Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27441478-20160601052927/@comment-24658561-20160601183137

Mystic Monkey wrote:

I just find it awfully suspicious that Ken Penders claimed legal rights to his Sonic fan characters despite signing a Work for Hire contract (meaning all the characters he made legally belong to Sega), in yet the very contract appears to be missing when it was brought up in court, thus Ken Penders got what he wanted and went off to start his Lara-Su Chronicles while Archie had to soft-reset the Sonic comics. Maybe, that's what SEGA wanted. Maybe they just wanted a good reason to "soft-reset" the Archie Comics and remove all the stuff that bothered them. Penders got "his" characters all to himself and SEGA got to do with the comics whatever they wanted without having to fear the fans would start mass-boykotting their product. Win-Win for both of them. Well, until Penders got the backlash Archie Comics would have gotten, had they changed everything for no reason. Now everyone blames Penders for resetting the Archie Comics, while SEGA can just say "Welp, we can't use his characters anymore. Guess we'll just make the comics more like the games then. Sorry guys, we can't do anything about it." to stay out of trouble. But hey, it's just a theory.