Rispon Avenue

I hate when things change just to have changed. I feel like that’s what’s happened over on Penny Arcade, change for the bad.

If you go right back to the start of Penny Arcade, you can see how far Gabe’s come in his art. The characters look a lot better, smoother, just… more professional. This new art style seems to harken back overly to the original Penny Arcade, and it makes Gabe’s work look less good for it. I don’t know what the heck is going on over there, and I haven’t seen any mention of it on the forums over there, but it just looks a bit cheaper, a bit nasty.

The whole site has a new style, too. The menu buttons have all be squished over to the sides, which means any time you want to use them, you spend the first second searching for them. Bad design, very bad design. Even the fonts are ugly… what are they thinking?

Looking back over comics from earlier this year, I’d have to say the colour pallet is slightly different, the backgrounds are tending to be less detailed, and the characters themselves seem to have thinner outline lines, and I’d say that a major difference is the eyes. They seem to be just slightly different, leading to the characters looking a little… stupid… I don’t want to say that, but that’s the affect.

Of course, these are all very slightly noticeable, two degrees less saturation on colours will be hard to specifically notice, yet has an impact… I’m being picky I suppose because I really like the comic, it’s the only web comic I keep up with. It’s frustrating to see their site and their comic go downhill. I’m hoping that the comics are just the intervening ones whilst they are at PAX, and that they are the reserves that were done some time ago.

On a side note, I’d like to say congratulations to Tycho on his second bundle of very cute joy, Ronia Quinn.

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A little while back, Penny Arcade put up a few ideas for new comic strips. They already have a few ‘other strips’ on the side, the Cardboard Tube Samurai, Catsby and Twisp are two of these, but they were looking to make another. Three options were given, Lookouts, a very cute and pleasing to the eye strip, then there was Automata, which was poignant, but depressing, and lastly, there was Jim Darkmagic, which is actually a D&D character created by Gabe, but the comic fell short for me, as it was a bit too silly, and somewhat grotesque.

Voting was opened, and readers made the choice in the end that Lookouts would be the comic to be taken up. Unfortunately, Gabe and Tycho decided to bring in a new artist and a new writer for this comic, which is so very disappointing! It’s hideous, with the panels being disjointed and hard to read, and the story itself is completely lacking that Penny Arcade snap. I’m not the only one that thinks, this either, the forums over on the PA site have a thread dedicated to how disappointed they are in the choice of artist/writer. There are no fewer than 23 pages at this stage, all filled with people trying to make sense of this comic.

I know it shouldn’t matter, but I feel mislead. Readers were given the option to vote for which comic they wanted to see expanded on, but we didn’t get that, we got a completely different comic that looks and reads poorly. Bah! What were they thinking? It is just… frustrating. I can understand that Gabe likes the work of Becky Dreistadt, but I personally think its ugly, really, really ugly. Her website makes me want to vomit. Seriously, for an artist to be that lacking in understanding of what a maroon background with fascia fleur de lys will do to a person’s vision – and stomach – is mind boggling. The writer, Oliver Grigsby, is a part of the team that writes for Heroes, and the Heroes comics as well. But as I said, his work lacks the crisp snap of Tycho’s writing.

All in all, please don’t do this again, Gabe and Tycho, or I think your fans may be forced to beat you senseless with ham barbells and cardboard tubes.

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