Penny Arcade

Here’s the third - or maybe the second, chronologically speaking - installment of The Wandering Age:  Last Rites.  Of course, we need to thank Elbo for the translations in panels one and two - and we need to thank you, as the readers of a comic ostensibly concerned with gaming, for enduring our erratically sourced samurai epics.

It’s just the summer con season condensing it all together, but we’ve been in a position lately to have people ask us what our favorite comics are.  The fact of the matter is that I read far, far too many comics to present in a quick list, but it’s easy enough to choose a few right off the top.  Gabriel typically replies that he reads Spells and Whistles, PvP, and Copper.  I’m with him there on the PvP, but as far as I’m concerned Scary Go Round is about as good as a comic gets - regardless of the medium.  I’m also perfectly willing to say, as I have whenever a person asks me, that VG Cats is the finest gaming comic that currently exists.  It is possible that it could be bested I suppose, but certainly not by any work currently in the genre.  Sorry. 

As a young man, Gabriel penned a whimsical yarn about a cat and a dog that lived together in an apartment.  Well, it turns out that Tauhid Bondia - creator of Spells and Whistles - used to cook up a little something something prior to his current work called Suzie View, written by Erik McCurdy, which concerns a gradeschool auteur and her cinematic adventures.  Six months ago, he had essentially shelved the concept and begun work on his current runaway success - and now, here come the syndicates, and they want to know if he’d like to put his work on Comics dot com.  The notion is that if a comic is Comics dot com material, then it might be funny page material, and if you are producing funny page material then that means that you are really and truly a cartoonist.

This came up a little bit at Scott’s Syndication panel.  Being syndicated used to be the definition of success for a comic strips, those things were synonyms.  That remains a valid way to do it, but there are absolutely trade-offs to that route that typically have to do with signing over a healthy portion of the rights to your work.  You can do it on the web as well, I know several people who are doing it right now. The trouble is that you need to construct from a bizarre menu of methods a sort of “business” that can support you in this endeavor, and it’s not going to be the same for everyone.  Penny Arcade alone has been supported via four wholly unique systems since its inception, each one of them correct only for a discrete temporal span. 

Getting back to Tauhid’s magical phone call - that is actually how it happens, people.  You set something down that you liked a lot, and then all of the sudden important people are like “wow, that’s some cool stuff you were doing,” even though you’d been doing the fucking thing for months and it never seemed to warrant their attention before.  When they gaze down from their golden throne, it will strike you how serendipitous, indeed, how melodramatic and apparently contrived your successes can be.  I know that many cartoonists, web and otherwise, read Penny Arcade from time to time, and hopefully you are reading today because this fact might bolster you.  You won’t know it’s coming.  Corollary:  It might already be en route. 

Please learn from our lessons though, don’t waste your time reading contracts yourself and imagine that you know what the fuck they’re talking about - if you’re serious about making a living by your creative work, then it’s time to be serious about protecting it.  We’re lucky that we can afford a lawyer now to shoehorn us out of our youthful indiscretions, but honestly, I’d much rather that we had never been indiscreet. 

(CW)TB out.

i feel old and foolish now

And they are sons of bitches.

That is all.

(CW)TB

I went to Taco Bell last night and I was shocked at what I discovered. I understand that it is their policy to mess up my order. I expect now that what I ask for is never what will actually end up in my bag. It turns out that simply forgetting your burrito or shorting you a taco is no longer good enough for these sons of bitches though. Now they have decided that they needed to replace their awesome mexi-fries with new shitty fiesta fries. No more delicious and authentic seasoned tater treats. No sir, now you get disgusting little potato wedges fried in salt and sweat. I noticed something was wrong a few months ago when their combo meals no longer included mexi-fries. They tried to pawn off some shitty taco in their place but I would have none of that. “Fuck your taco bitch, I want my fries!” is what I was often heard to say. Now it’s obvious that their removal from the combo meals was simply a precursor to a much larger mexi-fri conspiracy. They are now missing entirely from the menu and every bit of evidence that proved they ever existed has been meticulously removed and probably destroyed. Did those filthy Taco Bell bastards really think I would simply forget how much I liked mexi-fries? Its bullshit like this that makes me worry about bringing a child into the world. These are dark times indeed.

Oh, they also got some new exclusive drink called Mountain Dew Baja Blast. If you are curious what this stuff tastes like, simply drink a bottle of Scope.

-Gabe out

I don’t travel that much and when I do I guess I never go to Taco Bell. Lots of readers are writing in to tell me that they have never even heard of mexi-fries. At first I thought that the Taco Bell people must have gotten to them. Not content to simply remove them from their restaurants I figured they had set out to remove them from the very minds of their patrons.

Then I got a couple mails from readers who had grown up here in the pacific northwest and then for whatever reason moved away. They told me that our little pocket of cold rainy states up here was in fact the ONLY place that ever had mexi-fries. SHOCKING! It seems that enthusiasts of pretend Mexican food in other parts of the country have always had fiesta potatoes or tacos with their combo meals. I was asked by many of you to explain just what mexi-fries were. Perhaps in remembering them here publicly I can work through some of my own guilt and pain while at the same time sharing the magic of mexi-fries with those of you who might never have known what you were missing. So here goes:

They were yummy little tater tot things.

Gabe out

I got a lot of mail from people requesting I scan and post the pictures I got from Stephen Silver and Stan Sakai. They are actually being shipped back up from SDCC and should be here in a few days. Once I have them both I’ll scan them for you guys.

I also wanted to post links to a few more of the amazing artists I met down there.

Adam works at Blizzard and has decided recently to try his had at making a web comic. I highly suggest you check it out. This guy just destroys me with his talent. He’s got a couple how to guides available that will make you vomit.

I picked up Keith’s sketchbook at the show and spent an entire night in my hotel room drooling and copying drawings right out of it in an effort to understand his process. During the sketchbook party I attended he drew me some Star Wars characters that I will soon have framed on my wall.

I met Allen at the same Sketchbook party and we talked about web comics and the comic book industry in general for about four fucking hours. I have one of the drawings he gave me on my desktop at work and above it I wrote “LINE” and “SHAPE”. When I’m struggling with a picture now I can look at his work and it will remind of the things I need to concentrate on.

-Gabe out

I’m getting hundreds of mails about these mexi-fries. I was told that mexi-fries originated at Taco Time. Apparently the Mexi-Fries were very popular but the rest of their food wasn’t. Taco Time went in the crapper but Taco Bells popped up everywhere. The fuckers at the Bell decided that they could just rip off Taco Time’s mexi-fries and no one would notice. So Taco Bell started carrying mexi-fries, only their proper name was Mexi-nuggets. These mexi-nuggets also bear more than a striking resemblance to Taco Johns’ Potato Ole’s, seen below.

Now the shape isn’t quite right as mexi-nuggets and fries are essentially just tater tots while these Potato Ole’s seem more like little disks. Little delicious disks.

I found a Taco Time today for lunch and ordered some Mexi-Fries. I had never even realized we had a Taco Time until just this afternoon, even though it is literally just a block from the Taco Bell. As I endured my disgusting burrito I looked around at the nearly empty restaurant and felt sorry for them. It’s true they had mexi-fries but it seems as though they were unable to reproduce that success. The rest of their menu looked bland and uninspired. Even the mexi-fries I ordered tasted pretty much like regular tater tots who perhaps at some point in their brief life had read a travel brochure about Mexico. These were not the mexi-treats I longed for.

I did receive what I can only imagine is a top secret recipe that I am told came directly from Taco Bell manuals. I give you, the recipe for mexi-fries:

Cook some tater tots, then sprinkle them with mexican seasoning.

Many Bothans died to bring us this information.

In a related story, Taco Bell seems to have discontinued their chili cheese burrito as well. I was never a fan of this particular item myself but I understand the pain that these people must be going through. Fans of the burrito have united and created a website to spread the word about this horrendous injustice.

How long will we let this sort of thing go on? I could be wrong, but the last time I checked we still lived in America.

Gabe out

This guy was at Otakon I guess. That might be the coolest thing ever.