It's kind of funny that what has drawn me to and pushed me from PVP has been actions taken by its creator, Scott Kurtz. His anti-alternative comics strips and rant put me off the book for a long time, and his recent decision to offer up his strip for free to newspapers got me to take a look again. What I realized, especially after reading this collected edition, is that it doesn't matter whether I agree with Kurtz on everything or not, it matters whether or not I think PVP is funny, and for the most part, the answer is yes. For me personally, the early stuff in this collection is stronger than the stuff in the latter half, but there are guffaws to be had throughout. Kurtz captures geek culture with an obvious affection and an eye towards skewering its foibles that is reminiscent of how Kovalic's Dork Tower skewers gamers, but aimed in the direction of the more widely-known computer gaming market.
PVP is structured like a strip, but it has the ongoing subplots, character development and even story arcs of a comic-book series. While Kurtz is not above doing the occasional one-off strip, like Dennis Miller's color commentary on the resident jock gamers's video-gaming, for the most part the stories here fall into the pattern of a series of stories that tie together. Sometimes this is good, as it lets Kurtz really develop a gag and use repetition or increasing exaggeration for humorous effect, and sometimes it's not so good, as when Kurtz runs a gag a bit too long. In general, though, that kind of thing is an exception, as I found most of the story arcs here to be fun explorations of whatever topic Kurtz was covering.
Though it's a humor strip, PVP works because of Kurtz's characters. Kurtz nails them all down in brief pieces at the beginning of the book that presents them as "characters" in a fighting video game, which is a clever mechanism given the videogame theme of the book and also a very funny intro. At any rate, though, Kurtz has a good cast that springs from the basic archetypes of gaming (the older dork, the pretentious gamer, the annoying kid, the gamer girl) and throws a few monkeywrenches in there, like introducing a blue troll with a childlike personality into the mix. Skull, the aforementioned troll, is Kurtz's ace in the hole, because not only is his naivete endearing and good for a variety of gags, but because he serves as a de facto point of view character into the worlds that Kurtz explores if he needs to provide any exposition.
For the most part, PVP sits at a level of humor that I think of as fun, but not hilariously funny. Kurtz has strong observational skills that serve him well in poking fun at the nature of gamers and the workplace, but he only hits the really funny zingers every once in a while. There are some real laughs to be found in this book, though, depending on your sensibilities. I always get a kick out of the running gag involving Brent and killer pandas, and Skull's role-playing of a dwarf spending his reward never fails to crack me up either. Kurtz's stories here run the gamut from the first crush/relationship of a 13-year-old gamer to a Cheers/Old Towne Tavern style prank war to the joys of roleplaying to a mouse in the office, and it all fits easily into the world he has created. Just as Dork Tower is a story of friendships and personal lives as much as it is about the games those people play, PVP is as much a workplace and relationship sitcom as it is a goof on games, comics and other geek culture.
This collection does include what is, to my mind, the low point of PVP to date as well. That would be Kurtz's decision to tar all of alternative comics with the same brush, and to imply that anyone who was doing small press comics was in fact essentially masturbating with their art. Aside from the hypocrisy that Kurtz is one of those independent comics guys by some definitions, it's insulting to a lot of people who work really hard at their art. For every pretentious jerk, there are ten guys who are putting their heart and soul into their work and who just want to create, and for Kurtz to crap all over that seemed incredibly mean-spirited. Coming in the midst of the reasonably gentle humor of PVP, it took me off-guard, and repeated readings have done nothing to endear the strip to me, although I can now see it in the context of the larger series as a flaw rather than the crash and burn of the strip that I thought it was at the time.
