The Penny Arcade Thread

What makes that one even worse is that they've done the whole "Gabe turns to the internet for help and is disappointed" thing before, and far better:

I hear Wednesday's strip has a motivational poster background.

No, but it does still exist in the humour-free zone:



How old is this joke ... six, eight years?

He's teaching his Mom WOW? What kind of monster does that???

On one hand I'm totally in for seeing an adventure of Acquisitions Inc. And that snow in the first panel looks great! And hey, Gabe drawing Binwin Bronzebottom. Neat.


Then I look at the girl in the last panel and the more I look at her the more unsettled I get, like there's just a million tiny things wrong with her and they all add up to looking at Cthulhu's niece.

Okay,name five. I'm not seeing too much wrong with her.

The length of her neck for one. It's nearly as long as her head is tall.

I know almost nothing about drawing, but the only thing that really jumps out at me is that she has too many lines on her face. Under both eyes (two sets under the left one), under the chin, above the eyes...if decades of watching Matt Groening cartoons has taught me nothing else, I know that that is too many. Also she's making Dreamworks Face.

But more Acquisitions, Inc! Yay!

Her neck, her mouth, the weird placement of the lines on her face (I can understand some of the ones on her cheeks, is the one on her chin a tiny beard?), her Dreamworks eyebrows and her cleavage, which looks like Gabe panicked on how to draw cleavage and just decided that the best way to approach it would be to draw two circles bisected by a straight line and then run to the bathroom for a quick shametouch.

But man, that neck. Perhaps she is a giraffeling, from the plane of tall trees.

Well, Tycho does have a thing for birds with long necks...

He must've used Jennifer Love Hewitt as a reference for that one.

What?

- Her neck.
- The placement, size, and implied shape of her boobs.
- Her googly eyes.
- Her insane eyebrows. (One is raised ludicrously high but ok, but why does the other one go to the middle of her forehead?)
- Her Penny Arcade Nose (tm).
- Tons of random lines on her face.
- The part that fastens her cloak shut makes it look like her neck and head are disconnected from her body.
- Every part of her face is making a different expression.

Honestly nothing but the neck seems particularly bad to me. And maybe the line on her chin, but only after you all pointed it out to me. The lines on her cheeks seem like they're supposed to mean she's flush from the cold (along with the red color) and everything else is just part of the PA style and not particularly unusual.

The main problem--and mind you, I actually don't mind Gabe's new art style--is that she is supposed to look cold, but instead looks like someone just hit her in the face with a board.

Edit: Actually the snow on her cloak bothers me. In the first panel, the snow is out of focus because he is doing a depth of field effect. Which is fine, but why is it still out of focus when it's sitting on her shoulders?

The eyes are the worst thing. Why is one pupil larger than the other?

Are you sure it wasn't the ugly stick?

Someone hit her in the face with a board.

Nor do I. I just think this person looks bizarre. Omin's got a late-day PA nose and I've got zero problems with it. Jim's got Gabe's weird obsession with massive overbites. No problems. But the girl ... so weird.

I agree. The last panel is the problematic one. That and the snow.

Everyone's talking about her neck, but from the position of her coat's shoulders, I'm seeing it more as her hair is falling down over her shoulders, making it seem like her neck is longer than it is. If her neck is really that long, then that's a seriously padded cloak.

Collarbones.

Dunno, she looks cold to me.

If you start to look closely at the features then yeah, it's possible to find them problematic; but my first impression of the overall effect was more of a "striking, in a good way" variety.

Don't mistake the hood for the cloak... look at her shoulders, draw a line. Now, either her shoulders are very sloped, or her neck is really long. It looks like he confused the hood for cloak as well, like he drew her head as if the hood marked the top of her shoulders rather than the hood actually having the fur lining/edging he gave it which causes it to sit on top of the shoulders much higher than plain fabric lays on it.

Not perfect, but I think my second panel is a much better neck size given the rest of what he's drawn...

Have you seen her breasts?

Separated at birth?

It's gonna be a Christmas thing ;/.

The first panel of today's strip supports Ben's 'hit in face with board' proposal. She's crosseyed, appears to be sort of focusing on something between her and the person with whom she's speaking and that big red mark hasn't gone away.

I'm not sure what's going on with everyone else. Jim appears to be pooping his pants in the second panel, then enjoying the squishy warmth in the third. Binwin, on the other hand, appears to be shocked at how his eyes can pop out of their sockets to exist outside of his helmet. By the third panel he has that shit under control!

Panel one, still with the long neck. Panel two to panel three... her shoulders are at the same height, her head does not change angle, and yet there is more neck in panel three. So I overlaid panel three onto two and shifted the opacity...

I didn't move the panel up or down, just slide it to the side over the top. The shoulder and most of the head match up, but...

Apparently, her jaw doesn't open the way most people's jaws do, instead the jaw seems to unhinge and jut forward when she opens her mouth. Perhaps the long neck is because she is a snake and uses her unhinging jaw to swallow her meals whole.

I actually got a smile out of the change in Jim's expression from panel 2 to panel 3. Maybe it's giving too much credit, but the apparent change from a "This is an absurd venture no reasonable person would align themselves with" attitude to an "Oh, right, there will be loot --we're in" one strikes me as a pointed metacomment on the motivations of adventurers and the players who control them.

That neck does bother me, though.

I'd also note that her neck is approximately the correct length when viewed from the side. When he draws her from the front, he makes it twice as long. My theory is that she is E.T. in disguise.

I'm no artist, but



...guh

To be fair, in any campaign a quest-giver that's so obviously... mentally deficient, would make for some very, very exciting adventures indeed.

Is she supposed to be, um, special?

What the hell is with the buck teeth that everyone but Omin seems to have? Gah!

The art bothers me less than the humour void. In fact, the strip hasn't been funny in a good month. It's definitely a dry spell for penny arcade.

The hell Jim's crani-UUUUUMMM?

Brain tumor.

Well, that explains the inconsistent neck. Jim's just not very good at illusions.