Will Strip For Games 35
1up has a piece today on the backbone of the gaming zeitgeist: online comics. From PA to 8-Bit Theatre, they have thoughts on all of them. From the article: "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."
The article is about online gaming comics. (Score:3, Interesting)
8-Bit Theater (Score:3, Interesting)
So it's perhaps inevitable that the writing would be a secondary concern, and the humor is often far more repetitive than the art. To compensate for this, Clevinger begun focusing more on story than jokes some time ago, but as a rule the quality of the writing hasn't become any sharper. A large component of the strip's popularity is love for the characters Clevinger uses, something he acknowledges when he says "I've lost count of how many e-mails I've gotten from fans thanking me for reminding them how much they loved the original Final Fantasy."
Some people just can't handle the truth, I guess.
Rob