(Since I'm going to be referencing some of Kurtz's older stuff that I don't like as much, I feel it only fair to lead with one of the most solid recent strips, complete with new shading and the tiny-line style he gives to non-main characters. This I can get behind. I only criticize because I see potential. I am officially a maxim-spouting twerp.)
So I've been thinking about what would make good Haunts, but I have finally come back to the original purpose of this series: not to list good places to go, but to list the places I go because I can't even help it. Last night I dreamed of a magical website, with constantly updated articles and miles of witty, kind comments at the end. I have not yet found this website. So I will make do with the imperfect websites that entertain me regularly for now. But Magic Website... I promise, someday we will meet again. I will never stop Googling you.
So.
PVP ONLINE
and
PVP MAKES ME SAD
and
PVP MAKES ME SAD
I kind of wish I wasn't putting these two together. Unlike the Onion/AV Club/Slate trifecta, these two don't really like each other that much. But I always visit them together, so I must write about it, because this is serious journalism people.
PVP is a 5 day a week, M-F webcomic written and drawn by Scott Kurtz. The plot follows the various employees of PvP, a magazine about video games. Interestingly, many of the characters are originally from Kurtz's first attempt at a strip, which was set in a high school among teachers. When he got into the webcomics game, it became clear that the biggest audience with the easiest appeal was the gamer crowd; so the high school was dropped in favor of a gaming magazine. As one of the first webcomic artists to really be a businessman at the same time, this was (I am led to believe) a practical rather than a personal choice. PvP today has grown into... in the least offensive sense of the phrase... the Garfield of the Internet. PvP is syndication quality, which means that some days he'll crank out something that's not up to the level of his best stuff. But it's always going to be there, and be relatively solid. That's just how it goes when you make the timetable and the business your first priority.
The comic strip is not really the focus of all Scott's energy anymore. There's the pay-for-play animated series, the merchandising, a second strip called Ding! that gets updated about once a month, is drawn and written by someone else and still somehow he gets credit for, his partnerships with other cartoonists, etc. etc. etc. Not to mention that he keeps to a daily schedule, which is quite a grind for a web cartoonist. It's understandable if it's a little diluted. It's also one of the longest running webcomics out there with archives stretching back to 1998; so it's a little like criticizing Freud to drag his old stuff out into the light again and try to judge it by the same standards. You can say whatever you like about him; he's the veteran and he's going to do what it takes to make a living.
Scott's relatively pretty ungeeky (keep in mind that the mean of the Geekness of Internet Comic Artist distribution is significantly higher [p=.003] than the Geekness of Human Being distribution) and the strip has noticeably centered less on games or even gamer culture and more on a sort of sitcommy set of relationships.
Most people have a love-hate relationship with this; I'm not sure where I fall. Some of his funniest stuff is when he really breaks into the geekery (even when I don't get all the references) but you get the feeling that he's more comfortable with the other stuff. Personally I love a good lampshade:
There's a good set of fairly stock characters, each with enough personality to carry a story when they have to: Cole, the mildly ineffectual editor holding PvP together; Brent, his snarky, Mac-loving, latte-sipping counterpart who's my favorite character; Jade, The Amazing Geek-Woman, now also Brent's Wife; Francis and Marcie, the teenagers (I do appreciate that they are, on occasion, actually written like teenagers and not supercool tiny adults). Then there's the fantasy contingent: Skull the Troll, unofficial mascot, who used to eat disobedient children in the Middle Ages but who now is assigned to lonely children to be an invisible friend. Skull's presence is taken as just a fact of life, which is endearing; also, he is supposed to be the invisible friend of Brent, who seems to hate him. There's also Scratch Fury, Destroyer of Worlds: this is Skull's cat, who was hit with a Genius Ray when Skull tried to make himself more intelligent so that everyone else would like him better (he soon found out he was isolated from them because he was too smart so he reversed the process, but Scratch's stuck). Kirby, the basset hound, was also subjected to the process, but it doesn't make much difference:
I really love some of these old storylines.
And some of them I really don't. I really don't try to turn these things into feminist manifestos. But it happens. You may recall that Scott is the (internet)person who introduced me to Girls With Slingshots and Octopus Pie with the triumphant pronouncement "Who says girls can't write webcomics?". This struck me as odd then (to quote T-Rex, "That is a ridiculously overspecific stereotype!")... is that even a thing now? Do we really have to keep watching every single field of expression and inquiry, then cheering to the rafters when a female joins in with proclamations of equality, joy and freedom? Perusing the archives, it's pretty easy to see that Scott's construction of women is cobbled together from bad stereotypes and locker room stories. He writes dialogue for "feminists" the way he might for Norwegian terrorists or something: with no idea what they really do or sound like. (Be advised, this was a long time ago.)
This is the kind of person who still has wonder in his voice when he says (and you know he says, over and over) "I mean, girls are supposed to be nicer, but I think they're mean! They aren't perfect at all!" He then thinks he has dismantled the feminist apparatus. There's not a lot I can say to that, except that his female characters have become much better over the years. Yes! Characters! It's been exciting times at the PvP office. In a situation best analyzed elsewhere, the office is now populated by geek-female archetypes: Jade, the "sane one" a.k.a. "feelings exposition girl" who functions as the wife and mother of the whole office -- her sister, an oversexed bimbo seductress with no conscience -- and the teenage Marcie, who is required (like all teenage girl gamers) to be able to beat her boyfriend, keep a level head throughout adolescence, and be ready and waiting for her boyfriend when he finally stops ragging on her and decides he's in love with her. Like I said, best analyzed elsewhere. I don't want to get into it. I feel like I'm distracting from the very good stuff PvP has to offer. For instance, it provided me with my absolute favorite joke! I'm sad I can't access the actual strip, because it was wonderfully done.
Two drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff.
Buh-dum-tshh!
Anyway the archives are acting up on me right now and I've already spent more time on this than I wanted to. So moving on, PvP Makes Me Sad is a blog of PvP criticism. It used to be written exclusivesly by The Fake Scott McCloud, who did a decent job pointing out art changes that could be made, pacing issues, ways to tweak the writing to make it more effective, etc. This has helped me develop a critical eye for my own stuff (which might by why I'm getting so little of it done these days).
Someone described it as a "PvP-enhancing prosthetic" which is exactly what it is. (Although now, PVPMMS is being outsourced to some occasionally shining newbies and I feel like I need a page to criticise them too now.) PvP is great because it updates every day. This is the core of its greatness, and why I will never stop reading it; because mornings are boring and most comics update M-W-F. It's a comfort on stressful (all) mornings, it connects me to places I never would have found in the online comics world, and every once in awhile, we'll be on the same wavelength and it'll make me laugh out loud. It's almost nicer that it takes me a little by surprise when it does.
PVP is a 5 day a week, M-F webcomic written and drawn by Scott Kurtz. The plot follows the various employees of PvP, a magazine about video games. Interestingly, many of the characters are originally from Kurtz's first attempt at a strip, which was set in a high school among teachers. When he got into the webcomics game, it became clear that the biggest audience with the easiest appeal was the gamer crowd; so the high school was dropped in favor of a gaming magazine. As one of the first webcomic artists to really be a businessman at the same time, this was (I am led to believe) a practical rather than a personal choice. PvP today has grown into... in the least offensive sense of the phrase... the Garfield of the Internet. PvP is syndication quality, which means that some days he'll crank out something that's not up to the level of his best stuff. But it's always going to be there, and be relatively solid. That's just how it goes when you make the timetable and the business your first priority.
The comic strip is not really the focus of all Scott's energy anymore. There's the pay-for-play animated series, the merchandising, a second strip called Ding! that gets updated about once a month, is drawn and written by someone else and still somehow he gets credit for, his partnerships with other cartoonists, etc. etc. etc. Not to mention that he keeps to a daily schedule, which is quite a grind for a web cartoonist. It's understandable if it's a little diluted. It's also one of the longest running webcomics out there with archives stretching back to 1998; so it's a little like criticizing Freud to drag his old stuff out into the light again and try to judge it by the same standards. You can say whatever you like about him; he's the veteran and he's going to do what it takes to make a living.
Scott's relatively pretty ungeeky (keep in mind that the mean of the Geekness of Internet Comic Artist distribution is significantly higher [p=.003] than the Geekness of Human Being distribution) and the strip has noticeably centered less on games or even gamer culture and more on a sort of sitcommy set of relationships.
Most people have a love-hate relationship with this; I'm not sure where I fall. Some of his funniest stuff is when he really breaks into the geekery (even when I don't get all the references) but you get the feeling that he's more comfortable with the other stuff. Personally I love a good lampshade:
There's a good set of fairly stock characters, each with enough personality to carry a story when they have to: Cole, the mildly ineffectual editor holding PvP together; Brent, his snarky, Mac-loving, latte-sipping counterpart who's my favorite character; Jade, The Amazing Geek-Woman, now also Brent's Wife; Francis and Marcie, the teenagers (I do appreciate that they are, on occasion, actually written like teenagers and not supercool tiny adults). Then there's the fantasy contingent: Skull the Troll, unofficial mascot, who used to eat disobedient children in the Middle Ages but who now is assigned to lonely children to be an invisible friend. Skull's presence is taken as just a fact of life, which is endearing; also, he is supposed to be the invisible friend of Brent, who seems to hate him. There's also Scratch Fury, Destroyer of Worlds: this is Skull's cat, who was hit with a Genius Ray when Skull tried to make himself more intelligent so that everyone else would like him better (he soon found out he was isolated from them because he was too smart so he reversed the process, but Scratch's stuck). Kirby, the basset hound, was also subjected to the process, but it doesn't make much difference:
I really love some of these old storylines.And some of them I really don't. I really don't try to turn these things into feminist manifestos. But it happens. You may recall that Scott is the (internet)person who introduced me to Girls With Slingshots and Octopus Pie with the triumphant pronouncement "Who says girls can't write webcomics?". This struck me as odd then (to quote T-Rex, "That is a ridiculously overspecific stereotype!")... is that even a thing now? Do we really have to keep watching every single field of expression and inquiry, then cheering to the rafters when a female joins in with proclamations of equality, joy and freedom? Perusing the archives, it's pretty easy to see that Scott's construction of women is cobbled together from bad stereotypes and locker room stories. He writes dialogue for "feminists" the way he might for Norwegian terrorists or something: with no idea what they really do or sound like. (Be advised, this was a long time ago.)
This is the kind of person who still has wonder in his voice when he says (and you know he says, over and over) "I mean, girls are supposed to be nicer, but I think they're mean! They aren't perfect at all!" He then thinks he has dismantled the feminist apparatus. There's not a lot I can say to that, except that his female characters have become much better over the years. Yes! Characters! It's been exciting times at the PvP office. In a situation best analyzed elsewhere, the office is now populated by geek-female archetypes: Jade, the "sane one" a.k.a. "feelings exposition girl" who functions as the wife and mother of the whole office -- her sister, an oversexed bimbo seductress with no conscience -- and the teenage Marcie, who is required (like all teenage girl gamers) to be able to beat her boyfriend, keep a level head throughout adolescence, and be ready and waiting for her boyfriend when he finally stops ragging on her and decides he's in love with her. Like I said, best analyzed elsewhere. I don't want to get into it. I feel like I'm distracting from the very good stuff PvP has to offer. For instance, it provided me with my absolute favorite joke! I'm sad I can't access the actual strip, because it was wonderfully done.Two drums and a cymbal fall off a cliff.
Buh-dum-tshh!
Anyway the archives are acting up on me right now and I've already spent more time on this than I wanted to. So moving on, PvP Makes Me Sad is a blog of PvP criticism. It used to be written exclusivesly by The Fake Scott McCloud, who did a decent job pointing out art changes that could be made, pacing issues, ways to tweak the writing to make it more effective, etc. This has helped me develop a critical eye for my own stuff (which might by why I'm getting so little of it done these days).
Someone described it as a "PvP-enhancing prosthetic" which is exactly what it is. (Although now, PVPMMS is being outsourced to some occasionally shining newbies and I feel like I need a page to criticise them too now.) PvP is great because it updates every day. This is the core of its greatness, and why I will never stop reading it; because mornings are boring and most comics update M-W-F. It's a comfort on stressful (all) mornings, it connects me to places I never would have found in the online comics world, and every once in awhile, we'll be on the same wavelength and it'll make me laugh out loud. It's almost nicer that it takes me a little by surprise when it does.
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