Penny Arcade was a massive influence on me growing up, and is pretty undoubtedly my fave webcomic ever. I first starting reading it in summer 2010 – which, for my money, was still a pretty good time for the comic – and have continued checking up on the site irregularly ever since. The strip's classic era – about 2002 to 2012 – just couldn't be beat for hilarious internet video game comedy, and I think that both the writing and the artwork during those periods represented both creators at the absolute top of their game. I still laugh at shit like
this,
this, and
this. (Some of those lines are just fucking excellent.) This is easily my favourite strip:
I never really bought a ton of
merch, but I do own a print collection of the strip's 2004-2005 years (
The Halls Below), which contain some very entertaining commentary and bonus content. I also bought the first two episodes of
Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness on Steam – a pretty rote, somewhat-tedious mix of JRPGs and adventure games. They weren't really that good at all. (I didn't play the later episodes, which were pure JRPG – they never looked that good to me, either.)
To me, Penny Arcade is a comic strip first and foremost, so I never cared about PAX or Acquisitions Incorporated or the fantasy series they did. That said, I do like their pitches for
Automata and
Sand quite a bit – I'd watch TV shows or read full-length comics of those stories, if they ever made 'em. I'd also quite like a copy of the Penny Arcade one-shot comic book they did in the early 2000s, just to say that I have one. Oh my god, I just remembered – me and my friends used to watch
Strip Seach, the reality show they did, too! That was pretty funny! It was a pretty funny show.
I can pinpoint the exact moment Penny Arcade went to shit – when they redesigned their website from having a black background to a blue one in late 2012/2013. From that point onwards, the writing, art quality, and general tone of the brand took a massive nosedive into boredom and passive-aggression, and it's never recovered since. Modern strips just look awful and read like the rantings of miserable, social-media-addicted old men in their late 40s who clearly regret a life blown on all this nerd BS – at least, when they're not just very simple dialogues about whatever the latest geek movie is.
Jerry Holkins (the writer), in particular, was someone I really liked about a decade ago, but his mind has gone straight off the deep end into brainrotted, chronically-online depression as he glumly approaches age 50. Mike (the artist), changed, too – I remember when
this blog post went up, and how there was a pretty quantifiable change in the strip's tone from that point on. It's honestly kind of heartbreaking, but both Jerry and Mike seem pretty pathetic at this time in their lives.
These days, I don't check up on the strip often, because I don't really like what it's become. The writing is poor and generic, the artwork isn't as good as it was 15 years ago, and it just isn't funny anymore, which is the worst thing that can happen to a long-running piece of comedy. I love the first 15 years of Penny Arcade like I love very little else, but I don't love the comic enough to ignore that the last decade has been awfully disappointing. Or, in short:
www.penny-arcade.com
