Absolute Penny Arcade, Part Four

Okay, so, when we were writing this one - which we thought was surely the last of its ilk - we were texting about these "Goons" in the first panel and came up with a way to make it even more stupid. Dumber than ever! And it was already pretty Goddamn dumb.

Gabe's been buying comics through Comixology and reading them on his fancy pants color Kindle thing, and I started messing with it because now I want to catch up on shit, but he's essentially grabbing digital versions of trades and I am looking for a buffet. The Comixology subscription thing felt like a pain in the ass to use; I tried the trial and shut it down the next day. Because most of what I want to catch up on is DC shit I tried our their buffet and glutted myself on Absolutes, both Batman and Wonder Woman, and chewed up Woman of Tomorrow which was an absolute blast. Now I see why he wanted to draw all this crazy crap, and today's offering is the dark fruit of this obsession. Monday's will be also! And then I think he will go to his rest because he's going crazy on these and probably developed an RSI.

Thank Christ - our Twitch Mod turned So Much More™ reminded me that there is such a thing as a Newspost, which is a good thing, because I have been absolutely enveloped by another realm. I'll get to that in a second. But my eldest is home from college and sad for a reason I cannot fully discern, my youngest is navigating a social realm only fully known to sixteen year old girls, my super hot wife is buried in an indescribable sewing task, and I have a fever which is revealing things about The Batman I never truly perceived before while I develop a solo/cooperative tactics RPG founded in the rich loam of Sequential Art, which means - among other things - that time doesn't one hundred percent exist. Sorry! My head and face are very hot. In other news, Gabe fucking murdered this comic. It's dead! Call the police.

If I just didn't like Avatar that would be one thing, but the proxy data of Avatar movies being one of very few series to approach - let alone maintain - the heights of yesteryear have turned it into a puzzlebox. Everybody has a Star Wars; for us, it was Star Wars. For Gabe's youngest, Noah, his Star Wars is still Star Wars but it isn't ours - it's The Clone Wars. I hope there was a cadre for whom Lord of the Rings was their Star Wars, but I suspect this demographic slice was Star Wars'd by the books and movies about the wizards and the school.

These are strange days between Christmas and New Years. I don’t tend to accomplish much other than eating too much See’s candy, reading and playing some games. I have eaten, read, and played some really cool stuff though and I want to share.

When I see the Highguard trailer, I essentially want to install it immediately - and I could, because it's free, but I can't, because it's not out. It's not hard to see the influences, which are every great game, some of which were made originally by people at the studio putting it together. You can jump off a hill onto a ghost horse. You can use a wand to licklessly enter the center of a mystical Tootsie Pop. You can do a lip trick off a giant human skull into a burning vagina. You can use a sword to Amazon Prime a battering ram to fuck up an enemy dome! I just got a dome for Christmas, and I'm returning it. I don't even see the point of having a dome with these things runnin' around.

Alright! So that's all the frogs we have for you at this time. You dodged a frog bullet here, people: this ended so nice that we decided to just let it live. But I got a real cool idea for the next three and they're basically done. So, next time the flesh is weak - or we aren't able to form a strip from the shrapnel of a once functional society - we have an artisinal crutch ready to go.

Out of the frying pan, into three suprisingly unpleasant panels! I don't know what the memory situation is for frog eggs but we gotta hope just for his sake that his occipital lobe hasn't developed yet. He doesn't super need it right now because of the jar situation and it's fine if all that stuff just kinda happens… out there.

Lord only knows what could be going on here! The idea that we might want to leverage dreaded continuity to paper over some personal deficiencies - such as the universal human need for rest - gave way as it typically does into something we really wanted to do and it just took more than one strip to do it. It might take more than three strips to do it! Or just three. I think we'll probably come back to it, for cool reasons you will like.

All I knew about The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship was that it was basically impossible to buy - even for ready money. It wasn't clear to me at the time that it was Pandemic: Middle Earth, because if it had been, that's a beg, borrow, or steal scenario. Imagine having that shit over the break! That's what Mork was imagining, no doubt. And he will continue to.

I had seen this dude before, because he's a megafauna in a very specific context, and I never saw a rabbit hole I didn't want to inhabit for a while. But Morak had mentioned that whenever they turned the camera back on this guy, he was holding some crazy, borderline imaginary geometry to his lips and blowing through it. It's not something you have to imagine - you can literally see it here:

With his investment in OpenAI, Bob Iger has signaled that he at least is no longer interested in Disney’s legacy of incredible art and artists. As a Disney fan this is sad and honestly hard to believe. It’s like watching someone set their own house on fire. There are still people making Disney stuff that do care though and I think it’s important to recognize them. For example, Shane Hartley is the creative director for the Disney TCG Lorcana and he just made a very strong anti AI art statement over on his Instagram essentially saying he will never allow it in their game and praising the work of their talented artists. I would love to see something similar from other big card games.

I was listening to a Satanic cultist talk about how people don't like AI ads once they find out that they're AI ads. His response wasn't to not make AI ads; that would be too straightforward a path. No, what he suggested was to make AI ads in an animated or cartoonish style so that the artifacts of their dark labor - the human beings they falsified - were more difficult to perceive. I've sat here watching this blinking cursor for a few moments now, replacing the filament in my mind, trying to figure out what kind of language I should be extruding next, how to respond to that in a way that won't land me in jail. I can't do it.

I had a few people come up to me at PAX Unplugged last month and ask for more behind the scenes videos of the comic making process. I know I personally enjoy this sort of content from other artists but I rarely think about doing it myself. Well I remembered yesterday or at least I remembered after doing the rough sketch. You can watch the full video below! 

God dammit! We only wrote the strip yesterday, and now wicked men have revealed all. Look what Wario64 has posted!

Mp1st report: New Divinity Trademark Uncovered as New Icon Matches Statue https://t.co/z6D8dFtjuH pic.twitter.com/KQltlluXvs

— Wario64 (@Wario64) December 9, 2025

I wish I could muster authentic surprise, but it is Wario we're talking about: an individual whose inverted virtues (and occasional forays into ill-fated entrepreneurial schemes) place him against mankind and perhaps history itself as a base and prolific villain.

We usually write the strip on Discord, and so it came to pass that while we were doing so Discord wanted to remind me that I had been using Discord with their "Checkpoint," which is a kind of Wrapped. There are all these different wrappeds and they're wrappin' up all these crazy kinds of shit.