So I just posted this in our Kickstarter comments and I figured it would also be worth posting here.

So the current storyline is indeed taken straight from my life. My son attended his very first Pokemon League night on Tuesday. I played the game very seriously a few years ago but have not touched it recently. My son went in with a deck cobbled together from some of my old cards. It was comprised mostly of pokemon he really liked but had no synergies to speak of. I helped him a bit just making sure he had enough energy and talking to him about how many of each stage in an evolution you should have. He got to the league event and ended up losing all five of his games. Some of them after only a few turns.

My own son pulled a Zekrom in a booster pack, all shining foil, and he was confused about why you would use an attack that damages yourself until he noticed that, wait a second, dad does that mean yes, that is what it means! Yessss. It won't be hard for you to tell what is advantageous about it, particularly since every ten points of damage is a distinct "counter" in game terms. But the idea of trading temporary disadvantage for long-term advantage isn't entirely inbuilt. The ratio of hand-birds to bush-birds, and when you should choose between them, is something you have to learn. It might even have been your father who taught you.

These Kickstarter projects have me frothing at the mouth I'm so excited! I'm still working on the designs for the Daughters but I wanted to share my latest piece.

If anyone is ever wondering how not to go crazy, I have a small piece of advice: don't launch a game and sell your house and write a book and move and go to San Diego Comic-Con and launch a Kickstarter within, like two weeks. I'm running up against the theoretical limits of what stressors pharmaceutical science can effectively shield me from.

Our Kickstarter is very close to hitting the "New Automata Comic" goal. I'm so excited for this project! Here's some new artwork I just finished of detectives Sam and Carl:

The votes have been tallied, and Erika cracked out a slick page to display them. Lots of rad stuff in there, many of which you could try today, if you like.

The Kickstarter is really going great, thank you to everyone who has pledged. We’ve revealed a bunch of new goals that I’m very excited about. If you take a look at what we’ve proposed you can see this isn’t just about an ad free Penny Arcade. This is about what we can do if we are freed from that model. We will be going into all these various projects in greater detail as the month goes on but right now I want to talk about Strip Search.

I have survived; if there are any lingering effects vis a vis "the fucking plague" my body will (no doubt) make me aware of them soon. I need to go back and read my post from last year regarding the same show, and see if I found it as easy as this one. A five-day torrent of unrecognized and untreated social anxiety used to make the show a psychic cheese-grater, and each day there was less brain, until it had been processed completely. Such trips were also bookended with sky journeys which felt like dying in slow motion. It is difficult to imagine how a pill could resolve problems of this kind, but I didn't have to invent this pill; all I have to do is put it in my mouth.

Thanks to everyone who has come by the booth here at Comic Con. We will be there all day again today. We will also being doing a special Lookouts signing tonight after the show at the Cryptozoic store in the Gaslamp District. 

We're at San Diego, booph 1334, so on and so forth. But we are ALSO schlepping hot jpegs and flopping them right onto your plate. Among other fabulous toys, you might have heard that there is a toy prized above all others. Well, as professional thing-sayers, we have things to say about that.

We have updated the Kickstarter FAQ with answers to a lot of the questions we've been getting. We've also revealed a couple of the stretch goal projects. Something that might not have been clear is that when we say no advertising that also means no PA Presents. I love working on comics for publishers but we spend a huge chunk of time every year on stuff that isn't ours. Working on things like comics to promote games and pre-sell bonuses fill in all the cracks between our Mon, Wed, Fri strips. I've been honored to work with some of these properties but I'd love to devote that time to our own projects. I feel like we have all these cool worlds that we're neglecting because we just don't have the time. This KS would change all that.

The San Diego Comic-Con has a dark side, certainly; a dark place, where fear is currency. Come to booth 1334 for succor.

About eleven years ago Penny Arcade was on the brink of collapse. We had recently recovered the rights to our own work after accidentally selling them to a shady internet aggregator. The good news was that we could keep making Penny Arcade but the bad news was we had quit our jobs and we were broke. We talked about giving up and begging for our jobs back but I convinced Tycho to try something first. The Wayback Machine has a couple priceless snapshots of the day we decided to ask you for donations. Going back and reading those posts today is really amazing. For almost two years we ran this website entirely on your generosity. You paid for our rent, food, video games and in return we made PA three times a week as well as a bunch of extra content. A lot has changed in eleven years. PA has fourteen employees now, we put on two massive conventions every year, we run a worldwide charity, we produce our own video games and web show. It’s a major operation now and running it off of donations again seems impossible. Or is it?

We have many tales of San Diego Comic-Con adventure in store for you, through the week and maybe just past. I am completely fascinated with it this year for some reason, even though we've gone every year since 2000 and such enthusiasm should be all but burned out. I fully expect to synchronize with readers on a variety of topics, some of them thoroughly surprising. I also expect to take megadoses of vitamins A and C to counteract fully six days of exposure to those enervating halogen rods.

We will be at Comic Con is next week and I’ve got all the details for you.