Sebmojo
1681
And one more:
The hilariously OTT diction implied by bolding the ‘this’ in the first panel.
It’s not so much the message as the content. There’s really no need for such vitriol in a thread about a webcomic. Especially not when replying to BJB, who the rest of us have gotten used to tuning out.
Quitch
1683
I like the Puzzle Quest strip because they manage to slot the joke into the third panel :)
Straddling the line between positive and negative energy, here’s a Penny Arcade that I like, but like less than I used to, because they changed it at some point:
Years after it was posted they added the dialogue in the third panel. I judge it to be unnecessary.
It was reaction to the tone of his message, which was pretty much on the same level from my point of view, but unprovoked. And I had no idea there was some sort of “don’t listen to BJB” rule here.
Quitch
1686
So they have, and you’re right.
It does work better without the dialog. It’s long enough ago that I wouldn’t have caught the change if LesJarvis hadn’t pointed it out.
sinnick
1688
I totally agree about the last panel not needing dialog.
The podcast for that episode is pretty good.
I think it’s a little silly for people to keep complaining that they don’t get the joke because they’re not up on the news being referenced. Penny Arcade is frequently very topical. You need to be up on the gaming news of that week to get what they’re talking about. That’s no different from a political cartoon. If you don’t watch enough news to understand what a Teabagger is, you probably haven’t got a lot out of your newspaper’s opinion page in the last year, but that’s not a weakness of those cartoons. Kinect launches, news breaks about a guy whipping the dangling pull-cord from his ceiling fan into his TV and PA follows with their chandelier strip. Onlive launches their new microconsole, every gaming site in the world posts their review of the hardware and PA posts a strip speculating about the magic behind the service. It’s not rocket science.
It’s OK if you don’t understand a reference, but maybe that’s just because PA is more on top of the news than you. That’s why Tycho writes up the news post, so people have an easy to access frame of reference, but it’s unreasonable to expect every comic to stand on its own when most of the comedy is topical or relies on the context of current affairs. It’s not meant to be timeless. It doesn’t have to be Calvin and Hobbes.
Rimbo
1690
Yeah, but on the flip side, I’ve found that a lot of Bloom County cartoons haven’t aged well, y’know?
I’m generally OK with the jokes that require knowning the news. They’re not as funny as jokes I can get right away without the reference, but often they work anyway. A bigger issue is if the joke requires explaining even if you do know the news. Obviously isn’t not being told very well in that case.
I got the Kinect joke, and thought it was OK, if not one of their better strips. The art has problems, but never mind - I wasn’t in the group complaining. My problem with the OnLive strip was that it’s damned difficult to figure out the joke even if you know everything about OnLive. Tycho has to say, “see it’s funny because…” Can you imagine that in a standup routine? A comedian having to explain his jokes after he told them?
That’s not what they’re doing. They’re not speculating about the “magic,” they’re mocking it for being incredibly unresponsive.
See? You didn’t understand the strip as it was meant, either. You thought they were saying something else. Which is frankly completely reasonable, because the strip is not at all clear on its own.
Gabe and Tycho have mocked political cartoons because they’re so clumsy and blunt. They use habitually use labels because the art isn’t a clear enough depict their point. It’s a valid point. Yet they really need to consider the mote in their own eye.
Depends which ones. I think a good number are pretty good, before Breathed’s writing started to go downhill, and the later strips weren’t that good to being with. If I open up “Loose Tails” © 1983 to a random page, most of the strips are still funny. Some are kind of topical… but most aren’t. And some which are topical are sort of perennial, like the strips about the country moving to the right (hunting that elusive endangered species, the Liberal). After the mid-terms that almost looks current.
Doonesbury may be a better example. Doonesbury tends to dwell on current events more than any other strip out there.
Tim_N
1693
@Gus_Smedstad and several others:
As far as I know the product is most often designed to be consumed with the news post first and the comic second. If you decide to jump straight into the comic, which only has 3 panels and will regularly contain references that could potentially be obscure to any gamer who is not always at the cusp of gaming news, then please accept the inevitability that you will not immediately understand all of the comics and stop bitching in this thread about how it’s their fault you are too lazy.
Edit: to prevent myself from contributing to the thread derailment, here’s a penny arcade strip I love:
I like it because it shows how absurd game conventions could be in real life situations. For those mentioned above, it’s about resident evil.
Yet somehow most other cartoonists manage to make funny, relevant cartoons without requiring a couple of paragraphs explaining the joke first. And that’s our fault for expecting that level of competence from Tycho and Gabe.
It’s a wonder that Doonesbury doesn’t require you to read an editorial before each strip, given how intensely topical and political it is. To the point that it’s often carried on the Editorial page rather than with the comic strips. How does Trudeau manage it? It must be a miracle.
Penny Arcade is a comic strip. It’s supposed to convey the joke in that medium. If it’s topical, and requires that you know what the Kinect is, fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it shouldn’t need a detailed explanation of the joke if you do know what OnLive is, and you should be able to figure out that the strip is about Kinect without Tycho telling the strip is about Kinect. If they’re not communicating such basic stuff through the strip, there’s something wrong with the writing or the art or both.
ckessel
1695
Doonesbury typically takes on topics all over the news. You have to crawl under a rock not to be aware of them.
Penny Arcade is about games, usually very specific games or game technology, of which hundreds are released each year and even within the gaming community you’re not going to have the same level of awareness of the content. Hence, PA requires more background. Penny Arcade frequently embodies the saying that it’s not whether or not people get it, it’s whether the right people get it, where right depends on whether you’ve read the background or know the niche they’re talking about that day.
I get the impression you’re simply not the right people for their comic.
Doonesbury strips typically rely on the reader being a long-time fan. Half the strips are soap-opera episodes that require the reader to have several months or years worth of investment in the characters to understand the gag. Others are so political that you need more than a passing familiarity with current events to get the joke – and like the above, you may need to have read the strip for a long time to get the visual (e.g., a reporter interviewing a floating Roman infantry helmet or a levitating, talking waffle).
By comparison, it is a rare PA that requires you to be at all aware of previous strips or even possess a great deal of familiarity with the the two “mains”. But you do often have to read the blog post to get the context/background.
To be fair, Trudeau is capable of a one-shot gag that requires no investment. Today’s strip is one such. Ironically, it deals with video gaming.
Rimbo
1697
See, I would consider Penny Arcade to be a deliberate exception to this rule. Penny Arcade’s comic has always coexisted with Penny Arcade’s news post. The two have always gone together. That was true even before they went independent, back when they were part of loonygames.com.
You can still consider it a flaw, but I think they are choosing to make the comics and posts go together on purpose.
But the Kinect joke wasn’t about Kinect in general, it was commenting specifically on the flood of Kinect injury/damage stories flooding the blogosphere. It’s the difference between a joke about Democrats and a joke about what Nancy Pelosi said yesterday. If you heard the quote you can recognize the reference without any setup, if not you might need a link or explanation.
PA is in constant dialog with gaming culture and the gaming media. The three frame format may not be optimal to capture the necessary information for an uninitiated reader, but that’s why the news post is there.
Hm. Let’s see how this works out.
HAHAHA! Gus has it right, dudes! Completely self-explanatory and totally hilarious! At no point am I wondering ‘what the fuck is supposed to be happening in this strip and why is this shit funny’. Oh, that Trudeau. Truly a master of his art!
JM1
1700
Again, anyone who knows about OnLive would know about the number one issue with it, which is the lag. Suggesting that it required an explanation may be true in your case, but I doubt that’s true for the vast majority of their target audience.
