Will Strip For Games: Gaming Comics Online from 1UP.com (original) (raw)
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ith political pressure coming in over the horizon, deadly earnest New Games Journalism crushing from above, and licensed corporate soullessness rotting away gaming from within, our favorite hobby can be so depressingly serious when all we want is to have fun. Laughter, though, is a corrective, and all of the above maladies can be chased away by daily consumption of a stronger remedy than apples: gaming-focused comics.
Like many things that best serve a somewhat niche audience, gaming comics are usually found on the web, where they enjoy some overlap with the larger webcomics scene. Some of the earliest and most influential webcomics were game-based, and for better or worse gaming is still a huge influence on the world of webcomics today. Here, we'll give a brief history of gaming webcomics, look at some of the biggest and best strips, and examine the community that surrounds them.
Origins of Game Webcomics
Though they're the giants today, and both have comparatively long runs, neither Scott Kurtz's PvP nor Jerry Holkins and Michael Krahulik's Penny Arcade were the first gaming-themed webcomic on the Internet. That honor goes to Chris Morrison's Polymer City Chronicles, which began life on MPOG.com in 1995, a full three years before either of the current superstar strips would make its debut.
Though for some reason the PCC archives only extend back as far as 2000, the early strips still show markedly topical game humor, mostly focusing on what was near and dear to Morrison's heart: Sega and its new Dreamcast. A fierce loyalist to the once-great console manufacturer, most of the humor in the early strips comes from the cast's dogged refusal to succumb to Sony's marketing machine, then just getting into full gear to divert gamers' attentions away to the PlayStation 2.
Whether it was Sega's eventual admittance of defeat, or simply "running out of video game material," as Morrison said himself, the gaming humor ended before long in favor of fairly serious storylines about the backstory of the cast, which included an genially goofy inventor, his impossibly musclebound alien wife, and an anthropomorphic sidekick unabashedly introduced into the strip to fill out a "cuteness" quota. The change of direction for the strip is one of the primary reasons why despite Polymer City Chronicles' landmark status as the first gaming comic, it's rarely ever mentioned when discussing them today.
The "real" origin of game-based comics came in May 1998, when Scott Kurtz started Player vs. Player, a strip based around the office hijinks at a video game magazine. Hosted at MPOG.com, like Polymer City Chronicles, early PvP reflects its origins as a lighthearted way to lampoon games in the context of a larger gaming-focused publication. Some of the earliest gaming webcomics were started in a similar fashion; Penny Arcade, for example, was originally conceived and submitted as a strip for Loonygames.
As a result, early PvP is squarely topical and gag-a-day, with no more than two or three strips in a row devoted to the same joke or game: the 1998 strips reflect what was popular at the time (Ultima Online, Jedi Knight, Quake II), though even then, there was an occasional hint of what PvP would eventually evolve into. Even in 1998, Kurtz sometimes stepped away from video games to riff on the larger sphere of pop culture, such as the American Godzilla movie, Prince's short-lived and ill-advised name change, and the Beanie Babies fad.
Though Penny Arcade's launch was important for the juggernaut the strip would eventually become, in one sense it was simply going along the road already established by Polymer City Chronicles and PvP. The next real milestone in gaming webcomics was thus the September 1998 debut of Neglected Mario Characters, the first sprite comic.
Rather than poke fun at the trappings of gaming culture, which was the main focus of Polymer City Chronicles and PvP, Neglected Mario Characters (and the comics that have followed in its footsteps) lampooned the imagined inner universe of the games themselves. Using images and characters directly from the games as a sort of stationary puppet show, creator Jay Resop continued Mario's adventures as farce. It's not all that funny, to be honest, but it was groundbreaking: thanks to Resop, legions of would-be cartoonists realized they didn't have to let a lack of artistic talent get in the way of their dream when they could use pre-made images to act out the stories for them.
When Penny Arcade did make history, its imprint on the gaming comics scene was as much financial as artistic. After several missteps, including a disastrous period where Holkins and Krahulik had inadvertently signed away not only the print publishing rights, but the entire creative enterprise itself, Penny Arcade emerged victorious as one of the first online webcomics that earned enough for the creators to make it their full-time job. Since then, Penny Arcade has become a bona fide business enterprise with employees other than the creative team, a profitable yearly convention based around the comic, and an annual charity for children's hospitals.
PVP
URL: http://www.pvponline.com
Not all webcomics that seem to be about video games are necessarily what they seem. PvP, for example, is commonly cited as one of the most successful in the genre, but even a cursory reading will reveal that it truly resides in some other category altogether.
It does, of course, have gaming elements: it was started as a commentary on video games and gamers -- its very name, PvP, refers to the commonly accepted term for player vs. player combat in MMORPGs. The cast is still composed of the staff of PvP Magazine, a fictional gaming rag, and the strip still finds time for gaming-based humor. Just this month, for instance, was a week-long storyline about two of the younger staffers' venture into farming gold in World of Warcraft.
However, as time passes, PvP has become more of a character-themed strip, with story arcs devoted to cast-specific storylines. Brent and Jade, two staffers who have been seeing each other since the beginning of the strip, recently faced the implications of a pregnancy scare, and younger FPS addict Francis spent some time shaking off a copycat at school biting his style. Even when it isn't doing more slice-of-life humor, PvP is more a general pop culture strip -- it just happens to have the foresight to recognize that games are now as valid a part of pop culture as anything else.
The approach has worked extremely well for creator Scott Kurtz, and broadened his audience sufficiently that he's parlayed the strip into a successful print comic book from Image -- all the more impressive when you consider that the book is 1) in black and white, 2) a humor comic, and 3) not about superheroes. Normally, the three taken together would mean a death sentence in the hostile American comics market, but Kurtz has built up enough of a following that the print comic not only survives but thrives.