Don’t Try and Tell Me Penny Arcade Ain’t A-List

Penny Arcade’s Tycho posts about a blogger who took the bold step of adopting the “beg for change so I can do this fulltime” business plan. In this case, Tycho nails the self-importance of the blogosphere pretty well as webcomic creators are for the most part further along in business experimentation then other micro-publishing fields (this may have a lot to do with the lack of opportunity in “macro-publishing” in the comics field, but I digress…).

Also in regards to T Campbell’s last “History of Webcomics” installment, I believe Tycho (and Gabe had mentioned it to me earlier) is right in that although Something Positive gets a lot of credit for doing one of the first successful pledge drives, Penny Arcade did it first.

Xaviar Xerexes

Wandering webcomic ronin. Created Comixpedia (2002-2005) and ComixTalk (2006-2012; 2016-?). Made a lot of unfinished comics and novels.

10 Comments

  1. I took a look at that.

    Fucking primadonnas, the both of them.

  2. You don’t know them, Bill, and petty character assassination doesn’t reflect well on you. I’ve seen enough of you to know better, but this doesn’t show your best side.

    Arrogance is part of their personas, but they’ve had to struggle, sometimes desperately, to be in the position they’re in today, and they, especially Tycho, have not forgotten what got them there. That fits no definition of “primadonna” that I know. I do remember calling them out for an immature episode once, back in ’01, but they’ve grown a lot since then.

    Sorry about this, but I feel like Sean Penn reacting to Chris Rock at the Oscars.

  3. What bugs me is the term “micropatron”. Did he really need to invent a new name for running a donation drive? And why not just call them patron, micropatron sounds rather patronizing. Sure he may not be asking them to donate much, but he aint the Metropolitan either.

  4. So, you’re still upset that they called you out for critisizing their Child’s Play efforts?

  5. Arrogance is part of their personas

    There was simply no need for him to talk down at that blogger outside of that arrogance. He depicted that blogger as his lesser. That fits with the idea of a prima-donna as I understand it.

  6. Well, if Mikey had actually called me out himself instead of sending in the troops and wanging Buzz as a punishment for the sin of allowing my (admittedly poorly thought-out) comments to go undeleted, then maybe you’d have a point.

  7. “Mikey?” Awfully chummy with someone you see so negatively.

    Actually, from here, it appears that he never directly linked to buzzComix, and did call you out himself. Couldn’t you remember that?

  8. He removed the link after Buzz got wanged. If you dont believe me, I can send you to a couple of folks who had to deal with the Penny Arcade Fanboy Jihad that descended upon them.

    Anyway I never received a single word from him. He simply tossed out some insults in his blog (kinda ironic given what started this off) and then provided a link for the sheep to follow. I actually tried to email him about it a couple of times to deal with it “face to face” as it were. No reply. And he never went to Buzz itself to reply.

    He used his fans to deal with something he didn’t like instead of dealing with it himself. I realize that it’s an easy assumption to make that everyone reads your comic from his position, but I don’t. I simply never found it an entertaining comic. (my tastes, nothing more than that) So if he posted that “Calling out” assuming that I’d be reading it because, well, he’s writing it, that indicates a fair bit of arrogance as well. Really, outside of trying to show people who wears the pants in the webcomics world, there were no other reasons for what he did.

    So given this, the recent snotty, self-important comments towards the blogger that started this off, and a couple of other incidents in the past, I feel pretty confident in my assessment of the both of them.

    You obviously disagree. Oh well, I guess we’ll both have to learn to live with it.

  9. Let me clarify: Being on the top of the webcomics foodchain should not mean that either of them are exempt from criticism when they act like jerks. None of us are, neither are they.

  10. The blogosphere is no more self-important than the “webcomicosphere”, when you really think about it. I always hear webcomic artists preaching about how webcomics are going to revolutionize the industry and bring about the death of the newspaper syndicates.

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