A DECADE OF PVP I: THE BEGINNINGS

[MattBrady]

by Zack Smith

For what started out as an innocent online strip about video games, PvP (aka Player Vs. Player) has proven to be a groundbreaking work in comics. Not only is it a hugely-successful long-running creator-owned humor series, but it’s also one of the most successful webcomics ever. Each day, an estimated 100,000 readers follow the adventures of Cole, Brent, Jade, Francis, Marcy and Skull (and their various friends and enemies) as they riff on both pop-culture and each other.

In addition, PvP has proven equally successful in hard-copy format, with Image printing trades and single-issue collections since 2003. It’s also expanded into new media, with merchandise, a podcast, and even a series of animated shorts.

With the 10th anniversary approaching, creator Scott Kurtz sat down with us for a four-part look back at his personal journey over the last decade. From MPOG to UGO to Dork Storm to Image, Kurtz, who’s co-authoring the forthcoming book How to Make Webcomics, tells us his story in his words.

Newsarama: Scott, let’s start off before the beginning. You started off doing the Samwise strip, right?

Scott Kurtz: Ohhh, yeah. Actually, I’d been doing strips since I was a little kid, and then in junior high and high school, I was sending them off to the syndicates. My first strip online was Wedlock, which was about a young married couple. But that was just a few first strips, back when people were just figuring out how to use the Internet as a way to show off portfolios, you know, as a way to get work, not as a delivery method.

NRAMA: Now, you mentioned you’d been drawing comics for a while – how’d you get into comics in the first place?

SK: Well, I liked to draw since I was very little, when my mom bought me that first Garfield collection, Garfield at Large.

NRAMA: I had that one! That’s the one with the big, grumpy-looking design.

SK: Yeah! That was when Garfield had some edge, man! He was the shit! The strip had a whole different structure than it does now.

But I was floored. I was in love with the format, and the idea of making up my own characters, and having a strip, doing a story arc…that’s what got me started. And I’ve been creating my own comic strip and making my own characters since then. It’s been non-stop.

NRAMA: When you were creating these strips, were there earlier iterations of the PvP characters? I know Skull was showing up in Samwise…

SK: Actually, yeah. They were originally from a strip called It’s Elementary, which was about schoolteachers. Cole was the principal of the school, and Brent was the art teacher, and Jade was the music teacher, and the character of Skull was there as a big dumb janitor who worked at the school, and Francis and Marcy were kids in the class. That’s how it started.

When I got the opportunity to do a comic strip about video games for a web site – and this was during the dot-com boom, back when people were paying good money for content –

NRAMA: Ah, the glory days…

SK: Exactly! (laughs) Basically, we were all participating in legal pyramid schemes. Money was coming in from venture capitalists, which went to content providers, which went to us, and it was never going to be profitable, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone…

Anyway, at the time, there was a web site called MPOG, and they wanted a comic strip, they didn’t want ownership or anything, and they threw me a little pittance…actually, you know what? Strike that. It wasn’t a pittance, it was 500 bucks a month, which was nothing to sneeze at, especially to do comics five days a week. It was a lot of work for 500 bucks a month, but it was worth it to get to do comics.

Anyway, they wanted it to be about video games, because they had seen my Samwise comics, and I said, “Look, I can do a strip about video games, but it’d be boring. Can I do a strip about the people who play video games? Because then I can talk about all kinds of things – pop culture and movies – and I can do character development and stuff.” I wanted to make it very character-driven, and not just do a joke about a video game every day.

They said, “Do whatever you want,” and so I took the It’s Elementary teachers and put them at a video game magazine. And that’s how it started!

NRAMA: Did you glean any inspiration from those videogame magazines of the 1980s, like Nintendo Power with Howard & Nester or those guys in GamePro?

SK: You know, I actually developed relationships with all those people after the fact, after PvP got more popular. I actually did some strips for GamePro…but I actually hadn’t read any of that stuff ahead of time.

I wasn’t even that intense a gamer. I mean, everyone I know grew up playing video games, but I was not so crazy about them. I was into Ultima Online, and EverQuest, but I didn’t play everything that came out. I’m usually the guy who picks one game, and plays it, and stays with it. I’m surely not like the Penny Arcade guys – they play everything, and they love it! I’m pretty casual about my gaming, so in that sense I’m a fraud.



NRAMA: When you took your characters into the PvP environment, how did they change? Also, given what you’ve just said, did you have to do any research about video games to put the strip together?

SK: Well, actually, that was kind of easy. Like I said, it was a strip about people, and not about the games themselves. The strips that got the most responses were actually the ones that nothing to do with the minutiae of the games, but rather something that would make someone go, “Oh, I know someone like that!”

So it was more important to the comic to focus on the player than on the game itself. And I think I caught on to that pretty fast. That was when I know what PvP was about – it wasn’t about the game, but about telling jokes that related to people who played the game.

Once I learned that, then my audience expanded. Then, it wasn’t just the gamers who liked it – it was the girlfriends of the gamers, and the parents of the gamers, and the friends of the gamers. It wasn’t just hooking the people into pop culture, it was also hooking the people who thought all of it was silly, and had friends who were way too into it.

(In PvP), you have the character who’s way into pop culture, but you also have the character who can’t stand it, and has to deal with the characters who do like it. I mean, you grow up, and you’re into comics, and you usually have a friend who isn’t into it. And I like that contrast, because everyone’s been through that – there’s the friend who isn’t into the pop-cultural stuff, but puts up with it anyway, because they’re your friend.

All of what I’m saying right now sounds incredibly boring, I know…but that was the key to PvP being successful. If I tried to do a Penny Arcade-type script, where it was just about the games…I would have been fucked. The gamers would have been on me in a heartbeat. I would have been faking it, and it wouldn’t have worked.

But that’s what did make PvP work, because instead of coming in and faking it, or just doing the obvious jokes, what I did instead was have my characters admit, “I don’t get all of this. Maybe I’m just too old, or not the right kind of gamer.” And that’s what people identified with.

NRAMA: Early in the strip, you sometimes mentioned that some of the characters were based on people you know. Could you talk a little more about that, and what those relationships have meant to you?

SK: Well, I think that’s the key to writing comic strips. The question you get asked the most when you’re doing a comic strip is, “Where do you come up with your jokes?” You have to come up with a joke every day, so where do you get those ideas?

The answer is, if you think about it, your friends! You come up with something to laugh about every day. You’d be hard-pressed not to come up with something that makes you and your buddies laugh every day. The difference is that I write it down. I take notes, I chronicle it, and I transform it into something fictional. And I always feel the best humor is humor that rings true. So you have to take it from what you know in real life.

So, in that respect, basing characters on your friends – it’s a great deal. But it’s a fine line. Even if a character is fictional, if you take them in a direction that’s different than your friend is, they can be offended. So you have to take bits and pieces of the essence of what makes up the importance your relationship here and there, and put them into fictional characters.

I think when I started the strip, the characters were like complete avatars of people I knew, but as I became a better writer and went off in my own directions, they became less and less like people I knew, and more and more of me in them.

NRAMA: Now, after the strip had been running for about a year, you made your first major change – you shut the strip down for a week to do redesigns on the major characters. Why did you make this decision?

SK: What happened was that from the fourth grade up until 1996, I’d drawn constantly and developed a pretty consistent style of cartooning. Then, in 1996, my mom died. I was 24, she was 54, 55…she was pretty young. And I just kind of gave up on all that, on cartooning. I’d just gotten married, and it seemed like it was time to maybe grow up a little bit. And so my drawing board kind of sat aside for about two years. For at least a year and a half, I didn’t draw at all.

In late 1997, early 1998, when I started drawing again and posting stuff online, I got lucky…I was doing video game stuff, making fun of the developers, and it got attention, which led to PvP. And once PvP got going, and it became apparent that I wasn’t going to quit and start over with something else, I got serious about drawing again. I got curious again – curious about breaking out my old tools, honing my craft, and designing the characters. It was about getting back to that place I was before Mom died, that place where I could entertain frivolous thoughts about maybe one day being a cartoonist.

That’s when I asked the guys at MPOG if I could take the strip down for a week. And I went back to my house and pulled out all my old artwork and kind of talked myself into drawing the way I used to. That was the reason for that reboot.

NRAMA: And how did things change after the reboot?

SK: Everything changed. I went from posting erratically and losing readers – I think when PvP started, I had two or three hundred readers, and then it got up to around a thousand, and I was really happy. And then I wouldn’t post for a while, I’d miss a day or two or go away for a couple of weeks, and it’d get down to two or three hundred readers again.

So when I asked MPOG if I can take a week off, they said, “No, if you take a week off, you’ll lose all your readers.” And I said, “Yeah, but I’m going to come back strong. I’m really into this now.” They didn’t want me to do it, but I was clear that I was serious – that I was either doing this or I was quitting. They either had to let me reboot or I’d quit.

That reboot was a huge revelation for me. I came back and I stuck to the five-days-a-week schedule. I think shortly after that, I said, “screw this, I’m doing seven days a week.” And that’s when things really took off, when suddenly I had over a million page views and was going from MPOG over to UGO in 2000…

Next: The strip becomes more popular, and Kurtz reveals who really inspired Jade.

[ssava]

Great article!

It's nice to learn a bit of PVP's history...

Thanks for posting.

[Glen Cadigan]

PvP is one of the true success stories of the little guy making good in the comic medium. It's also another example to naysayers of the importance of the Internet in both promoting comics and leveling the playing field for anyone that doesn't work for a major conglomerate.

[jmc65]

I really like PVP. Scott does a real good job at portraying people that you know and putting them into interesting situations. Here's to another 10 good years. Great article.

[AbacusComics]

PVP is good stuff. It's no wonder it's been so successful.

[johnchrist]

Heh, Ultima Online, man it's been a long time since I heard anyone mention that. Sh!t, I was one of those guys pioneering the MMORPG back in the day. Looking back now, those games feel like the wild west, no rules, no classes, just skill sets and exp. Heh, guild wars before they were even moderated.. man... fun times.

To anyone who remembers those days I was Peregrinator of KGB on Pacific and Siege Perilous shard.

Oh, and I drew the 'Armand Hammer' comics on the 'ImaNewbie' site.. heh, and to think I considered myself cuttign edge back then!

[AnthonyL]

I read the PVP comic, but basically felt like I was paying forwhat I was getting for free daily. Then I lost interest in the strip.

But I do have fond memories of Graphamaximo (sp?)

Heh. That was great, controversy and all.

Anthony L

[Uthor]

I admire Scott and his meticulous approach to both the creative and buisness side of webcomics. I found his various rants and stuff very infomative in giving a look behind the scenes.

I stopped reading PvP, however. The stories just stopped being interesting to me.

[Regicidal]

Scratch Fury ONGOING!!

[Scar of Kaine]

PVP is part of my morning ritual.

Come into work
Switch kettle on and fire up PC
Pour tea
PVP
Megatokyo
Shortpacked
Ctrl Alt Del
Looking for Group
Least I could do
Start work

I couldn't function without my daily dose.