PvP: The Dork Ages

by Scott R. Kurtz

Collecting the hard-to-find six-issue run of PVP originally published by Dork Storm Press for the first time. This trade paperback includes over ten pages of dorky extras, including preliminary artwork and gaming stats to play the PvP characters in your Mutants and Masterminds d20 campaigns (from Green Ronin Publishing).

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Humor, Webcomic, Graphic Novels Comics

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 17, 2004

About the author

Scott Kurtz has been self-publishing his comics to the world wide web since 1998. His work has been nominated for the Harvey Award and in 2006 won the prestigious Eisner Award for best digital comic.
He co-founded the new webcomics.com with his peers to help promote and develop the independent work of online cartoonists.
Mr. Kurtz lives in Dallas, TX with his wife Angela.
PvP is read globally by over 150,000 daily readers.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up because i've found the webcomic to be weird and funny, and this collection dives back to its early roots. Scott Kurtz briefly did a comic book based on the webcomic, and this collects the first few issues of that effort. The comic has gotten better over the years, but as a bit of history of the PVP comic, this was well worth reading. Yes, a few of the gags are derivative, but are taken in such odd directions that it seemed like that was the intent, to take something that readers thought they already knew, and do something weird with it, like a blue troll on a sugar rush becoming a department store Santa, or a weird parody of The Matrix involving Scott McCloud.
Is this a great work of creative genius? No, but it is worth reading for anyone who has read and enjoyed the PVP comics at all.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The early years of the greatest web comic. What’s not to love?

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Occasionally, one finds a book that seems natural to one's interests and that was what struck me with this work. A work titled PvP that is meant to be humorous for those with interest in gaming, comics, and general geek culture seemed to be a natural pick for me. Sadly, this particular collection left me disappointed - generally I found that much of the material was not humorous and sometimes not fully new. For one instance, the joke about Santa and Superman being the same person has been used before such as in the 1993 season of Saturday Night Live in one of the Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy segments. The comic plays like a Geek culture Dilbert, and while I found a few laughs, they seemed to be too rare and too inconsistent and I found myself thinking I would be better served reading Dilbert or watching some other form of geek humor. Another reviewer says that the other collections are better, and that may cause me to pursue those works if I chance upon them, but this did not instill a necessity in reading them - but if I chance upon them, I would try them perhaps, but I do not think many people deep in geek culture will find anything too uproarious or new here, even if they bought it when it first was released.

[Julien V · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love geeky stuff, but I should've read the blurb first (it really says the following): "The reason PvP hasn't received any coverage in the Journal is because it's a leaky bucket of tepid s***, so mediocre, trite and boring that it's not worth an inch of type to kick around".

[Keith Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, but the later collections are much better.