Monkey Law

I was reading this thread on Fleen today, and one poster made a pretty good point regarding comparing webcomics at an earlier state of gestation with powerhouses like Penny Arcade….

Should that be that a strip just starting be held to the same standards as Penny Arcade now, or Penny Arcade when it was just starting? Cos there’s a bit of difference between the then and now (as there is for a whole heap of webcomics currently sitting at the top of the pile after many many years of trying to get it right). Gotta start somewhere.

This got me thinking — sure, Monkey Law is not quite up to the standards of established strips like PA or PvP right now, but what about when they were as young as Monkey Law is?

I know what you’re thinking… 4 years isn’t all that young, but remember my unreliability in the first few years… the one-year hiatus, for one thing. Monkey Law has 214 strips in the archive. So I used the magic of math and figured out (more or less) what Penny Arcade’s 214th strip was. It is this one.

So… does Monkey Law measure up? I think so. The gag in the strip involves Gabe laying a trap for Tycho, using a game CD as bait. Not a bad visual gag, and a good use of the multi-panel layout. The lines are just as clean as PA is known for. To understand the humor more, I navigated back a bit to get the rest of the storyline… and there wasn’t one. Nothing. It’s a standalone strip. No clue why Gabe wanted Tycho dead… just underlying hostility? There does seem to be a lot of that in PA… Maybe he’s just trying to smash the “Icewind Dale” CD and Tycho is haplessly in the way. Perhaps he hates “Icewind Dale.” I dunno.

So… does Monkey Law compare favorably with Penny Arcade at the same stage of gestation? Well, that’s kind of a toss-up. I mean, I can make all the snarky comments I want about Penny Arcade’s 214th strip, but the fact remains, my 214th strip is a joke about a dildo.

Oh well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2006 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Monkey Law News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.