Haunt Haunt Haunt Haunt Haunt #1: Penny Arcade

If you don't understand the title, you don't have to. Please note these links are not in any particular order or anything: if anything, they go in order from "you have probably not heard of this" to "you have probably heard of this". Notice how I used the British punctuation there. It just makes more sense, and you can't stop me, because this is MY PART OF THE INTERNET. Moving on.

Penny Arcade:
Updates M-W-F, usually not before noon, read the newsposts first

Consistently hilarious and regularly vulgar, PA is usually referred to as a gaming webcomic. But calling it that is kind of dumb... probably the best comparison I can think of is calling The Daily Show a comedy variety show. Yeah, it's a show, and it's funny, and there's one host and a lot of regulars, and guests, but... no, that's not what it is. Carrying that comparison further, you get real news from PA, enmeshed in amusingly cutting commentary. It's smartest to go to the general site first and read the newspost, which will give much-much-needed context to the day's comic. The newsposts are almost as good as the comic, and the character voices stay mostly intact. But the comic is what I admire most.
The voices of both characters are very genuine, and Tycho in particular, as the main writer, has such a unique voice that the flickering pixels of your screen seem to speak aloud in the darkness of my pillowed grotto, the majesty of his italics crying out in their ethereal light-voices that this is really a very poor imitation of his writing style. But anyway, I really enjoy reading it, and greatly enjoy his particular variety of neurotic linguaphilia. Shut up, spellchecker. That's more of a word than "spellchecker" will ever be. A classic example of Tycho's writing:

"I Hope You Like Text" 4/10/06

And of course, Gabe provides art that I only wish I could even hope to imitate (although I do draw a certain amount of optimism from the crappiness of the very, very first strips), and his character provides a perfect foil to Tycho. I'm consistently amazed at how well he manages their bizarre and complex narratives in the three-panel format that they stick to pretty consistently. Also, how he manages to get facial complexity with a relatively small number of lines and without much anatomical realism. Also, how awesome and gross this death is.

"First Impressions" 3/26/07

"An Excerpt from The Book of Deeds" 3/28/07

Between those two posts, they persuaded me to buy Puzzle Quest, as of yet the second video game I've ever bought. It was a good buy.

All this and I still haven't mentioned their relatively-good-reporting-for-a-comics-site crusade against Jack Thompson The Idiot Who I Refuse To Link To And Give Even That Little Bit Much More Publicity and their good-living-is-the-best-revenge response to an article about evil gamers which has spawned (I think they'd approve of the use of "spawn" there) their awesome million-dollar-a-year charity, Child's Play, or PAX, the Penny Arcade Expo, the embodiment of their commitment to gamers as a community. I'm probably not legit enough to be a part of the gaming community, but I'm a fan of community and human relations in general, and these guys make me happy. I think I used up my hyphen quota for 2008 in this paragraph. (EDIT: One more thing I forgot! These guys have one of the best designed websites I've ever come across. That might not seem like a big enough deal to stick in at the last second but I have a soft spot for well-designed websites, especially when I deal with crappy ones so often (not to name any names))

Yeah, so this whole "list one site and cop out of doing a lot of writing and research" thing worked out really well. Thanks, brain.