Finale

And now, the conclusion to the Memorial Day weekend posts....

So, Attack of the Bacon Robots. It has been out for quite some time, and it was only this weekend that I finally acquired it. I have, however, been searching for it in every book store I've come across since its release. It was always the same ritual; walk past the magazines and new fiction, past the ever growing wall of manga, all the way to the back area where the "humor" section resides. It was always the same lineup; comedians making fun of politics, and cartoonists trying to be funny for the 5th or 6th book in a row. The other thing that never changed was the utter lack of Penny Arcade in the section. Month after month it was the same thing, until I began to wonder if the book even existed in a physical form.
Just my luck, then, that the one day I don't go looking for it is the same day I find success. There sat two copies of Attack of the Bacon Robots at the Colorado Waldenbooks. Mission Complete.
Purchasing the book was quite an experience. After the clerk asked me if I wanted to sell my personal information willingly for free coupons, he began to look at the back cover, his face in a look of complete puzzlement. It was as if the man had never seen a stack of pages bound together with a cover in his entire life. As he rang it up, I was passed by a man with a long ponytail, dirty glasses, a patchy beard and a shirt which could not have been clean. This fellow geek also looked upon the book in my hands and my Tycho Brahe shirt, and replied with nothing more than a smirk, one that showed he knew exactly where I was coming from. As I left the store and began diving into the first few pages, more and more people gave the same looks of sheer confusion as the store clerk. Maybe it was the fact that some guy was walking around the mall reading, or maybe they saw the insanity that is Tycho and Gabe and wondered what the hell it was all about. The bad attention didn't bother me at all. I had nostalgia to get to. Such is the power of Penny Arcade I suppose.
If you're wondering how the book stacks up, I'll say this - I agree with a sentiment Tycho repeats throughout his commentary. The early years of PA aren't always very funny. In fact, sometimes it makes no sense at all. I'm not sure what they were thinking while making them, or what we were thinking when laughing at them, but somehow it became a winning combination. I suppose we were all a lot younger, brasher and more immature back then. Or maybe we just were all excited about a game related comic. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun going back and reading the strips that were coming out when I really started to form into a serious gamer. I also didn't realize that I started reading the comic within its first two years (I thought it was much later than that). Overall, I have to say that PA volume 1 will easily rest along some of the very best books that will eventually come out, not because of the all around quality, but because it answers this very important question:
Where does funny come from?