Has PVP always been this bad?

After catching a bit of this on other sites, should I take this to mean that Kurtz is essentially in agreement with the whole "hot women who cosplay are VAGINAL TERRORISTS after our precious bodily fluids" thing and is a big fan of the idiotic "if you disagree with misogyny, you're a white knight" attitude?
Anyone who's been following it a bit more care to weigh in?

When did Kurtz start drawing PA characters but shittier? Sheesh.

I always knew Kurtz was an /r9k/ fan. He fits right in!

And with today's strip he keeps digging. Really need to get rid of the reflex to check that comic every day.

Yeah. As much as I've defended Kurtz over the years, I think that this might be it for me. Maybe I'll try Something Positive again. Perhaps he's discovered a second punchline to toss into the mix.

Man, the design on that White Knight dude looks weird, especially relative to the relatively more realistic models for the other characters. He really does look like a Krahulik doodle, right down to the square crotch.

Jesus fucking christ, Bahimiron, that one is not only captial-letter Not Funny but actively offensive and stupid. What an awful, awful strip.

I bet bar stools are quite comfortable when you have a fully square crotch, though.

I've listened to Kurtz on podcasts and read his stuff long enough that I know I just became 'that fan', cos I emailed him and basically said that I've been reading his strip since before anyone had even heard of Penny Arcade and that while there have been ups and downs (I did not say that the downs started a few years ago and haven't gone back up since) that I've always stuck with it as a sort of constant since college, but that I needed a good explanation of this series of strips and soon or it'd pretty much be it for me. I know he won't take that well cos he doesn't ever take that sort of thing well.

It just kills me that he'd post ludicrous concern trolling bullshit like this only a couple of months after his best buddy, the genuinely awesome Kris Straub, got himself a bucket of internet hate for shitting on the secret mysogyny of the Nice Guy with this strip.



Edit: While looking for that strip, I found this one which made me happy.



People who pronounce robot 'robut' will always be hilarious to me.

I bet he's getting a lot of Internet tizzy reaction over the White Knight strips, which I'm sure is exactly what he's gunning for. Let us know if he actually responds to your e-mail, Bahimiron, but I'm gonna make the call that he's more likely to write a "Damn the critics, I just gotta be me" type blog post instead.

Also, wasn't aware that Straub had gotten hate mail for the secret friend zone misogyny strip. I thought it was kinda funny.

It's probably his most commented-on strip ever. It's packed with people explaining to him that he's wrong and unfair.

He's just going to accuse you of being the creator of pvpmakesmesad.com or that you're not one of the $100,000 he needs to survive or something equally dismissive and tonedeaf for an artist to say. You know, I totally get not wanting people to show up and start deconstructing your shit with their "producer's ear", you know, Armchair Quarterbacking, but he has such a warped sense of perspective that you either seem to be with or against him, with no room inbetween. It'd be one thing if he had the same DILLIGAF? mentality as Penny Arcade, but Kurtz is so obviously one of those Artists-as-Wounded-Warrior types that you can tell he takes it personally.

And anytime someone legitimately, as in without hyperbole, says one of your latest works has lost the magic, you should be wounded. Enough to listen, not to retaliate.

Where are you reading comments on the strip? I don't see a comments section or forums on his site.

Also, to add: while Kurtz gives a lot of solid business advice regarding how to run an independent shop, I would think that anyone taking it would be wary of who it is coming from. Start-up webcomic artists who take his advice, but who also chose to act exactly like him, would get exactly nowhere. The only reason he has an income is off his residual fame - geezers like us who can't stop the daily refresh or people who buy his merch because LOL TROLL WEARING A FEZ.

Under the strip is a little blurb where he explains the strip or (more often) makes a secondary gag to go with the strip. Right under that on the right it says 'Woah lots of comments (46)' or something. Click on that and you'll see the comments. The comment people are a kind of weird community. They do not get irony delivered by anyone other than Kris.

I'm always a little surprised to find that Kurtz still does well. His other projects never go anywhere (though Truth Justin and the American Way was actually pretty okay and did finish) and it seems to me that the appeal of his main strip is that it's been around forever, so maintains an inertia-based audience that has to be constantly dying off. Then again, I keep reading it. Even though I'm annoyed at his going back to Scratch stories or Lolbat stories, even though it bugs me that he can't be bothered to finish some of his more serious stories like with Max or gives shitty joke endings to his other stories like with Marcy and Francis, thus denying any of these characters any kind of growth. Blegh. Maybe this is a good thing.

Oh, and someone commented on how weird looking the White Knight is. He looks exactly like a character from the Trenches. So it's clearly inspired by the cooperative art work he's been doing with Gabe at PA. And hey, considering Gabe's track record on responding to gender issues, his newfound misogyny may also be inspired by Gabe at PA!

Weird, I don't see any such blurb. Did he turn comments off?

The chainsawsuit nice guy friendzone comic is actually funny. I'm also not surprised at all that the creator got a ton of flak from Nice Guys who Aren't Like That, No Sir. Because laughing at yourself is admitting defeat.

That's not even anything approaching the godawful shittiness of the PvP White Knight strips. "Poking fun at 'nice' but socially awkward guys who don't understand social dynamics" ≠ "In between apologizing for their gender."

It's actually at blogspot. Though it hasn't been updated in over a year.

Nope. Right there. Under the blurb are links to some popular strips and Adbird featuring the latest ad and under that is sort of a bloggy thing that he usually uses for jokes, like his review of season 2 of The Newsroom. Right now it has 'spoilers' for Sinister.

Not for me, apparently. This is what I see:

Jamie, I think Bahimiron was talking about the chainsawsuit strip.

Oh. Yeah. That's the problem.

What he said.

Why do people read PVP? Is it a daily strip? It seems like there are better choices out there. Like looking at newly painted wall, watching the paint dry, for example.

You're so funny and so full of original insights that you should consider starting up a webcomic!

Ah. Duuuuurrrr....

Yeah, all I would need to do is be a bit more misogynistic, and then I'd fit right in!

On one hand Kurtz appears to have killed his White Knight story.

On the other hand, he may very well be trolling his entire user base, as he's brought back a character he has admitted is the single most hated character he's ever introduced.



...and the fact that everyone hates him appears to be the punchline.

(Also, fuck that second panel. You're not that guy, Kurtz. You never will be.)

Odd, Penny Arcade did the white silhouette thing in the second panel in their strip today, too.

I see what you did there.

Huh. I dig the second panel of that strip, actually. The joke is terrible and unfunny, but the one-third of the art is good. Progress!

He's gone ... and done it ... again!



Does he think the silhouette thing is cool and artistic? Cos if it's being done with no purpose other than to look interesting, the reader will intuit this fact and it won't be interesting at all.

Also, there's no joke here.

Also, holy crap does Val look terrible in both panels 2 and 3.

Her nose in the second panel looks like a skin tag I once had removed.

Speaking of bad comics, our long national nightmare is finally over. Though there's speculation that it's just paving the way for a reboot...

It's not really speculation. He says exactly that on the front page. Also, I've never read that comic and have no idea what was going on. But I'm okay with that.

I can't tell if the first few panels (up to the "our suffering is over" bit) were supposed to be in-character only or if Buckley finally became cognizant of his own failings, as both an artist and human being, and meant them as a sort of spectacular meta-commentary thereof.

Oh. The reboot is gamer/pop culture pandering; guess it's the former. Thanks Hanacker!

DIS.

LIKE.

Mmm whatcha say

CAD is starting over? What a miscarriage of justice.

Terrible.