June 7th, 2007
Nine years ago, writer Jerry Holkins and illustrator Mike Krahulik started the web-comic Penny Arcade, starring their alter egos Gabe and Tycho as two friends who love video games and hate each other. The strip quickly took off, becoming one of the most popular comics on the Web, and the centerpiece of a nine-person company. Holkins and Krahulik's other projects include the Child's Play charity, which raised more than $1 million last year for children's hospitals, and the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), which expects to host 30,000 gamers in Seattle this August. Holkins and Krahulik are also developing their first video game, Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness, working with Hothead Games and Ron Gilbert (best known for the LucasArts Monkey Island games). Holkins and Krahulik recently talked to The A.V. Club about their lack of ambition, their new sympathy (or lack thereof) for game developers, and their role as the spokesmen for video gamers everywhere.
The A.V. Club<: You guys started making a living from the strip when the marketing network eFront picked it up in the late '90s. And after you left eFront, you were able to run the site on fan contributions. How did you decide to turn it into a business?
Mike Krahulik: We were working our regular jobs when the eFront thing came along, and that was a pretty good deal for us for a couple months there. We hastily quit our jobs, so when that deal fell through, when they went out of business, we were sort of in the position where it was like, "Do we go back and get our old jobs? Or do we try to figure out how to make money off this comic thing?"
Jerry Holkins: I think it was really a choice of, become a business, or stop doing what we were doing. I think making it into a business, taking a run at doing it seriously, was the alternative to not doing it. Because by and large, we had resisted many efforts to make it a sensible enterprise. [Laughs.] And eventually, we had no choice but to do that, because we wanted to continue doing it. It had become a full-time job.
AVC: Robert Khoo came in and brought you a business plan, and worked for you for no pay to prove his case. But still, how did you make the decision to keep expanding and going in new directions, to the point where you're running a whole company?
MK: The decisions have been pretty easy. When Robert came on board, like you said, he came with a business plan, which was something we had never even considered. He said, "This is what I want to try to accomplish with you guys, for Penny Arcade, in five years." And along the way, as he grew the advertising model, as he invented it for Penny Arcade and grew it, it eventually required another person to run it. So we hired somebody to do that. And then Robert started working on another aspect of the business, and as he grew that, then that required someone to run it. You know? So, as he and we build up these different parts of the company, they just grow and require people to manage them.
AVC: Do you ever break out a chart and say, "Okay, by this year we want to have this many readers?"
MK: Jerry and I don't ever think about that. We really insulate ourselves from the business side of the company. Our job is to play video games and comment on video games, and make comics.
JH: And write video games, and do art for video games.
MK: We have very specific roles, and if I ever try to bog myself down and think about traffic, and numbers, and is our growth rate equal to that of last quarter—that's just not what we can do.
JH: We never look at the Q4 numbers.
AVC: You've said that the advantage to working with web-comics is that you don't have to appeal to everyone that, say, reads the Sunday funnies.
JH: And thank God.
AVC: At the same time, do you ever think, "Maybe we should be a little clearer about this," or "Maybe we should make it easier to understand this reference?"
JH: It's rare that we ever do that. I mean, there are a lot of jokes we do where we'll look at each other and say, "Is this a little too obscure? I mean, are people really aware of this game, or this particular game issue, this news clip?" And it comes down to, if the joke is funny, if we laugh at it, we just roll with it, and sort of trust that our readers will do their homework to find out why it's funny. Or we [explain it] in a news post, or something like that. It might sound silly, but we really focus on making the joke first, and then we don't really worry about, "Well, how is this going to come across?" If we laugh, then—that's so hard to do. It's rare we ever turn down a comic, man. If we've got something that makes us laugh, we just have to go with it.
AVC: And it is nice to have the news post to refer back to.
JH: The news posts are good because game news, like the gamer consciousness, is constantly in flux. And the news is worthless even two or three days beyond its shelf date. We started doing the posts sort of on accident, like we had to fill some space on the site, but now, it's absolutely critical if you're going back through the archives.
AVC: It's interesting to see some of the quick story arcs that pop up in the strip. Do you ever think of doing more of that?
JH: We just do whatever we want, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That's really all we do. That's all we can do. I don't think that it would really benefit us to analyze it overmuch. It's sort of whimsical, and… Let's say that we tried to be mercenary about it and tried to figure out why it had worked, and why people were reading it. I think that we would probably lose sight of it.
AVC: The canon around Gabe and Tycho is pretty loose. They're based on you, but it isn't like you sat down and wrote a bible for what they will and won't do.
MK: No. We sort of have an intuition about how they'll behave.
AVC: Over the years, have you found directions you wouldn't take them in, or things where you start to say, "We've never done this before, so we probably shouldn't?" For example, you don't often see your kids in the strip.
JH: There's really no continuity to the strip. Again, it goes back to, if we have a joke that we think is funny, we'll do it. So we've had a couple jokes that involve the kids, or the wives, or something like that, and we just tell the joke. Do Gabe and Tycho live together in the same house, with their wives? Sometimes. Do they have kids? Sometimes.
MK: They have quantum kids.
JH: Yeah. They're like actors, they just play their roles, and if a joke requires them to have a kid, then they have the kid.
AVC: You used to work on more dramatic comics, and you once mentioned that you worked on a fantasy comic about angels and devils. Have you thought about working on story-based comics like that again?
MK: Shit, I'd be glad to work on that comic again. That was called Sam, I believe. I would love to work on that comic again, if we had the opportunity. It seems ridiculous, but we have two fairly serious Cardboard Tube Samurai stories that could actually be executed. But right now, and certainly for the next couple years, pretty much all the cream—everything that floats on top of our work schedule is all being poured into the game and other projects, as they come up.
JH: The Cardboard Tube Samurai is actually a really good outlet for that type of creative energy. If we want to do something serious, and that happens about once a year, you see a Cardboard Tube Samurai story arc pop up [in Penny Arcade]. The last one, I think it was like five pages that we did called "The Hawk And The Hare." I mean, that was pretty serious. And someone going back through the archive might think it doesn't really fit. But it's just like a steam valve. We need to get that out sometimes.
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