announced in December of 2011, The Lara-Su Chronicles is real. Ken Penders is continuing the story he started in Archie Sonic, and neither Archie nor SEGA can do anything to stop him.
What’s come as a shock to a number of Sonic fans is that not only can Ken publish his continuation featuring his characters that first debuted in the pages of Archie Sonic, but he can also reprint and sell his Archie Sonic stories as they were originally printed. Those who viewed the copyrights Ken registered for the Mobius: 25 Years Later story in the U.S. Copyright Office’s public catalog could’ve told them that and, well, I know I tried to.
So, Ken owns his stories, they legally belong to him. Is that it, end of discussion? Not quite.
The question of who owns what of Archie Sonic has been shrouded in confusion in the years since the Archie Comic Publications, Inc. v. Penders case. Some people believed Archie owned everything, or maybe SEGA owned it, either way none of it belonged to Ken Penders. All of this relies on the sketchy premise that yes, Archie totally won the lawsuit without any concessions, they’re just… choosing not to use any of the characters they definitely own. Uh-huh.
Why that is, why they would leave money on the table and (by some reckonings) doom the Archie Sonic series by ripping most of its guts out and rebooting? You get to make up a reason, just as long as you hate the freelancers who stood up for themselves in court enough. And don’t think too hard about it.
The first tangible hole poked in this worldview came with the high-profile licensing of Evil Sonic (AKA Scourge) the Hedgehog. It happened, money changed hands for the right to publish a comic of a character Ken Penders created that some Sonic fans considered to be the most derivative of SEGA’s intellectual property, and SEGA & Archie had no response. The Sonic fandom collectively took it very well.
That was sarcasm, by the way.
But even after the licensing deal came and went, there was no putting the toothpaste back in its tube. Evil Sonic belonged to Ken Penders, a statement that would’ve gotten you laughed uproariously out of many a Sonic fanclub prior to this turn of events, so what now?
Well, now it was time to pull on an obscure thread from Archie Comic Publications, Inc. v. Penders where it was claimed that Ken did sign a contract henceforth transferring the rights to his creations over to Archie… just, y’know, after he created Evil Sonic. But before most of the other things he created, like Julie-Su! We promise!
It’s at this point that I’d like to take a step back and pose the question, why do this? The copyright ‘for’ Evil Sonic (characters can’t technically be copyrighted, but their debut stories can) was registered just the same as the copyrights for everything else Ken did for Archie Sonic. You could just let go of the lie you were told, that Ken never owned his characters and stories, why prolong it any further?
At any rate, this lie didn’t last very long. Ken Penders successfully published a reprint of Mobius: 25 Years Later, featuring characters he does and doesn’t own, because the story legally belongs to him. It’s not a new development, there wasn’t a ‘clearance’ process he went through to get SEGA or Archie’s “permission,” it’s been this way all along.
Which also means all the other freelancers who attested in affidavits that they too did not sign contracts transferring the rights to their work over to Archie also own their work. Karl Bollers owns Mina Mongoose, Scott Fulop owns Mammoth Mogul, and they own each of their stories as well as the right to reprint them.
We also know that Archie transferred to SEGA any remaining rights they had to Archie Sonic, no later than 2012, which puts the reboot continuity squarely under SEGA’s ownership. As of writing, SEGA seems utterly disinterested with ever touching anything anyone made in Archie Sonic that they own.
As The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings continues to sell above expectations, with Archie Sonic fans making their voices heard after years of tolerating slander of the comic they love, one can reasonably call SEGA’s decision to do all of nothing with Archie Sonic “questionable.”
In all the words I’ve written in this article thus far, I’ve gone over this subject purely from the perspective of what’s legal. However, what’s legal doesn’t always align with what’s right. I’ll give an example, as surprising as it may be for some to hear from me.
Writer Ian Flynn does not own a single one of the stories he’s written of Sonic the Hedgehog. He can’t reprint them, he doesn’t receive royalties for the issues he wrote when they do get reprinted by the companies he freelances for, and as for the characters he created for Archie Sonic? He’s had to say goodbye to every single one of them.
Sure - one can look at what side he took during the Archie Comic Publications, Inc. v. Penders case and say, well, that’s karma. The work-for-hire status quo is one he defended in siding against Penders, so he simply doesn’t deserve any of the rights he would accept being withheld from others… right?
I disagree.
You can talk about what’s legal or what’s karma all day long, but the truth is that companies like Archie and IDW are robbing the freelancers that work for them. They rob them of the rights to their original creations, they rob them of royalties, and they frankly rob them of dignity. If we lived in a more just world, Ian and every other Sonic fan that freelanced after him would get to enjoy the same success that Ken is currently enjoying with the release of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings.
On the note of “legal vs. right,” there are many Sonic fans who’ve scorned Ken for “robbing” Ian of the ‘right’ to continue the stories he was telling with Ken’s characters prior to the reboot. By the reckoning of these fans, Ian wrote them better and thus deserved to continue getting paid to tell further stories of these characters that he had no hand in making - and for Ken to rip that away from him just because he happens to own the characters was wrong.
There are many problems with this framing, but I’ll start by pointing out that the reboot was Archie’s fault. Completely.
The U.S. Copyright Office, when Ken was registering his copyrights, notified Archie and SEGA in case they wanted to intervene. They gave them the customary amount of time to respond, and then some more after that came and went without any action on their parts, but eventually registered the copyrights after nothing was done.
If Archie wanted to stop all of this from ever happening, if Archie wanted the right to say they didn’t want this, they would have. They let it pass by, instead, and then filed a lawsuit alleging tortious interference with business. It was this reckless act that threw the fate of Archie Sonic, and the livelihoods of the freelancers actively working on the book, into question.
You might say, well, they had no choice! They must’ve just not known if they or SEGA were supposed to respond and, after SEGA did nothing, simply needed to take aggressive legal action or else… something bad would happen, probably!
To that I would say, fucking tough. So you fucked up and you don’t own a large swath of the cast of one of your best-selling comics, where’s this oh-so-terrible fate lead you without aggressive legal action? Needing to pay freelancers a measly amount of money to secure the right to continue publishing comics containing intellectual property of theirs?
Whatever ‘unfathomable’ amount of money you just pictured in your head that this would’ve cost Archie, dear reader, pales in comparison to what their reckless lawsuit cost them. I promise.
So it’s Archie’s fault, we’ve established. But that still leaves writer Ian Flynn with hundreds of comics and several characters of his that will never see print again. How is it fair that Ken gets to publish The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, concluding his Mobius: 25 Years Later story once and for all while beginning the next story to come out of it, while Ian gets nothing?
Again, I bring us back to the opinions of Sonic fans. Particularly, Sonic fans who have given me a lot of grief over the years. But let’s hear out their case.
These Sonic fans really love the Archie Sonic issues that Ian wrote, and especially love how Ian wrote Ken’s characters and continued his stories.
On the latter note, Ian even wrote his own conclusion to Mobius: 25 Years Later titled “Once and Future Kings” - an action-packed two-parter that pulls the focus largely away from Ken’s original characters and makes the story more about SEGA’s intellectual property - and a sequel of his own in “Mobius: 30 Years Later,” an action-packed four-parter that pulls the focus largely away from Ken’s original characters and makes the story more about SEGA’s intellectual property.
Sure, the author started the story, but what about Death of the Author? A thing we’ve all heard of but very few of us have ever actually looked into? Doesn’t the story belong to those who read it, after it gets published? Ian Flynn was a reader and a fan of Archie Sonic prior to him getting hired as a freelancer to write it, so doesn’t that mean he double owns Mobius: 25 Years Later?? Is this a thing???
I’m being a bit silly, I do appreciate you reading this far, please bear with me for just a moment longer.
The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings doesn’t just continue Mobius: 25 Years Later, it collects it in full for the first time ever. Sonic Super Special Magazine #4 purported itself to be the ‘complete Mobius: 25 Years Later epic,’ but that wasn’t true. For one, it omitted the first chapter of the story - which only later saw print in the collected volume of Mobius: 30 Years Later, for some reason…
Secondly, it did not collect the second-to-last chapter of the original Mobius: 25 Years Later story that Ken wrote. Chapter 13. You might be thinking, “it wasn’t an important chapter, was it…?”
It was called Father’s Day, and it’s arguably the most important chapter of the entire story.
In it, we flash back to a more familiar-looking setting than we had grown accustomed to over the course of the story that is still nonetheless just a bit ahead of the present day timeline. Knuckles bids farewell to his old fire ant pal Archimedes, before finding out shortly after that his father’s health has taken a turn for the worse.
During this time of turmoil, things get said between Knuckles and his father Locke that had gone unsaid up until that point. Before Locke passes later in the night, after lamenting that he never gave Knuckles a choice in being a guardian, he tells Knuckles, “What truly does matter is that you’re my son and that I love you!”
Upon reflecting on his father’s regret, not giving him the chance to choose not to be a guardian, Knuckles realizes he’d been making the same mistake by refusing to let his daughter Lara-Su choose to be a guardian.
This is the turning point, after Knuckles spent the story resisting Lara-Su’s pleas to let her become guardian, that leads to Knuckles finally agreeing to teach his daughter to become a guardian - and it’s directly tied to the emotional journey he goes on in this chapter.
Sure, you could just shrug and say Knuckles naturally changed his mind over the course of the previous chapters, but you’d be ripping away the heart of the decision. Which brings us, at last, to the final page of the chapter.
At the very bottom reads, “In loving memory of my father, Kenneth, 1934 - 1982,” revealing that the penultimate chapter of the original Mobius: 25 Years Later story - which, again, was omitted from a collection that claimed to be the ‘complete’ epic - was dedicated to Ken Penders’s late father. Naturally, it doesn’t take a scholar to infer the parallel between the tale of Knuckles and his father and that of Ken and his father.
This chapter and the dedication at its conclusion, I would posit, cements this as Ken’s story. It came not from years of studying Sonic video game manuals and wiki entries, but from his heart and the life he experienced with it. Mobius: 25 Years Later simply wouldn’t exist in any recognizable form, and neither would the continuations published in Archie Sonic after he left the comic, had Ken Penders not come along.
You can prefer other writers, you can prefer the stories that were told of his characters that he had no involvement in, but you can’t say Ken doesn’t deserve to continue his work on his terms - especially not after what he’s gone through to do it. While I don’t envy the freelancers working on Archie Sonic during Archie’s reckless lawsuit, if any one of them thinks they would’ve preferred to be in Ken’s position instead? They can count themselves lucky there exists no extra-dimensional cosmic being curious enough to put that to the test.
At the end of the day, the fact remains that Archie Sonic can never be put back how it was. Everything leading us to this moment has passed, leaving us only a present in which the Sonic comic tradition is kept up by IDW Sonic while The Lara-Su Chronicles continues the stories of several characters left behind.
I’ve seen lots of people who are disappointed at how things turned out, and it’s true that this isn’t necessarily ideal. In an ideal world, Archie wouldn’t have filed a lawsuit against Ken Penders to begin with, among other things, but we simply can’t live in that world anymore. The Lara-Su Chronicles is the story we’re getting, now, and it is very definitively Ken’s.
Everything from the story, writing, art, characters, and designs all come from him. With the release of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, it should now be clear to everyone that he legally owns all of it. But like I said at the beginning of this article, that’s not all.
The story also, rightfully, belongs with him.