Web Comic: PVP

While reading Scott McCloud's website, I stumbled across a web comic called Player Vs. Player (PVP). The comic is about a fictional game magazine publishing company. The strip takes place in the office, similar to other online strips such as User Friendly. According to the wikipedia entry, the comic was started in 1998 and has been published in Image Comics. The creator, Kurtz, has changed the format of the comic several times, eventually going to "widescreen" format. Monday thru Thursday, the comic strip is done in black and white with full color on Fridays.

There are several reoccuring characters including Cole Richards (Editor in Chief), Brent Sienna (Creative Director and Mac Zealot), Jade Fontaine, Francis Ottoman (younger gamer), Skull the Troll, and 11 other characters.

Today's comic features a drawer full of cloth maps from old games. The Editor-in-Chief has been collecting them for ages. The deluxe edition of World of Warcraft included a cloth map of the world with great detail of the two continents. I pictures that map while reading this comic. The subject matter tends to be geeky things, and occasionally some relationship issues between the characters. This comic makes use of words and pictures. The style is typical of "traditional" print comics one might see in the newspaper. Scott McCloud writes in "Understanding Comics", "A Great majority of modern comics do feature words and pictures in combination and its's a subject worthy of study, but when used as a definition for comics, I've found it to be a little too restrictive for my taste". (McCloud 21) In this case, that restrictive definition would work. The delivery of comics over the Internet might be considered unorthidox by some and possibly not comics. Its clear the concept of a comic can be extended to the web metaphor just as easy as print media.

The comic can be found at http://www.pvponline.com/. The wikipedia article is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PvP and finally McCloud's website is at http://www.scottmccloud.com/links/links.html