Speaking of gamer comics with a reputation for crappiness, after reading today's Ctrl+Alt+Del, I may have to push back the Penny Arcade review a week or two.

(From Powerup Comics. Click for full-sized blissful ignorance.)

As much as I've criticized YWIB over the past couple of days, I do sympathize with their frustration, and to tell you why I need to tell a little story.

Once upon a time, some people at the Truth and Beauty Bombs forums (the forums for Dinosaur Comics and some others, and the place that gave us the "Garfield without Garfield's lines" meme, which eventually became "Garfield without Garfield" himself) decided to take a bunch of cut-and-pasted elements, throw them in MS Paint, and create the crappiest gaming comic they could. The result was Powerup Comics, and once it started picking up steam among the members, they started a DrunkDuck account and started storing their comics there.

But here's the real punchline: Powerup Comics - intended to be a parody and the worst gaming comic ever - attracted people who treated it completely seriously. And liked it.

A comic intended to be the worst gaming comic ever, attracted actual fans.

When the people at YWIB reviewed Powerup Comics as an April Fool's joke (which actually attracted some defenses of the comic from people not in on the joke), and ended the review by claiming that there was no point in continuing and so they were ending YWIB, I would not have blamed them for quitting for real. Heck, it's enough to make me wonder if it's a lost cause.

It's hard to see what the strip's fans see in it, unless they're actually T&BB members furthering the parody. The art definitely falls on the "distraction" side of the line of badness, for lack of a better term; it's blatantly an MS Paint copy-paste job, more so than others of the type, but instead of looking computer generated like sprite comics and Dinosaur Comics, it just looks like a 12-year-old drew it (or younger). My artistic abilities must be the crappiest in the universe, yet I actually could ape the Powerup Comics style. There's the same propensity towards violence as Ctrl+Alt+Del, only so much more unnecessary as to seem completely random. Some strips have no punchline whatsoever (which is itself supposed to be the punchline), some have been done a gazillion times before.

I could go on, but I've made my point already. I'll just point out that the YWIB folks may have inadvertantly hit on something without realizing it, and that's the real reason for CAD's popularity, the distinction between Ctrl+Alt+Del and the mounds of crappy gaming comics they've reviewed. Say what you will about CAD's art, it's positively Rembrandt compared to Powerup Comics or even Cartridge Comics. I could go on, but I'm on a bit of a clock here. Gotta go!