davextreme: Penny Arcade is Six Times Funnier Than I Thought

I’ve been vocal when asked about my opinion of Penny Arcade. PvP boiled it down pretty well a few years ago. I certainly don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with knowing your audience and skipping the background introduction, but really, it’s like a leader paragraph would kill them somtimes. Regardless, I had the theory that I thought they were brilliant occasionally, and either unfunny or inaccessible the rest of the time, so I decided to put it to the test. I read every single comic they’ve published, and picked out the ones I thought there were funny. Anything rating above a three on the chuckle-meter made the cut. Here you go:

I think my initial goal in the project was the prove they only had like five funny comic strips, and their vast popularity was all a fluke born out of getting into the game when the world needed a webcomic about video games, but thirty strips is a lot, even if they’ve beeing doing it for years. Much like my slow progress through The Complete Calvin & Hobbes, it’s neat to see how their art and writing changed over the years.

My gripe about webcomics in general is that they exist on the web, but they don’t take much advantage of it. You can’t search for old comics easily. They’re not usually arranged by category. Finding an old strip, unless you get lucky and a blogger wrote a post about it, is just as hard as flipping through old newspapers is — you go day-by-day until you find the right one or get sick of the project. They could solve this pretty easily by using a content management system (Movable Type could easily be rigged to do webcomics) and putting the text of the strip in a field that you hide with CSS so that search engines could still have an idea of what a given strip is about.

Edit: a few others that did not quite make the cut: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Edit: okay, I’ve grown to like this one: Liar’s Day.

24 March 2006

Penny Arcade is Six Times Funnier Than I Thought