Player vs. Player

PvP is one of the more intriguing and popular webcomics. Webcomics are published by cartoonists at their own websites, and usually either haven't been picked up by a syndicate for the papers or are too edgy or narrow in appeal to be considered. There are a lot of them out there, but the only ones I follow daily are Little Dee, PvP, Pibgorn (a labor of love by syndicated cartoonist Brooke McEldowney, who does 9 Chickweed Lane), Day By Day, a dry political strip, and Least I Could Do, a surprisingly appealing strip ostensibly about sex but more about the amusing and unlikely adventures of the testosterone-poisoned protagonist.

More about the others another time (but you should check out Little Dee).

Player vs. Player is a daily strip, presently published Monday through Friday, about the adventures of the staff of a computer game magazine. While there are a fair number of strips about the subject of the magazine, they tend to be funny and comprehensible even to someone like me who has never successfully played any computer game other than Myst. (Judging by my friends, who are mostly slightly younger than I am, I just somehow missed the cutoff date for getting into computer games - the appeal is inexplicable to me. Although I really did like Myst.)

The writer, Scott Kurtz, is not exactly sophisticated. Sometimes his strips are pretty predictable, and he will go for the easy joke. He has a lamentable delight in what he enthusiastically and unashamedly bills as "fart jokes", and he exhibits a strange nostalgia for The Dukes of Hazzard, a hokey 1970s television show that is something of a byword for just how bad network television can be. But at times he excels, bringing his popular culture commentary to genuine heights. I get the impression from his blog commentary, also at the site, that he is something of a procrastinator and realizes that he doesn't apply himself with quite as much energy as he might. But he's genuinely talented, and he's apparently managed to make a living with PvP, which has become a comic book from Image and has been collected in book format. And the strip is consistently entertaining, occasionally moving, and often hilarious.

This week, Kurtz is displaying a degree of wit and sophistication at satire that might surprise the regular reader expecting the daily gag about D&D, comic books or movies. On Monday, he launched without ceremony into a sequence inspired by the Watchmen movie coming out Friday (or more exactly, by the legendary graphic novel itself.) The characters, however, are comic strip characters - on Monday we find Popeye as Rorshach, Jon from Garfield as Nite Owl and a discussion about the murder of "Blockhead", obviously Charlie Brown. And immediately one begins to wonder who is going to be Dr. Manhattan or Ozymandias. I won't spoil the rest of it. But this is really clever.

Like almost all of Kurtz's work, if you aren't a fan of the popular culture subject he's addressing (in this case Watchmen and mainstream comic strips), you won't get it at all. But if you are, well, you really shouldn't miss this.