Jerry Holkins

This is a collection of the first three years worth of strips from the online comic Penny Arcade, which is mostly about videogames and geek culture.

Unless you want a printed copy to read cozily on the couch or something, the book (especially the e-book) doesn't really offer much of anything over the online archives. There's a foreword by the creator of the FoxTrot comic and one by Tycho himself and each strip is accompanied by a short, usually funny or explanatory comment by Tycho. This is very welcome since many of the references in the comics are way obscure even for an alpha geek.

This sounds kinda critical, but it's really hard to imagine what else they could have done. Perhaps include some exclusive content (other than the short comments), not available online?… (mere)

Since both Gabe's art and Tycho's writing improve nicely in this second tome, featuring collected strips from the year 2001, and the inclusion of the occasional original post from the website ups on the hilarity, I was going to give this one four stars.

But then again, a quarter of the book is dedicated to showing the images of some card game they did. Now don't get me wrong, the art is great, but nearly forty pages dedicated to this in a 160 page book, without any commentary whatsoever, is a bit too much. At the very end, they show some projects that they did outside of the main comic, which is nice, but still, three stars for this effort.… (mere)