A DECADE OF PVP II: THE UGO YEARS AND JADE

[MattBrady]

by Zack Smith

In celebration of PvP’s impending 10th anniversary, we’re talking with creator Scott Kurtz this week about his strip – how it evolved, both on-screen and off, and his personal journey through the last 10 years. Today, Kurtz talks about how he came to do the strip full-time, the real-life inspiration for Jade, and why everybody loves Skull.

Newsarama: Scott, when we left off, you were talking about your move to UGO. How did that move come about?

Scott Kutz: Well, it was very frightening. At the time I started this, it was me and Penny Arcade, and I was at MPOG.com, and the dot-com boom was about to happen, and we didn’t understand how anything worked. I didn’t know how to look at my own page views, how hosting worked, any of it. So, we were kind of relying on MPOG to give us the state of the union, and they were very slow about it – “Man, you wouldn’t understand these numbers, don’t worry about it.”

What happened was MPOG sold themselves to a company called eFront, and there were these new contracts where they promised us all this advertising on the site and all this money – a lot more than $500 a month, enough to quit your job. And the contracts came in…and they basically said that they would own everything. They would own the website and everything on the web site, but they wouldn’t own the characters. And I didn’t like it. It threw up a red flag.

I was devastated. I thought I was finally going to get to quit my day job and be a cartoonist for real, and here comes this contract, and it had every red flag I had ever been warned to avoid. It was a limited payout…a lot of it was, I dunno, stock options, stuff I didn’t understand. All that typical dot-com stuff you’d expect. But the payments ended after the first of the year, and they owned it, that’s the impression I got from the contract.

So I refused to sign it. And all of the sudden, I had nothing. I had no place for PvP. So I immediately started scrambling and looking for another web site to host it. I talked to some different places, including Keenspot, and UGO made me this incredible offer. So I just moved everything over – and thank God I did, because Google eFront sometime and just read about the debacle with all that. It was this big mess, it was bad news.

UGO was a lot better. It was just interested in your traffic – they didn’t care about the content, they only cared that you had their trade dress, and you ran the ad the way they wanted, and you gave them permission to record your traffic (for media purposes). (explains online advertising to ignorant interviewer). It eventually got to the point that the money I was making from the ads was more than I was making from my day job.

NRAMA: What were you doing as a day job before you were able to move to the strip full-time?

SK: At the time, I was working as a webmaster at a local radio station, at a Christian radio station. It was a great, great job – I’m still friends with all the people there, who were very supportive. And I wasn’t going to quit – I was pretty happy. My wife and I were struggling – not financially, but I was working a full-time job, and I was coming home and working on this strip…and we’d only been married two years, and I was coming off this horrible loss, losing my mom.

I think at the time, around 1998, we had finally broken out of “keep the family together” mode. We kind of stopped being newlyweds and started being the glue that held the family together after Mom died. So right around that time, we decided the family was going to be okay, it had been two years, we could be newlyweds…but instead of being newlyweds, here I was coming home and working on this comic that had no guarantee that it was going to go anywhere.

So here I was being offered all this money, and I felt like, “This is great! Now I have this justification for doing all this work! Now, the comics were bringing in as much as the day job, and I wasn’t going to quit my day job, but my wife was saying, “You should quit your day job. You should quit, and you should try this, because the worst that can happen is that UGO doesn’t pan out to be what it’s supposed to be, and you can mark on your resume that you were a self-employed freelance designer for six months. So it won’t hurt anything.”

I waited about three or four months, and after that, I quit (the station). But I wouldn’t have, if it weren’t for Angie. Because she said, “Look, if you don’t do this, you’ll be 50, and you’ll regret having never tried.”

NRAMA: Your close relationship with your wife has really come through in the strips. Now, some people have said, “Oh, she’s the inspiration for Jade,” and she’s said, “Oh, it’s Scott’s feminine side.” Who, in your opinion, is correct?

SK: Oh, well…there’s a lot of me in Jade. I would love to tell you it’s all Angie, and maybe these days it is. But in the beginning of the strip, especially, there was a lot of me in Jade.

(pause) Yeah. Listen, the bottom line is: I am not going to lie. I am like a female man. In our relationship, Angie’s the dude and I’m the girl. In most households, if you were to hear someone say, “Yeah, I came home the other night, and my spouse says I’m being tough on our relationship,” or “My spouse is mad because I don’t compliment them enough on their looks,” you’d think it was the man complaining about the woman…but that’s usually me. I am very much the girl in our relationship. So it’s not hard to write women for me, necessarily.

I think that once she became comfortable with the idea that she was Jade, I put more of her in Jade. But at first I was really nervous about it. I think once she understood that everyone assumed she was Jade anyway, she was cool about it, and I put a lot more of her in the character anyway.

To this day, there is a lot of stuff I would love to do with the character, and I can’t, because people might think that that’s me! I mean, you read comics – what do most comics do with female characters?



NRAMA: Uhhhh…rape them, beat them horribly, wipe their memories, shove them into refrigerators…

SK: (laughs) Exactly! Yeah, I love that Gail Simone site! I want to shove Jade in a refrigerator because Max put her there and have Brent come home and find her…no, I mean like do posters and stuff with Jade kind of being the sexy person in the strip. But it’s hard for me to that, because people will assume I’m writing about Angie, and I don’t want to do that.

There was a recent strip where Brent revealed there was some weird sexual fetish he had a problem with, and I think some strips might have made that the girl’s thing, but I made it Brent because I want to avoid people coming up to Angie at a con and going, “Hey, so like getting your butt smacked, huh? Wink, wink, saw it in the strip!”

But because of that, I think, it made Jade a more well-rounded character. I think it prevented me from hitting all the normal clichés. But yeah, I think that there is a lot of me in Jade.

NRAMA: Would you say that’s the character most like you in the strip?

SK: I think if you split me down the middle, you’d get Skull and Brent. You have my very sarcastic side in Brent, and there’s a big part of me that’s just kind of dumb and really naïve…I walk into a lot of stuff. I dunno, I kind of go back and forth between the two of them. But I would say yeah, Brent and Skull are my two halves.

NRAMA: And Skull’s certainly become the breakout character, all the plushies and things…

SK: Oh, yeah! I mean, come on, he’s easy! Every comic strip’s gotta have their mascot. It’s easy to like Skull. He’s loveable, he’s innocent, he means well, he’s well-intended, and he’s the cute character, he’s easy to look at. Though I would say my favorite character to write has gotta be Brent, Skull is definitely very iconic.

It’s very exciting, because we go places with that plush, and people see that, and are intrigued by it, and want to touch it. It draws them in. That makes me feel really good about Skull as a character, because I don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that he’s a plush…he’s just a fun character. Kids love him, they see that plush and they want to read the book.

NRAMA: But you sometimes deal with saltier humor in the strip – would you recommend it to kids?

SK: Well, not real little kids, no. In a way, I would…I mean, we get a little risqué sometime, but if you talk to kids, especially teenagers, they don’t want to read stuff for kids. They want to read stuff that’s going to challenge them, and is going to make them feel like they’re adults, as opposed to reading something that’s talking down to them. And I try never to put anything in the strip that wouldn’t be in a prime-time TV show.

So yeah, some of the trade collections do have some words I wouldn’t want kids to read, and if they’re looking at it at cons, I make sure their parents flip through it first. But kids don’t really read it – they just don’t look at the pictures. They like the way Skull looks. (laughs)

Next: The Dork Storm Years.

[Spaz_Monkey]

First page I hit every day is PVP.com. It's been my favorite comic, online or off, for years now, and I'm happy as hell to see that Scott is reaching the 10th anniversary with it!

Congrats, Mister Kurtz! Thanks to you, I've started every day with a smile!

[ticknart]

Since next is the Dork Storm Years, even though I don't know if this is an already completed interview or if it's ongoing, I want to know: Does Mr. Kurtz has any plans to do some more long form style storytelling where he's doesn't have to use the rigid horizontal comic strip panel structure, like he did with all six issues of PvP that came out through Dork Storm?

It's not in front of me, but I think the last time he broke out of the usual strip sturcture was PvP 0 with the Skull story.

When I reread the Dork Storm issues, it always feels like he let himself breath a little more because he could play with the panels more and fiddle with the pacing in a way he normally can't do within the strips structure. I'd like to see more of that.

[TheMightyGeek]

Kurtz is who I want to be like when I grow up.

[magellan]

Scott,

You are the reason my fiancee started reading comic books! Thank you for giving me at this point years of good memories and fun. I've been reading your strip almost since the beginning. I can't believe its been 10 years. Congratulations, and may you still be writing this strip 10 or even 20 years from now.

[Bob Weber Jr]

Congratulations on your 10th anniversary, Scott!! It was a pleasure meeting you in San Diego!