>>128254109Ken falls back on Marvel's various isms but doesn't copy a story again until he rips off a combination of 60s Spider-Man stories ("If This Be My Destiny" where Peter is trapped in a flooding underground facility mixed with "Disaster!" where he suffers amnesia and teams up with Doc Ock). That story directly calls it out with a homage cover, so it's not really "stealing", but it's showing that every time Ken tries to get dramatic he filches shit.
Once you reach the 30s, Knuckles backups start up and they're just Jim Starlin-isms, with shadowy figures taunting Knuckles in a computer room. Once he gets the go-ahead to write ACTUAL stories, he gets back to proper filching.
"Sense of History" has Knuckles giving the echidna backstory, and it's literally just Krypton with a twist. They decide to just push the city above the meteor impact site. Ken's so direct about this that, since he DREW this one, he starts tracing from More Fun Comics, where the idea of a Krypton council first emerged (and a panel reused many times). There's a lot of shit he's pulling from here, but it's still only on the level of homage.
Then the "Knuckles Quest" series of backups starts and he repurposes Gallagher's Athair as a figure like Gardner from Thanos Quest: a wise man who is attuned with reality itself. He doesn't get too into that here,but I just wanted to mention it.
Knuckles Quest itself is actually more like the Captain Marvel comics Starlin wrote in its first issue, with Athair serving as a sort of combined version of Mentor and Eon from two different issues telling Captain Marvel about Thanos' backstory via cosmic imagery. Except here it's just a fetch quest. Also Tails is here as a reference to the fact that "Starfox," Thanos's brother, was in the issue he was thinking of. lol
The rest of Knuckles Quest is just Marvel's Black Knight comics for some reason. I really don't have the time to skim through all of those and Conan to find which specific stories Ken stole.
