Review of Penny Arcade Vol. 3: The Warsun Prophecies ~OR~ Only Thing To Improve Now Is The Artwork

The Penny Arcade brand name is one synonymous with quality. Now more of a media juggernaut than anything resembling just a webcomic, the adventures of Gabe and Tycho have evolved from two guys talking about their passion for gaming in all its forms to the first (and almost unanimously most trusted) source for gamer satire. The duo have run the gauntlet, with a ridiculously successful children’s charity and lucrative annual convention under their belt as prizes along the journey. With all of these accomplishments under the PA empire and an amazing pedigree to live up to, is it really any surprise that a collection of the webcomic that started the whole thing rolling is among the most professionally produced collections out there?

No. The answer is no. And there’s your review.

Continue reading

Share

FCBD Finds

The main point of Free Comic Book Day seems to be to get people into their local comics stores, but the free comics serve another purpose as well: It’s a way to check out new work you might not otherwise see. So now that FCBD is over, here are a few of the freebies that I found online, all of which are worth at least a look.

The FCBD people have put short samples of six titles online using ettitude’s reader: You click on a corner of the page to turn it. The best of these is Fantagraphics’ Unseen Peanuts, because it crams so many strips into such a short space. I really thought this comic was the best of the bunch, and the six-page online sampler has enough of Charles Schultz’s “lost” strips to be satisfying. Thom Zahler ladles out a generous eight pages of Love and Capes, the funny and very amiable romance between a superhero and a bookstore owner. Continue reading

Share

Another Year Another Challenge

Last year saw a lot of new events in web comics. One of the biggest was the emergence of Platinum Studios into the medium and there was huge ruckus over whether or not they were coming in to to ruin it. It’s been almost a year and from what I can tell they have done very little to change it. Just what has been their impact so far? The most obvious is the purchase of Drunk Duck and the complete overhaul they performed. Admittedly this has resulted in nothing more then the hosting site being known as one of the more undependable to being very solid. Yet the competition for web comic hosting is tougher then a year ago with Drunk Duck only taking the number two place behind Smack Jeeves.

Continue reading

Share