12 years later, what can we learn from Penny Arcade?
Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik
A review of The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade (2009)
I spoke with Tycho from Penny Arcade a few times. This was back in 2000, when his site was only two years old, my site was non-existent, and ICQ was the popular medium of online communication. I remember asking if he, as an American, preferred Gore over Bush, or vice-versa. He told me that he favored Nader, which I thought was kind of an odd thing to say, even in those days when I had considerably fewer political opinions than I do now.
It seems weird to remember that there was a time when you could just instant message the Penny Arcade guys and casually discuss politics. The comic, or rather the brand, is now a multi-million dollar media empire, with DVDs, video games, resolutions of praise from the state legislature, and so on. It seems superfluous to even summarize. The very fact that you’re on an online comic site presumes you likely have some knowledge of what PA is, even if it doesn’t go far beyond “that one webcomic.”
There were no such things as “webcomics” a decade ago, at least in the sense of the career-making industrial-complex that exists today, so merely getting to be “that one” is an accomplishment unto itself. The Penny Arcade guys, Tycho and Gabe, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, inspired an industry, and deserve to be recognized as pioneers of the internet age as much as Mark Zuckerberg, Arianna Huffington, or Craig Newmark. It’s what makes their 11.5-year retrospective, The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade, such a necessary work, and a vital read for anyone interested in what their success represents.
There is a limit of how much they have to teach, of course. The book opens with a several-thousand word biography of the two creators that is so banal and self-indulgent as to be nearly unreadable. Authored in completely somber, un-ironic prose by Wired magazine’s Chris Baker, the unspectacular pre-comic lives of Jerry and Mike are chronicled in cloyingly mundane detail.
We’re treated to anecdotes such as the following:
“He was definitely trying to impress me with his intellectual prowess,” says Brenna [Jerry’s wife]. “He would quote Kant, give me books of poetry, write me songs. But he was also constantly buying me little presents. When I was a cashier at Shopko, he had me ring up a teddy bear. Then he turned around and gave it to me at the end of the check out line.”
During this time Jerry was also playing with his bands…
And so on.
There’s almost nothing to be learned from the lives of these two men, and the inclusion of such a pointlessly long memoir is largely a testament to the personality cult they have built up around themselves. But to be effectively sustained, a personality cult also requires some degree of fantasy and mystery surrounding those being defied, and the “story of Penny Arcade” is disturbingly revealing in its supreme blandness. Mike and Jerry were friends. One was a writer, one was an artist. They wanted to do a comic strip about video games together. So they did.
It will probably take a more impartial reporter to summarize Penny Arcade’s rise in a more substantial, less hagiographic way. My increased knowledge of Jerry Holkins’ dating life aside, it’s still quite unclear what exactly allowed Penny Arcade to triumph in such truly epic fashion. As the comic’s critics never tire of observing, PA is not particularly remarkable product when you get beyond the hype. It’s a rude, angry comic that editorializes about video games in an often incredibly insular way, caring little about how accessible it is to those outside the hardcore “gamer” subculture, or even many of those within it. There are no real characters to speak of, aside from the empty talking-head avatars of the two creators, and thus no plot or continuity to unite the 12 years of content. Consistency, regularity, and longevity seem to be the strip’s most glowing attributes, even today.
The book does largely confirm, however, the increasingly popular thesis that an enormous portion of PA’s success can be tied to the brilliance of Robert Khoo. An ambitious Japanese-American business student who talked his way into assuming control of the entire Penny Arcade brand back in 2002, Khoo has exercised strong managerial oversight ever since. A lot of Splendid Magic’s content is authored by him, and the influence of his steady, guiding hand on the history documented within can be seen everywhere.
Indeed, as far as a larger analysis of the Penny Arcade phenom goes, Khoo’s successes are woefully underreported, considering that he was able to develop what the New York Times and countless other publications have never been able, namely a viable, long-term business model for generating profits from the distribution of free online content. It thus seems almost flippantly hurtful when Jerry and Mike repeatedly characterize their comic’s success as flukish, or the result of some organic raport with their fanbase. There is doubtlessly some of that, but the degree to which PA is a for-profit business, and has been run (very competently) as such for the majority of its life, is too often obscured by the creators’ vanity, or folksy “doin’ it for the fans” populism.
As an analysis of Penny Arcade: the product, Splendid Magic is much better. There are favorite strips, interviews, behind-the-scenes revelations, and a thorough analysis of the comic’s most oft-observed evolution — the remarkable artistic development of Mike Krahulik’s drawing style. It is a beautiful, funny comic propelled by two genuinely creative people, and for anyone who has ignored the strip in recent years — as I admit I had — the book will serve as a charming reminder of what initially drew you to it in the first place. The fact that better people have produced better comics to far less acclaim shouldn’t obscure the obvious appeal it does possess.
The video game-centricity of Penny Arcade is deliberately limited and alienating, but also represents a valuable case study of how media is consumed and disseminated in our brave new web 2.0 world. Virtually everything the brand has produced, from comics to the massive PAX conventions to Jerry and Mike’s rightly admired pediatric philanthropy work, has been deliberately designed to service the interests of an exceedingly narrow community — “gamers.” The tribe-solidifying power the internet has made closed-clique business models viable in a way they never were previously. I’m sure they’d hate the analogy, but in this regard Penny Arcade is not much different than Fox News or the NRA, in the sense of being an echo chamber for the faithful, a community for those who “get it” and a hostile one for those who don’t. (The PA scene even has even developed its own crypto-political agendas, chief amongst them an unwavering viciousness towards anyone who dares criticize the violence or sex content of modern video games). If this represents the future of cartooning, I’m not convinced it’s entirely a good thing.
There’s a timeless quality to say, Calvin and Hobbes, or The Far Side that PA will simply never, ever have because it’s so openly scornful towards the very idea of gaining mainstream appeal. Penny Arcade may be good at what it does — very, very good, in fact — but whether that makes it a culturally significant piece of work is an open question. Not everything can be Shakespeare, obviously, but when talented artists retreat into comfortable little subcultural niches, the larger culture loses access to their skills, and the possibility of more ambitious purpose is lost.
But to realize their lost potential is to admit their success, and a more upbeat observation: the triumph of Penny Arcade proves that there is still a viable future for editorial cartooning. PA is a comic about commentary, a fact which is not explicitly recognized nearly enough. Lacking characters, continuity, and realism, the strip exists only as a vehicle for expressing opinions, which is to say an editorial cartoon. In that sense Jerry and Mike are much more the heirs to Thomas Nast than Jim Davis.
Within their limited realm of focus they have affected change; Splendid Magic documents numerous instances in which game developers have drawn influence, or at least expressed sensitivity to their opinions, and almost everyone who keeps track of such things regards the duo as among the most influential men in video game journalism. For all their inside-joking and vulgarities, the pair have never been shy about speaking their minds, and without heavy-handed editors to worry about, have helped pioneer new standards of critical commentary in the information age. As boring, middle-class suburbanites, they speak with the authority of genuine consumers, bringing a genuine spirit of “authenticity”— that the youth market so craves — to their editorializing.
Through their work, the 21st Century has churned out an early and inspiring case study demonstrating that cartoons can still matter as a medium of commentary in the internet era. The fact that the video game industry has been their disproportionate target is unfortunate, but also offers encouragement to anyone who values the expression of ideas through art. They’ve presented a model of success, and there is nothing to stop its emulation by those with a wider focus.
I’m inclined to think that gaming culture, as it exists today, is largely a product of the idiosyncrasies of a specific generation (the echo-boomers), and will invariably evolve into something quite different as that base ages and (hopefully) matures. When it does, one hopes Penny Arcade will evolve too, and its creators will move onto more ambitious projects with greater prospects for cultural longevity. They’ve earned a right to something better.
