You would be hard pressed to find anyone who has spent time on the net and is into comics and gaming that doesn’t know Penny Arcade. For almost a decade, Gabe and Tycho have entertained, reviewed, and poked fun at just about every aspect of gaming, comics, and life in general.

In 2006, Dark Horse began publishing long-awaited “analog” collections of Penny Arcade, starting with Vol. 1: Attack of The Bacon Robots.

In the subsequent volumes, we have seen the evolution of Penny Arcade from a side project by gamers Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, into a monster company and webcomics institution.

This month, Dark Horse has released Volume 5 in the Penny Arcade library, titled The Case of The Mummy’s Gold. This installment collects all the Penny Arcade strips from 2004, as well as the Christmas tale, “The Last Christmas.” It also features the debut of characters Twisp and Catsby, and another installment of the adventures of the Carboard Tube Samurai.

I love Penny Arcade. It’s hard to find someone that doesn’t, but they were a huge inspiration to me when it came time to start up No Reason. Krahulik and Holkins have almost perfected the 3-panel story and though I am not at gamer, I can usually get what they are poking fun at, even when it traverses the most inside of gamer jokes.

The art in Penny Arcade is always spot-on, and over the course of the 5 volumes we see it grow and evolve into the sharp stylized strips we see today. With Volume 5, the art really hits it’s peak and the momentum and quality of the strip takes an even bigger jump forward, as “Mummy’s Gold” takes place at a time in the strips history where it is the authors sole focus.

My favourite part of these collections though is the titles. From Volume 2’s Epic Legends of The Magic Sword Kings to Volume 4’s simple Birds Are Weird the titles are as funny as the comics. They have NOTHING to do with the strips themselves, but they certainly make the books leap off the shelf and the accompanying art has such drama to it that you can’t help but wish they would tell those stories in full-length comics.

With the success of these books, the yearly Penny Arcade expo, and now a video game based on their work, Krahulik and Holkins have created a New Arcadian Empire, and here’s hoping that it lasts another 10 years.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Graphic Recommendations, Reviews. 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.