![]() ![]() (Considering the incompetence of the Archie legal staff during the lawsuit, this tracks.) This lead Archie to hastily get several of their creators to sign replacement contracts, which is when Penders signed the oddly incomplete contract that Archie later presented a photocopy of in court. In court it was explained that some of Archie’s contracts were destroyed in 1996 due to incompetence on the part of the Archie warehouse staff. “Penders destroyed his own contract so he’d be able to claim ownership of his characters and stories.” According to Penders, we’re never going to see the Sonic Chronicles characters ever again, because Sega using them again would allow him to sue again. This case was actually dismissed multiple times (first because the judge wanted Penders to settle his simultaneous dispute with Archie first, then because the three year statute of limitations following the release of the game was up), and they settled out of court. The problem is rather that the stories and characters they had taken inspiration from were supposed to be property of Sega, and thus fair game. The problem here wasn’t that Penders thought they took inspiration from him, which they totally did. And honestly, it’s obvious they DID in fact take inspiration from his Dark Legion stories. Well, he sued Sega and EA, the publishers of Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, for BioWare taking heavy inspiration from characters and stories he had claimed ownership of. And it’s generally believed that all comics-exclusive characters from the pre-Flynn writers now belong to their original creators, due to the precedent set by the Penders case and a lack of contracts.Ĭorrect. Penders was not the only writer to get into a legal battle with Archie over their characters, though, as Scott Fulop later did the same. However, because they had lost the contracts, Archie ended up losing. Archie and Sega, obviously, saw this as a problem, as they were still reprinting his stories and using his characters. It’s the other way around, actually! It started when Penders learned that Archie didn’t actually have his contract from the start of his run on Sonic, which would have signed the rights to all of his work over to Sega, and began filing copyrights for his stories and characters. “Penders sued Archie over the rights to his Sonic OCs.” There’s also an extensive page on the Sonic wiki and an even more extensive summary of the legal battle here. Penders has done and said many bizarre things during and after his tenure at Archie, but I think it’s important we only hold him responsible for things he actually did.įor more info on the lawsuits in general, I would suggest reading my article for New York Magazine on the subject. So here’s an FAQ just about the Sonic comic writers. But mainly Ken.) Some are true, while some things have been exaggerated. As someone who made the mistake of starting an Archie Sonic liveblog with the man’s name in the URL as a joke, I get a lot of messages about Ken Penders and the myths surrounding him. ![]()
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