Penny Arcade (Webcomic)/Trivia

"Putting up a link is actually considered a hostile act by some comics. The bandwidth drain our readership - well, you, I guess - can place on a site is almost indistinguishable (at first) from a Denial Of Service attack."
 * The Cameo: Finn and Jake appear on a poster in a recent strip.
 * As does Derpy Hooves.
 * Colbert Bump: Any website that Tycho links to in his blogpost that isn't used to getting several thousand pings will be crashed by the massive influx of people who read Penny Arcade. In the words of the bard himself:


 * Cowboy Bebop at His Computer: Tycho's claim that Mega Man X was the tenth game in the series.
 * Development Hell: Episode 3 of On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness was seemingly in this inferno, until the creators said the video game series was over and the storyline would continue as a novel.
 * Episode 3 has now been Saved From Development Hell. It has been picked up by the creators of Cthulu Saves The World, and is taking on the form of a 16-bit RPG. It is set for a Summer 2012 release for Steam, Xbox Live Indie Games, and mobile devices.
 * Did Not Do the Research: Astonishingly (and he apologized for it almost immediately), there was a comic where Tycho became dangerously angry while asserting that Mega Man X was the 10th Mega Man game. (It wasn't; the Classic serues hadn't even gotten as high as 7 when X was released. The actual 10 would be made years after the strip.)
 * "The Great Divide" is about how little sense it makes for Peter Molyneux to design Fable 2 for non-gamers. Molyneux actually asked reviewers to play through the game, then get someone who doesn't game a lot to play through, in order to compare the different worlds the two different approaches would yield.
 * And this strip mocks the new mutants added in X Men First Class, yet Banshee and Angel Salvadore have been around for quite a while (they may not be the oldest X-Men, but they've been in the continuity for a while).
 * Actually, the strip never makes fun of them as being made-up for the movie, just as being dumb additions to the movie series and showing that the film-makers must be at the bottom of the barrel (fairly true). So it's not really an example of Did Not Do the Research
 * Fingore: Mike once cut his thumb clear to the bone without even realizing, something he wrote into the comic. In the accompanying strip, Tycho was less than concerned.
 * Heterosexual Life Partners/True Companions: Jerry once described Mike in a news post as "not my friend [...] more like my arm".
 * Internet Backdraft: As widely respected as PA is, its subject matter choices and...let's say "irreverent" approach have produced a few.
 * Most recent was the controversy over The Sixth Slave, which turned into a six-month internet war that resulted in boycotts of PAX and death threats from both ends.
 * A more insular version came back in 2006, when the guys mocked a webcomic documentary they found silly and pretentious, singling out Cat Garza--who had quite the fanbase. They came under a small amount of fire from said fanbase.
 * Schedule Slip: Relentlessly avoided. Things that would cause multiple-week delays for other comics cause single-day delays for PA. They ran the first guest strip in recent history because Gabe was physically unable to move a pen when it was time to draw the day's comic--it's the only time the two weren't able to produce on a schedule.
 * Spin-Off: They attempted to make a Jim Darkmagic comic arc, which seemed to involve him and his stage performances going horribly wrong. It was however, voted down. Probably due to the fact that "That wasn't Jim Darkmagic! Jim Darkmagic only ever rolls natural 20s! He's seven feet tall with red hair and eyes like the sun!"
 * Also due to the fact that, as great as the Jim Darkmagic's (of the New Hampshire Darkmagics) strip was, the even more amazing alternatives -- Automata and Lookouts -- crushed it in in the voting, with Lookouts winning by a small margin (all three concepts are going to be revisited anyway, they just wanted to know what order readers would like).
 * They've since presented another round of potential spinoffs like Sand and Queen of Bells. One, The New Kid, has already been optioned for a movie.
 * Springtime for Hitler: Twisp and Catsby, which Gabe and Tycho intended to be so horrible that nobody would enjoy it. They became immensely popular instead, much to the creators' disbelief, and remain a favorite when they want to do something surrealistic.
 * One of the appearances of the Victorian duo was a children's book written for one of their kids, in fact.
 * Sure Why Not: Tycho and Gabe were not originally intended as Author Avatars, but when fans assumed such was the cause, Jerry and Mike decided to roll with it. Even then, the characters are mostly distinct from the creative team's.
 * Technology Marches On: Inevitable considering how long the strip has run. Some ideas are reinvented to suit new mores - the Fruit Fucker 5000 was originally a parody of the rambling cable-TV gadget advertisements popular in The Nineties, but has since moved on to parody Apple's range of iProducts.
 * What Could Have Been: Both Jerry and Mike have said that without Robert Khoo, their business manager, they would have sold themselves into slavery for what, at the time, would have seemed like a really good idea. For example: their book rights.
 * Write Who You Know