Truthfully, I figured the cover was just sort of a gag. PVP has had a superhero parody, has even guest-starred Savage Dragon, but it doesn't really take place in a superhero universe, so surely this "Invincible" guest starring spot was just a cover gag since Ryan Ottley, Invincible's artist, was drawing the cover, right? Wrong. In the truest sense of the word, Invincible does guest star in this book, or at least the spirit of that series coincides nicely with the spirit of PVP in what might be some of the funniest strips Kurtz has done. In and around the Invincible stuff, though, we've got the PVP staff at Comicon (some familiar pokes at comic geeks here, but still funny) and a few pretty fun office-related strips as well. PVP is really like a sitcom written just for gaming/comic geeks, and while it can at times be a little predictable in its humor, Kurtz's characters and pretty solid comedic timing carry the day more often than not.
So the majority of this issue is given over to the PVP staff getting a booth at Comicon and the stories that result from that. Probably the funniest gag is that first Troll and then Jade and Brent run into Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley, creators of Invincible. Kurtz's parody of Kirkman and Ottley is something I found hilariously funny, as he pokes fun at Kirkman for writing Jubilee and has a lot of fun with the notion of Ottley as an indentured servant to Kirkman. It's probably only funny to those who have a sense of Kirkman's persona from his own books, which makes it a little in-jokey, but really, being in-jokey is a big part of the style of PVP in general.
This issue also marks the return of a storyline I hated the first time around, as Skull reprises his role as the snobbish creator of small press creation Graphimaximo. One could argue that Kurtz taking potshots at Fantagraphics' plea for money from fans is a little mean and maybe motivated by personal antagonism, given the rotten quote that TCJ gave PVP, but I have to admit, I found it pretty damn funny. Fantagraphics going all "we're all in this together" when their role has generally been to serve as the "art snobs" of comics seemed at odds to me as well at times, and is ripe for parody. That the innocent, terminally nice Skull becomes the snobbish character provides another level of humor for regular PVP fans.
At its best, though, PVP is really about exploring the personalities of the characters and the industry commentary is sort of secondary. Part of why the Kirkman/Ottley stuff works is because Kurtz essentially turns them into PVP characters and the funny comes from the way they act as opposed to any commentary on the comics industry or who they really are. The best strips in the issue for me, though, are when Cole and Brent try to teach Francis to drive. The dichotomy of these two best friends' personalities is evident in their driving (and teaching) styles, and it's always fun to see the "know everything" teenager Francis in a situation where his more innocent and less confident true personality can emerge. Brent's rationale for why he drives the way he does always made me laugh out loud.
Part of the charm of PVP is that Kurtz seems to honestly and truly "geek out" with the rest of us on all of this stuff, and even if you don't read his text rants on the website, it's easy to see that infectious love of all things geek in the strip. This does mean that those who don't have a certain geekiness on their part probably will see PVP as anywhere from charmingly amateurish to outright dumb. Kurtz doesn't help his case with these folks when he has typos like using "broke" instead of "broken" or spelling "challenge" as "challange," but I think it's fair to say that those folks aren't really the target audience of PVP anyway. Instead, this is a book for those who can crack up at inside jokes about Transformers, comic book conventions and videogames... in other words, probably 90% of the current comic reading audience, including me. 8/10
