Why is Penny Arcade still going...

Why is Penny Arcade still going? Mike and Jerry have had way more success in things like PAX and could easily branch off into other creative endeavors, yet they are still sticking to the same three-a-week schedule of this almost two-decade-old webcomic. Who even still reads it every week?

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because it's a habit and they like doing it.
Having a job that gets you out of the house when you're married with kids is a good thing sometimes.
And just because they update 3 times a week doesn't mean they aren't doing them all in batches.

Man, this is flat out dad jokes at this point. Tycho's hair scares me.

>they like doing it

Do they really? I can't imagine working on the same project every single week for almost 20 years and not getting a little tired of it. I know newspaper comic artists do that all the time but they are at least contractually obligated to do it. When you run your own business you can do whatever you want.

Well there you go then. If they clearly don't HAVE to do this but they still ARE, maybe they just like doing it.

this is worse than finding out megatokyo still publishes.

What the fuck can a writer even do with the plot of Megatokyo for THIS long

I honestly wonder that about Questionable Content. The reason I stopped reading it was it felt like it was going absolutely nowhere and there was no point to it. With something like Penny Arcade, it's clearly just a gag a day strip with no continuity outside of the occasional story arc, but QC is a meandering, continuous storyline that has no point.

>tfw you wanted to make a fairly-long webcomic with a start and end, so you came up with formulas for self-contained stories to pad out the lore-centric stories, but then you either end up with a 20-year-long narrative of bullshit or a 2-year arc that feels disjointed

>that art
This is like that mental patient that drew a cat that got more and more surreal as his condition worsened.

>this is worse than finding out megatokyo still publishes.
You just blew my mind. I honestly forgot it even existed.

They don't have to try very hard at this point. They crank these strips out in literally an hour and a half at any given PAX; I'm sure it's about the same length to make one on their own.

They probably don't mind putting in maybe 10 hours a week of actual creative time at their game-stocked office in order to maintain an additional revenue stream for their families. Most of their work probably goes into their other projects at this point.

It's the lines. I miss the bold, thick lines from like '08. They look so thready now.

I think it's comfy desu

I haven't been to their webzone in like 10 years. Once they became successful they just stopped being funny.

Apparently there are fantasy ninja nuns now or something. I mean that's sort of a progression.

In universe time, hasn't it been like two weeks or something? I haven't read MegaTokyo in at least a decade.

>Once they became successful they just stopped being funny.
Yeah. Once they became an established part of the game industry they lost the outsider snark for the most part.

Still have the occasional one that gets under someone's skin, like a recentish one shitting on Polygon that annoyed some game journalists

Oh were those faggots pissed about this one

They have tried other endeavors, and nobody cared, because while Tycho fancies himself the Serious, Literary One, he actually can't write an original work to save his life.

There's Automata, which is Noir But With Robots. Sand, which is just Western in Space. Then there's Eryewood which is what if Boy & Girl Scouts were actual mystical forest warriors.

...well, the boys are forest badasses, girls become mysterious spooky dryads when they reach a Certain Age.

They've also tried their hand at the multimedia streaming thing that the young people are into, with varying results.

It's so interesting that "two dudes stranded in japan" that forms the backbone of that game's plot started as an arc in a two wacky-gamers comic.

How are they even stranded at this point? Do they not have totally functional lives there now?

>Who even still reads it every week?

Me, out of habit.

Almost like they can't keep raging against the machine once they become part of the machine they raged against.

I can understand preferring the old simple art they used to have but I really don't understand people saying that Mike's art is bad. It's better than a 3-panel wacky gamers comic deserves.

Mike has outgrown PA in every way possible, it's interesting to me that when you watch podcasts it seems like it's always Mike coming in with the idea for a strip and Jerry just Jerrys it up and sends him off to do it. Between this and the fact that the dude is legit making tabletop games and crafting fucking universes you really get the impression Jerry's kind of just along for the ride sometimes.

I stopped reading QC around the time Marten and Claire finally got together and I'm always amazed by the fact every time I see a strip posted here it seems to revolve around a new group of characters I've never seen.

When did Marten and Claire get together anyway, it's amazing to think that MxC has been status quo in that comic for years now.

My only exposure to his art these days is when strips are posted on Sup Forums. I haven't read the strip or even been to the site in roughly five years. Do you have any examples of his recent stuff that's good?

I really miss the days when the art of the strip was Mike doing his best Stephen Silver impression.

Not that user, but that said: fair point. It IS good art. But it's not PENNY ARCADE art. Penny Arcade as we know it in art and wit finally went poof like what, ten years ago?

.....QC is still going on? What?

As I understand it, the entire comic up until now has taken place over the course of a couple weeks or so.

His current art is overly busy. It's like he's trying so hard to avoid B^U that all his characters are making WACKY FACES in every single panel and everyone has weird warts and misshapen teeth.

The artwork seems barely necessary any more. Tycho and Gabe have a brief conversation about [topic] in front of a completely plain background with no other actions occurring. That's the modern PA template.

At least their forums used to be fun years ago. Now they're not.

Here's the previous strip in the archive with a really nice fall scene in the second panel. His instagram has a lot of nice stuff on it too. I'm honestly not sure if he has another place he puts up his non PA artwork regularly anymore.

instagram.com/cwgabriel/?hl=en

Point is, Sup Forums only discusses the strips with boring art because Sup Forums only wants to talk about how bad mike sucks now. Even the strip in the OP has better posing and is way more expressive than is necessary when your steepest competition is fucking Buckley and girls n games.

The theme of the comic appears to be about Identity and shit, and some kind of commentary on how Idols are treated by Japanese society? Like, Magical Girls and VN Heroines can take on real lives of their own based on the whims and beliefs of their fans, so much so that the people that portray them lose "themselves" and literally live and die as their stories dictate. This shit probably would have been considered interesting and/or unique had he gotten here sometime back in 2004-5 as opposed to like within the last year or two. 2/3s of the so-called original cast are backseat players now. Kimiko doesn't even exist at this point. I don't think she's showed up in years.

Still, he's managed to consistently update about once a week now for quite a few years. I guess that means something.

Yeah, a lot of people feel this way, but Mike himself has never been happier now that he doesn't do that anymore. I can't hold it against him.

>kimiko doesn't even exist at this point

WHAT seriously?

I thought the will they/won't they shit with her and piro was like a driving aspect of the narrative. I read that shit for years and honestly didn't understand a thing. Are Piro and largo still present?

The stuff on his Instagram is definitely better. He really phones it the fuck in for PA.

I would argue Largo has more importance at this point just by way of Nanasawa, and the fact that he "gets it" by way of being ridiculous and stupid, so all the weird bullshit they run in to makes perfect sense. Piro is all about Miho at the moment, who again, is one of those girls who got caught up in her stories so much that even she isn't entirely sure who the real Miho is anymore. Her thing was that she dies a lot in her stories, and some vagary of of how real all that is.

If Kimiko is going to matter in the story at this point, it's probably going to be about how willing she is to give herself over to all this bullshit, but that role already seems to have been taken up by Yuki and her teenage magical girl shit.

I've said this before; Fred Gallagher has a ridiculous world rolling around in his head that could go interesting places but he is a fucking terrible vehicle to get it out there. He needs to write a fucking bible for it and get some fans (which he still seems to have, somehow) to draw this shit for him on a semi-normal schedule.

>Still, he's managed to consistently update about once a week now for quite a few years.

The story went on hiatus for basically all of 2015, with chapter 11 ending on 1/4/15 and chapter 12 beginning on 12/13/15. After that, 2016 had 24 story pages, and 2017 he started Patreoning and things got a bit steadier, with 35 pages so far. Still erratic, but at least he updates. Unlike some artists that announce "Hello everyone! I have finally joined every other webcartoonist and set up a Patreon campaign in hopes of increasing my comics output." then wait multiple months between comics.

Isn't he also making a visual novel game?

The funny thing was even the people mad about it were saying it was true, just not a funny observation because it was dated or some shit. That's some special salt.

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