The San Diego Comic-Con has a dark side, certainly; a dark place, where fear is currency. Come to booth 1334 for succor.

About eleven years ago Penny Arcade was on the brink of collapse. We had recently recovered the rights to our own work after accidentally selling them to a shady internet aggregator. The good news was that we could keep making Penny Arcade but the bad news was we had quit our jobs and we were broke. We talked about giving up and begging for our jobs back but I convinced Tycho to try something first. The Wayback Machine has a couple priceless snapshots of the day we decided to ask you for donations. Going back and reading those posts today is really amazing. For almost two years we ran this website entirely on your generosity. You paid for our rent, food, video games and in return we made PA three times a week as well as a bunch of extra content. A lot has changed in eleven years. PA has fourteen employees now, we put on two massive conventions every year, we run a worldwide charity, we produce our own video games and web show. It’s a major operation now and running it off of donations again seems impossible. Or is it?

We have many tales of San Diego Comic-Con adventure in store for you, through the week and maybe just past. I am completely fascinated with it this year for some reason, even though we've gone every year since 2000 and such enthusiasm should be all but burned out. I fully expect to synchronize with readers on a variety of topics, some of them thoroughly surprising. I also expect to take megadoses of vitamins A and C to counteract fully six days of exposure to those enervating halogen rods.

We will be at Comic Con is next week and I’ve got all the details for you.

I'll talk about Theatrythm next week, when I can stop playing it long enough for the thoughts

We will be at Comic Con is next week and I’ve got all the details for you.

The first issue of our ongoing Lookouts comic book is available today on Comixology! This book has been a long time in the making and I’m incredibly proud of the result. Cryptozoic has put together and incredible creative team and they really nailed the Lookouts style. Tycho and I worked very closely with everyone involved to make sure this book feels like Lookouts. If you’re a fan of our fantasy boy scouts I think you’re in for a real treat.

Gabriel has been playing the newest Spider-Man, which - to hear him tell it - is actually a new Batman game, or something very much like it. He doesn't care at all! He doesn't think they're engaged in a barrel scraping operation, or that there's a paucity of inspiration at Beenox, or anything of the kind. He loves Batman: Arkham Whatever, and he simply thinks that all superhero games should be exactly like that. Essentially, he's arguing for the formulation of Batman a la Rocksteady as a kind of genre.

Knowing, as we do, that Gabriel plays games in order to be rewarded with "new art," the fact that Kingdom Hearts 2 ranks high for him - as high as it can, actually - probably isn't a surprise. I find the story fascinating, the sort of game one drains with a FAQ chaser; there are huge ideas all over the fucking place, when the fact their tangle of warring franchises works at all is surprising out the gate.

Try to follow the sequence of events:

I keep thinking I'm going to get back into Diablo 3, but it never seems to happen; they inspire new outrage on a weekly basis with everything that surrounds the clicking, but I'm not even running the executable! I'm safe altogether from these fresh horrors. And everyone else beat it and left. If I wanted to get back in, I'd be doing it alone. So that might not happen.

Fingers crossed!

They've been at it for days already, up past $77,000, and they just keep cranking. Stop by the stream!

I was an Avatar: The Last Airbender fan, a big one. Perhaps not big enough to refer to it as ATLA or whatever a true enthusiast would call it; I'm also not entirely sure what a true enthusiast might be called. So, now you have the meticulously calibrated threshold. I have been largely unavailable to mass media enterprises of late, but I couldn't wait for the season to end to catch up with Korra. I'd gorged on the previous series, and had similar plans, but no. Gabe kept coming into the office eyes wide, head shaking, desperate to discuss and embroider.

We've been testing builds of different stuff for PAX10 ahead of the judging, making sure everything will function day of, because early software doesn't always behave correctly. Dave and Feh were playing a really cool cooperative puzzler when I dropped in, and I couldn't bring myself to look away. I could have plugged in a controller, it allows for four clever little virii, but I was too mesmerized. I went back into my office and bought it instantly. I don't know what this subgenre is called, or if it even has a name, but this is one of those games where you are trying to light up a circuit. A Virus Named Tom! I'm only one judge, so I can't verify it'll get all the way to the show, but you could (if you were so inclined) buy it for five stupid bucks and grab the very polished beta right now.

It’s been quite a while since we announced that a Lookouts comic was being made. It honestly took us longer than we thought to nail down the right creative team to make the book. We’ve nailed it now though and the first issue will be available on July 6th.