Slashdot Mirror
Tycho and Gabe Respond to Your Questions
1.) Tools by cbrocious
My question is very simple: What tools do you use (both physical and digital) to create your comics?
I'm a long-time reader and have always wondered :)
Tycho:
He uses a pencil and paper for starters, and once he's scanned
that in he does all the finishing work with Photoshop 6.1 and a
massive 12x24 Wacom Intuos.
2.) Your Job by JediLuke
How much of your personal life does Penny-Arcade consume? On that note, great job, I love your strip.
Tycho:
Thank you for saying so. It is hard to know, actually, where
to draw the line between our personal lives and Penny Arcade. The
scripts come from our normal conversations. You knew almost to the
moment when Gabriel was born. The site is virtually our diary, so I'm
hard pressed to determine what corner of my life it hasn't yet been
dominated by.
3.) First gaming webcomic by genessy
Was Penny Arcade the first, regularly produced gaming webcomic? I read approximately 20 webcomics on a daily basis, and many of them are dedicated to gaming humor or frustration. Were you guys the first, and if so or if not, who or what inspired you?
Tycho:
No, I don't believe so - in terms of a gaming focus, that honor goes
to Scott Kurtz of PvP, by five or so months. We didn't know about him when we started, but we
did know about Iliad from User Friendly who covered games from time to
time, typically Quake. As for inspiration, we've always made little
comics, but never considered doing them in strip form until we entered
an online contest that Next Generation Online (now defunct) was
holding. I can honestly say that if we had not entered that
contest, there would be no Penny Arcade. It never would have
occurred to us.
4.) Question Two by dgrgich
A question for both of you: Name the console and three of its games that you would take to that mythical desert isle.
Tycho:
Gabe suggests that a Playstation2 would suffice, with
Disgaea, Phantom Brave, and Rez. If he had Internet access, and I submitted that this island might have
some kind of satellite uplink, he would gladly bring along an Xbox, with the local staples Halo 2,
Pandora Tomorrow, and Links for good measure.
Consoles are, in general terms, not my bag. I have come to enjoy them but they are not my preference, but I will answer the spirit of your question. It is clear to me that I would bring along a custom PC, with System Shock 2, Missionforce: Cyberstorm, and (this is a recent addition) World of Warcraft. That is, of course, provided their game begins to work properly.
5.) Gabe and Tycho: by mcc
Just curious: Are there any webcomics you read?
Tycho:
Sure. Gabe reads Kazu's Copper, Machall, and PvP regularly. I cast
a fairly wide net, but the strips I read whenever they are updated
include Boy On A Stick And Slither (which I crave beyond reason), PvP,
Shaw Island, 8-bit Theatre, Machall, Wigu, Deisel Sweeties, Creatures
In My Head, Scary Go Round, Exploding Dog, Goats, Ctrl-Alt-Del, and
VGCats.
6.) Domesitification ... by SuperRob
Jerry's bought a house, Mike's had a baby boy. How has becoming bona-fide adults changed your lives, and do you find your priorities changing away from drawing comics and playing games.
Bonus Question: What advice would you give to geeks looking to in some way ensare geek grrls?
Tycho:
We are lucky enough to have really unorthodox jobs. Drawing
comics and playing videogames is what we do for a living. It is an
odd loophole, I admit, but if I don't play Half-Life 2 or whatever I'm
actually slacking off.
As regards the laydays, Gabriel suggests the most important thing is that you simply be yourself, unless you are poor. Then, try to be someone who is richer and better looking, because you are kind of ugly. I am only only speaking for myself, but I have had good success with traps.
7.) Halo and Bungie by SilentChris
You guys absolutely roasted the original Halo, then gradually grew to like it. You've said you've met with Bungie since then. Were the meetings amicable?
Tycho:
It's important to note that what we came to like was the
multiplayer mode, and the console LAN party culture it fostered, but
yes - we did come around. As for the guys at Bungie, they have never
been anything but nice to us, which always makes me feel bad.
8.) Collaboration... by kayser_soze
How far does the collaboration between you two go?
Does Tycho usually come up with the text/idea for the comic, then Gabe does the art as a separate process or is it more of a collaborative venture?
Tycho:
It's the collaborative venture you suggested there at the
end, for the comic at least. They are written first, in a tag-team
manner suggestive of the WWE, and then the art is created. For longer
form projects, the full page stuff we've done for PA Presents, I
handle the writing itself almost completely - but that's only after
we've both come up with what happens on a page, and he has given me a
light sketch of the events we've agreed on for me to write to.
9.) Rise of the Megapublishers by CarrionBird
Do you think that the industry is doomed to be under the thumb of less than a handful of publishers, buying up every promising studio?(and keeping the cost of promotion so high that small guys could never keep up)
Or is there a chance for a new wave if independent developers breaking free from the EAs of the world?
Tycho:
I am not an industry analyst, so I dont feel like I'm qualified to
talk about ebb and flow of hojillion dollar industries. However, it
is easy to imagine a universe where small developers don't huddle in
blasted out wreckage, waiting to be vivisected by the the next wave of
EA Scion-class sawbots. None what I'm about to say applies to closed
platforms, consoles and so forth, where the relationship between the
developer, the product, and the platform locked to varying degrees.
If you are not already familiar with Garage Games, Totalgaming.net, and of course Valve's Steam, I can understand why you might feel dread. As for the costs of promotion, I'm confident that community sites like this one can recognize quality and deliver shrewd gamers unto products missed by larger sites or publications. I'm very curious to see if, for example, the Steam platform gives rise to a number of retail quality mods for cheap. We'll see how it goes.
10.) Favourite comic? by ecliptik
Out of all the comics you've done, which one is your all time top favourite, and why?
Tycho:
Gabriel has suggested to me that his current favorite is Mr.
Period Returns, where Mr. Period and his Bad Boys of Punctuation
resolve issues in a collected, helpful manner. It often changes for
me, typically I say Red and
Blue in: We Deliver to deflect the question. Honestly, I just went
into the archives looking for my favorite comic and I was stuck there
for like forty-five minutes. The last strip we did is usually our
favorite one.
11.) Life outside of games by hng_rval
How do you spend your free time outside of gaming?
Tycho:
I guess we don't understand the question.
And on that note, what do you and your spouses do for fun (outside of the apartment)?
Tycho:
Gabe and Kara don't really leave the apartment. They do escape from
time to time to see a movie, but he just suggested that a fire might also
make them leave. I typically accompany Brenna to interesting cultural
events, like shows and plays, that are very interesting and cultural.
12.) Do you feel the pressure to self-censor? by Drunken_Jackass
As you get older and as PA's popularity increases to more of a mainstream level (thanks to the great job you did on last year's Childplay), are you starting to feel the pressures of self-censorship? I mean, how many news anchors could reference the good work you do with Childsplay without giving a Within that site, there be fruitfuckers warning?
Are you becoming too popular to maintain your riske side?
Tycho:
Not censoring ourselves is what made us popular, so locking up
our most depraved ideas hardly seems like a recipe for success. The
question itself implies that we are monitoring some kind of meter that
determines how mainstream we have become, and can altering the mix of
ideas to match our audience. You're giving us way too much credit.
The Child's Play thing is an issue, though it's more an issue for Child's Play itself than it is for Penny Arcade. I think about this a lot. Is it proper that a site like Penny Arcade should host or operate a charitable organization? I'll tell you where the thinking usually leads me: Maybe not, but that doesn't absolve us of our social responsibility.
13.) Difficulty of making a living via online comics? by Zeddicus_Z
Guys,
At the last SAGE-AU [sage-au.org.au] conference in Brisbane we had J.D. Frazer (Illiad) as guest of honor.
At dinner J.D. spoke of the difficulties he faced in the early years attempting to make a living from comics - the insanely difficult process of being sydicated into newspapers, working out a revenue model for a web-based comic when he realised syndication was too restrictive, and generally attempting to make a living doing something he loved.
With PA and UF being roughly as popular as each other these days and thus (hopefully!) both providing decent incomes, I'd like to hear how you guys coped with the early years and how you faced some of what seem to be the common difficulties such as the syndication process, creating a viable revenue model and dealing with early set backs.
Tycho:
Well, we walked different paths somewhat, and that should be
firmly delineated. One of the few things we have in common with J.D.
is that we both upload images to webservers. Gabe and I have never
sought syndication as an end or a means to it. Don't forget that
Illiad also made Userfriendly a public company at one point -
try to imagine buying stock in Penny Arcade. The mind reels.
The main thing we share, and this is something that we have in common with all cartoonists making a living on the web, is that we keep at it until we find something that works, and when that stops working - and it will - we try something else. We don't confuse that business model with our creative work, imagining that its failure has revealed some desperate flaw in ourselves.
Over the course of six years, we have cycled through nearly every sequence the tumbler can produce. The first year and a half, we worked regular jobs until it could support one, and then both of us. We've done advertising, outside projects, joined a content aggregator for a percentage of the revenue, supported the site solely on donations, eventually moved to the quid pro quo, donations-for-gifts method that is fairly commonplace now, went hybrid with donation gifts and very limited advertising (no more than two per month), and finally stabilized on advertising alone. We've gone back and forth from doing our own merchandise to having someone else do it a two or three times, trying to find the right balance.
14.) Strawberry Shortcake by Anonymous Coward
A little while back, PA had a run-in with American Greetings over the use of the copyrighted and trademarked likeness of Strawberry Shortcake in what was obviously a (protected) work of parody.
American Greetings got called Nazis, but American McGee's Strawberry Shortcake is still missing from the PA archives.
What are the reprecussions of the Strawberry Shortcake debacle? If you had it to do over again, either the strip, or your interactions with American Greetings, would you have done anything different?
Tycho:
I think we made the best decision that we could have, and in
retrospect I haven't gained any wisdom on the subject that leads me to
believe we erred in judgement. We got the best advice we could from
places like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and the final analysis
was that we weren't absolutely, one-hundred percent in the right. We
could have been a good deal more
feisty legally, but we're still in court over something that happened
five years ago and I think we were hesitant to open up another front
when the first one was already as much as we could afford.
I think I would be much more unhappy about the situation if people didn't have access to the comic, if they wanted to find it - it's not difficult to type strawberry shortcake penny arcade and have it revealed in all its sensual splendor. In fact, and I think I've said as much, I almost prefer that there is this hole in the archive where a comic should be. If the strip was just there, I think it would have been forgotten by now - you wouldn't be asking me about it. As it stands, virtually every time I'm asked to speak to people the Strawberry Shortcake Issue comes up, which keeps the notion that corporations overreach in these matters front and center.
Update: 11/30 19:09 GMT by Z : Tycho sent this in to answer some questions brought up in comments -
The "ongoing legal battle," and it's still with us, is over the book we printed a few years ago. People often ask us why we haven't produced another book, and there's people who don't know about the first one. Our publisher never paid us for the first book, and then told us the second book had to be in black and white, and we'd better start writing it for them if we ever wanted to get paid. Obviously, we did no such thing, but since they own the print rights we can't make books for ourselves either. Hopefully it's something that can get worked out in arbitration here in a few months.
15.) Question for Tycho by Captain Splendid
Despite the fact that you've mentioned a few times that your aspirations don't go much beyond PA, is there any chance your unique writing style may be found elsewhere in the future? Is that even a remote consideration for you?
On a related note, what kind of offers have you received from mainstream (and not-so-mainstream) publications?
Tycho:
Not having aspirations to write outside my comfortable
context is sort of my cover story, I'm afraid. I shudder to think how
the things I write would be perceived outside of my own comfortable
context. Even inside what I consider my own community, there is
considerable disagreement about whether my output has merit. So there
you go.
I've been offered this and that every now and again, but I'm not unsatisfied with my life or the way I spend my time, so I'd usually rather reserve my energies for Penny Arcade. Offers to write for gaming blogs, do community management, editorials in magazines that cover games, review sites and the like make up the bulk of such offers. I'm very lucky, which is another way of saying our readers are good to us, but neither of us needs to take work that we aren't genuinely interested in.
16.) An Animated Penny Arcade by Altima(BoB)
Have you ever considered trying an animated form of Penny Arcade? It seems that your brand of humor makes particular use of precise timing, and while you tend to be successful at conveying that through comic strip panels, the formula could translate to animation quite well.
Tycho:
When we're writing a comic, we will often become too elaborate
than we can reasonably achieve with three panels. Sometimes, we try to make it
fit - but more often than not, we say That's One For The Animated
Series, which is to say that it would be well served by the
properties of that medium. We have been approached on
multiple occasions to do just this sort of thing. In fact, there is
something percolating even as we speak.
I'm not sure why Steam is often mentioned as some sort of possible salvation for independent gaming. I mean, online-delivered content has been available for many independent games, and in fact, is probably the norm for delivery of independent games. I'm not sure that online delivery has somehow radically changed the gaming industry, if at all. It has certainly made independent games more accessible, but I'm not sure it's changed the general status quo of gaming.
Holding up Steam as revolutionary has actually seemed sort of ironic to me, because Half-Life 2 has seemed to me to be one of the most over-hyped games ever produced. HL2 is a good game--don't get me wrong--but it's not nearly as good as some of the mass-media reviews, nor is it radically better than other FPS, except in technical quality perhaps. Using Steam as an example has therefore seemed sort of strange to me, because the very act of arguing that it's sort of revolutionary seems to maintain the very status quo that it's being used to argue against.
I'm not trying to be a troll here. I'm not saying Steam isn't useful--if Valve can avoid the middle-man, great. I'm just wondering if there's something about Steam that really is radically different in terms of content delivery from typical online delivery, or the sort of delivery implemented by e.g., Bioware.
as a user of a 12x12 tablet, i can tell you that its much much easier to do rough stuff with a pencil. this goes for technical art mainly, but simply the ability to turn the paper and get better angles at stuff is the main advantage (to me) over using just the graphic tablet.
I believe he is talking about not getting paid for the limited edition book they did. I can't find where he mentioned it last, but I think it was fairly recently.
I happen to think it's perfectly obvious. But obvious to a human and obvious to the legal system are two completely different things.
I vaguely remember a deal between them and an online content provider (possibly UGO) that went sour when the provider decided they weren't going to pay Tycho and Gabe for their services. Since PA's been around since the latter part of the 90s, that would make more sense than the collected strip book that others have mentioned.
Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
One tool does not substitute for another. I know artists who use crow quills. Nobody is so old that using a crow quill is "just what I learned in my childhood, I can't move on."
You use a crow quill if you want a certain line texture. You use a pen, pencil, or tablet for very different results. Art tools are defined by the limitations they place upon the artist.
Charlez Schultz used a certain pen nib for years. When the company making them went out of business he rushed over and bought up all the remaining stock rather than switch to a different nib. Another nib would have been very nearly the same in that it would be a fountain pen nib with the same ink, but he had trouble making his lines with anything else.
Gabe developed those characters on paper. He made a certain process. Drawn entirely on the tablet they probably won't look quite the same, feel quite the same, or act quite the same.
I learned to draw almost entirely on my 12x18 Wacom, so I'm perfectly content to make every piece from digital scratch. I haven't touched my scanner to start a digital piece in over a year.
Several sibling posts are talking about the problems their authors have with a tablet. The hand-eye disconnect or whatever. Those are silly answers to a silly question, though I'm always interested to read how people feel about tablets. If you ask a cellist why she plays the cello instead of the electric guitar you also won't get a sensible answer. It's... bigger? Deeper? Softer?
It's a different instrument.
Jokes aside thanks for the Q&A guys.
-- Enditallnow
I really liked The Bench. I wish they would do that again. I think I contributed three cartoons for The Bench, and one of them was even funny. =)
Education is the silver bullet.
Maybe it's just my older Wacom pad or something, but it doesn't feel exactly the same to me. I generally do pen and ink when I'm drawing, and the slick surfaces of the wacom (combination of pad and pentip) just don't have the same friction and tactile feedback as my microball on decent stock paper. I could get some of that by applying masking tape or paper over the pad, but that's still not going to give me the same feedback because of the slick round tip of the pen. Add that to the fact that my wacom pen doesn't have the same heft as the pens I usually use, and that leaves me just using pen & paper and scanning it.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Those devices are really amazing. I wonder why he doesn't just get rid of the pencil and paper altogether.
Tactile feedback and better visual coordination. You can feel the paper under the moving pencil and the feel communicates the type of line you're getting. You can also see your hand as you move it, making it easier to follow a desired curve or what have you. Wacom pads are good for artists moving from traditional mediums to computerized, but few of the computer artists I know who started out doing computer art bother to use anything more complicated than a two button optical mouse. All of them do, however, start with a pencil sketch (sometimes inked) or the occasional watercolor painting and then scan it in.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
If you find the tablet too 'slick', and want that papery feeling back, here's a simple solution:
Tape a piece of paper of the drawing area.
Sounds simple, and it is. Works like a charm, though.
I'm sure it will have a big impact on PC gaming, but not console gaming. And console gaming is where most of the money and populus is. So saying it will have a MAJOR impact on the gaming world is not accurate. It will have a major impact on PC gaming only, which is less than 30% of the overall "gaming" market.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
How does one accidently read a contract and then accidently sign it?
Open letter to Web Comic Webmasters...
Please, Please, Please, when a comic is over a year (or even a month) old, put it on a page with several other comics.
I find it way to annoying to hit the freaking Next button every 20 seconds (10 for reading, 10 for pageload) for 4 years worth of comics, no matter how good your comic appears to be.
I gave up on Angst after about a month's worth because the pageload takes too long between short hits of comic. Now, do the numbers, one month is 12 views of your Steel Wool manufacturer. Had the page been a full month's of comics, you would have gotten the same income out of the first year as you did from me as I gave up.
Then you get 3 more years of archive pageviews (36). And an addict to add a pageview every MWF.
Instead, you got someone that decides that it isn't worth the hassle to get to know the characters, so will most likely not be a regular reader of your wares.