As a follow up to yesterday’s postmortem on Penny Arcade, I thought I’d address some of the comments about how the comic lost its way by showing how it could be fixed.
Comics being a visual medium that capitalizes on a picture speaking a thousand words, the best way to explain what I mean is to show you an example.
Luckily, PA produced a comic that embodies the strip’s besetting vices.
To preempt comments about PA’s woeful slide in art quality, yes, this strip predates Mike Krahulik’s ill-advised departure from his cleaner Stephen Silver-inspired style to ape John Kricfalusi.
Let’s leave the art issue aside since a) I’m an author and editor, so addressing the dialogue is more my line, and b) the new art’s demerits are self-evident.
Back to the example strip above. It’s built on a solid chassis. Tycho’s word economy has always been one of his greatest strengths, in that he favors strong verbs and nouns over weaker words with lots of modifiers. It’s deceptively high-density. That’s why his dialogue packs a punch.
Bonus points: Naming all three clerks a variant of “Bob” is a delightfully subtle joke that manages to be a play on words and a sight gag at the same time.
In the minus column, this strip is much wordier than it needs to be. We get the premise of “Vietnam vet with a screw loose managing a Game Stop” in the first panel. The multiplication of Frank’s high-density epithets feels redundant. It also oversells his character and lowers him from an archetype to a caricature.
Time for a peek under the hood. Most jokes in the Western tradition follow an A, A, B structure consisting of a framing device, a narrative in the context of the frame, and a punchline that typically employs a semantic shift to deviate from the established frame. In three-panel comics, each panel customarily presents one of these elements, proceeding in order.
A Penny Arcade strip, in contrast, usually puts the punchline in panel 2 and leaves panel 3 for a reaction to the joke.
That’s where this strip breaks down. The third panel isn’t a reaction to what happened before. Frank launches into a non-sequitur stuffed with crazed vet tropes that come off as redundant and too on-the-nose. This is where he becomes a caricature. Honestly, you don’t need it at all.
The other oddity in this strip, even for Penny Arcade, is that the setup and the punchline are reversed. Frank delivers the joke in panel 1, and the framing isn’t provided until panel 2.
In joke structure terms, you’d diagram this script as: B, A, ?
OK, there’s nothing less funny than analyzing humor, so let’s have another visual aid. I took the liberty of editing the comic. Here’s what emerged:
Not every PA comic has its setup and punchline reversed, but you can apply this reverse Chekhov’s razor to almost every strip.
Behold the power of editing! Make it work for you.