Ken Penders

Ken Penders is an American comic book creator and writer. He makes his living as a freelance writer and artist of echidna OC’s, accepting assignments involving screenplays, storyboards, character design, backgrounds, website graphics, and some the magazine covers, portraits or commissioned work. Penders illustrated the cover of the complete series DVD set of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Penders is known for his work on the comic series Sonic the Hedgehog, which was published by Archie Comics. He primarily worked on the former side-series Knuckles the Echidna before it was cancelled due to poor sales in 1999, though he continued to produce stories and artwork for the main title until 2006.

In addition to his work for Archie Comics, Penders has written and illustrated stories for other comic publishers including DC, Marvel, Image and Disney on titles as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Disney Adventures, Savage Sword of Conan, Captain Atom, and The Green Hornet among many others. He also branched out into other media, producing children's activity books and creating graphics for CD-ROM games.

In December 2011, Penders announced plans to utilize Echidna characters he created for the Archie comics in a graphic novel series entitled The Lara-Su Chronicles. Said series is planned to feature Lara-Su, one of his original characters created during his work at Archie, as its protagonist. On March 5, 2014, Penders announced on his Twitter account that his characters were no longer echidna but Echyd'nya, an alien species. Penders stated reasons for the change was that he needed to make some adjustments to broaden the audience while making certain longtime fans get answers and resolution and because of the difficulty he has seen with people pronouncing the word echidna.

Archie Comics vs Penders

In January 2009, Penders began copyrighting various stories, characters, and artwork that he created for Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog comic series and spin-off titles, and these claims were certified as of April 2010 by the US Copyright Office. After declaring that he would "use every legal means at my disposal to protect and preserve" his works, Archie Comicsfiled a lawsuit against Penders in the fall of 2010 in an attempt to retain their copyright holdings of his characters and concepts. In the fall of 2012, Archie Comics fired its legal team and replaced it. Following this and a court settlement, many characters created by Penders were written out, never to appear in the comics again.

Penders vs SEGA and EA

Penders filed a lawsuit against Sega and Electronic Arts (EA Games) in 2011 for alleged copyright infringement in the game Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, which was developed by EA's subsidiary BioWare. The case was dismissed without prejudice September 26, 2011, then again in February 2012, after the case had been refiled four days after it was originally dismissed, despite warnings from Judge Otis Wright who dismissed the case both times. In October 2013, the CA 9th Appellate Court upheld Judge Wright's initial ruling.