PvP: A Webcomic about Pop Culture Heroes

PvP also known as Player vs Player is a webcomic, written and drawn by Scott Kurtz with around 100,000 unique visitors per day (as of August 2005). On February 1, 2007, it became the subject of its own animated series.

“The comic chronicles the adventures of a fictional video game magazine company and its employees. A popular but often controversial figure in the field of online comics, Kurtz is usually willing to share his opinions about comics and gaming culture in his blog which is hosted on the same website as his comic strips.

Originally, PvP focused on video gaming and the larger “nerd culture” including comics and RPGs. 1UP.com described it as one of the first game-based comics, but not the original, saying, “… neither Scott Kurtz’s PvP nor Jerry Holkins and Michael Krahulik’s Penny Arcade were the first gaming-themed webcomic on the Internet.”

Over the years, the humor has broadened to include technology jokes, relationship humour, in-jokes about and mocking of the generation gaps between the different characters, with gaming increasingly taking a back seat. Kurtz occasionally comes under fire for his satire.

The first online strip was posted on Monday, May 4, 1998. Kurtz normally updates the strip every day but has occasionally missed updates since the comic’s inception, less so after the PVP 2.0 revamp.

In April 2005, Kurtz changed to a Monday through Friday schedule, with Friday’s strip in color and sketches on Saturday and Sunday, in response to the mounting work he had taken on as a monthly comic at Image and associated side projects.

On June 4, 2005, Scott Kurtz posted on his blog that he was returning to the daily schedule. On May 6th 2008, Kurtz reaffirmed the strip to a Monday through Friday schedule. Although the strip was initially formatted 2×2 to fit on 800×600 resolution screens, it switched to “widescreen” (1×4) on February 3, 2003.

The strip celebrated its 10th anniversary on Sunday, May 4, 2008 with the wedding of two of PvP’s main characters, Brent Sienna and Jade Fontaine.”