(Video link is here, since I can’t 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, he’s finally going to be doing something with them…and it’s 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 it’ll tie into his Lara-Su series, but there’s a lot in there that he simply doesn’t 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 didn’t 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 Pender’s site, and it seems like he’s planning on redrawing at least a few panels for his comic—like this one here:
(In case it wasn’t 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 honestly…I guess it’s good that he’s not profiting off of other artists’ work without compensation, but at the same time…the new art is uncanny as hell.
Also, it wasn’t 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 K’nox, so it’s possible the other characters were changed too.
There’s been a lot of discourse about this lately, and it’ll be…interesting, to say the least, to hear about what the final comic will look like (cause I sure as heck ain’t buying it!)
(I’d like to note that I’ve never actually read the Light Mobius arc myself, and most of my research came from Ken Pender’s 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 don’t have to give Reddit more clicks than you have to :)>