Webcomic / Penny Arcade

Penny Arcade is a Gaming Webcomic, created by Mike "Gabe" Krahulik (art) and Jerry "Tycho" Holkins (writing) and updating on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. From its humble beginnings in late 1998, the comic has inspired countless imitators and grown into a veritable household name; the franchise has its own convention (PAX) and charity (Child's Play), as well as several commissions.

Although most of the comics are connected to Video Games in some manner, it is not exclusively a gaming comic; much of the humor is drawn from real-life experience, as well as character interaction, both with the authors' alter-egos and with their friends.

The series has spun off multiple other projects, including:

• PAX, formerly the Penny Arcade Expo, a convention featuring gaming of all kinds. There are now four (previously five) PAXes yearly: two general ones in the U.S. (West, formerly Prime as it was the original PAX event, and East),^note The former third general U.S. PAX, South, was held from 2016 to 2020, but was canceled in 2021 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and a lack of growth. one in Australia, and an "Unplugged" one with a focus on tabletop games. There's also PAX Dev for game developers.
• Child's Play, a charity that seeks to fight negative gamer stereotypes by providing gaming equipment to children's hospitals.
• Episodic video game Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.
• Various video series, including Penny Arcade: The Series, a documentary shot in the PA offices, DLC PodShow, which shows Mike drawing the comics featured in the podcasts; Livescream, which shows the office cowards playing scary games; You're Gonna Love It, which is where employees show terrible games to each other; Play Date, where employees show each other their favorite titles; and First 15, which show Gabe and Tycho playing through the - you guessed it - first fifteen minutes of a game neither has played before. ("PATV" as the various web series were called, shut down in 2013, although Mike, Jerry and associates now regularly stream on Twitch.)
• Song of the Sorcelator/Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs. This one's complicated, but the gist is that Jerry set up a Fanfic Magnet and told the internet to go to town with Stylistic Suck. And then he threw a fake Fandom Rivalry into the mix.invoked
• Acquisitions Incorporated, a Dungeons & Dragons podcast/video series that's a collaboration between PA and Wizards of the Coast; with additional players such as Scott Kurtz of Pv P, Wil Wheaton, Morgan Webb of X-Play and fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss. Now officially part of the Forgotten Realms canon.
• Reality talent search web series entitled Strip Search.
• Tabletop game Eyrewood Adventures, spinning out of some of the strip's fantasy stories.
• The Trenches, a webcomic about video game quality assurance testers, originally created in collaboration with Scott Kurtz of Pv P. (On apparently-permanent hiatus since 2016; all links to the comic have been removed from the main PA site in its most recent redesign.)
• The Penny Arcade Report, a section of the PA site for "serious" game industry news, reviews, and commentary which ran 2012-2013.
• Lexcalibur, a series of children's books containing fantasy-themed poetry written by Jerry with accompanying illustrations by Mike. As of 2022, two volumes out of a planned trilogy have been released.

Krahulik and Holkins were chosen for TIME Magazine's list of Top 100 Influential People for their 2010 issue under the "Artists" category.

Tycho has starred along with Strong Bad, The Heavy, and Max in a poker game named Poker Night at the Inventory, and the Fruit Fucker 2000 appeared (renamed Juice Bot) in the Steam version of Monday Night Combat. The Merch is now an unlockable pet in the game Fire Fall.

The Cardboard Tube Samurai was available as a promotional Survivor for CMON's Zombicide for backing the Kickstarter campaign or attending the PAX convention. Gabe and Tycho also appear as Kickstarter exclusive players for CMON's Kaosball.

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This webcomic provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Tycho's childhood was often a living hell.
• Accidental Misnaming: Scott Kurtz of Pv P, portrayed as The Rival in some strips, is invariably called "Steve Kuntz" by Gabe and Tycho.
• Accidental Truth: In "Stewardship" Scott Kurtz comes to the guys with a list of topics to avoid while writing PvP in his absence. As it happens, they had considered doing exactly that.
• Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: The E3 2004 comic, where Gabe and Tycho argue over which is better:
  Gabe: The PSP is a POS!
  Tycho: It's got MGS!
  Gabe: It's still BS!
  Tycho: How about the DS?
  Gabe: FYI, I'm keeping my SP.
  Tycho: OK.
• Adjective Animal Alehouse: the Silver Unicorn in The Vault Of Winter, Part One
• Aerith and Bob: Or so Gabe has been led to believe.
• After the End: We trusted the cloud, and it's made fools of us all!
• Ambulance Chaser: Spencer Halpin in this strip.
• The Annotated Edition: The printed collections have text commentary.
• Answer Cut: Annarchy decides that E3 is "an elaborate scheme to suppress rational thought" and wonders what kind of "pea-brained monkey man it's supposed to appeal to." Enter Gabe.
  • In this strip, when Tycho asks why Gabe only wore his pants backwards once, it cuts to a flashback of Gabe in high school, with his pants soaked in pee.
  • "What could he possibly be doing that is more important than what I want him to be doing right now?"
• Anthropomorphic Typography: The comic has a talking period, correcting trolls and addressing fan outrage. And this.
• Art Evolution: Jokingly used when referencing ancient history. The ten years of practice really shows.
  • And note that that first panel was based on the style years after the first actual panel.
  • Art timelines for Gabe and Tycho.
  • Later poked at again in a self-deprecating manner.
• Art Shift: Another art shift used here.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: From the rejection letter the duo supposedly received from Golf Digest for Bogey Golf, their series of golf comics:
  Your "Bogey Golf" submission glorified many themes one does not readily associate with the game, such as incest, murder, rape, bestiality, religious intolerance, or crab fishing.
• Author Appeal:
  • Gabe seems to like drawing weird, disgusting-looking alien creatures.
  • Tycho loves Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.
• Author Avatar: Retroactively so — Tycho and Gabe were not originally meant to represent the creators, but too many readers assumed that they did and eventually Jerry and Mike just went with that. Jerry's posts sometimes mention that while Tycho draws from Jerry and Gabe from Mike, their characters are distinct from their creators and the real story is redistributed to the appropriate character. For instance, he was the one that wanted to give away free waffles at their convention booth, but it wasn't something Tycho would do, so their roles were switched for the comic.
  • The dissimilarities between Mike/Jerry and Gabe/Tycho were later played for laughs in "Perhaps Too Real", where Tycho and Gabe art redrawn for the iPad Retina display end up looking like Jerry and Mike.
  • Later brought up to heighten the joke in "Parabolic".
• Awesome Mc Cool Name: Mike named his Dungeons & Dragons wizard "Jim Darkmagic" (of the New Hampshire Darkmagics).
  • Immediately called out by Scott Kurtz, who demands, "Why don't you call yourself Chet AwesomeLaser?"
    • Scott Kurtz later gave this a Shout-Out in his own strip.
  • The group also suggested "Jim Fellmagic," "Fell DarkJim," "Jim Felldark," "Fell Darkevil," and "Ominous Darkfell Magic-Bad."
  • Also, Doctor Raven Darktalon Blood.
• A Wizard Did It: Used to explain "reverse necromancy". As well as where babies come from.
  • Alluded to when Gabe comes to Tycho with the problem that he's painted himself into a corner with his D&D campaign. Tycho's solution is to say "A Wizard Did Something", and when Gabe tries to clarify a specific question, to say it louder.
• Badass Adorable: Annarchy in Armadeaddon, and doubly so in Penny Arcade Adventures, where she plays a Gadgeteer Genius.
• Badass Boast: Mike Krahulik gets one while talking about Ocean Marketing.

  I will personally burn everything I’ve made to the fucking ground if I think I can catch them in the flames.

• Badass Santa: In the 2012 Christmas strips featuring Acquisitions Incorporated. Ho-ho-holy crap! And they gave him stats.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: There is a Running Gag with Tycho having sex with all sorts of animals, including giraffes. It squicks out Gabe whenever it comes up.
  • Specifically, animals with long, slender (sexy) necks.
• Big "NO!": Too late, Gabe realizes the awful truth in "He Who Fights With Nerds". More gruesome examples are here and here.
• Bindle Stick: Gabe has one here.
• Berserk Button: For the love of God, don't insult ''Jesse's Girl''. Or mention those claw shrimps. Or imply that Warhammer and Warcraft are the same thing near Tycho.
  • Real-life example: Mike Krahulik detests bullies. So much so that he publicly named and shamed a horrid PR spokesman after he belittled, mocked and threatened a customer after providing terrible service. Said spokesman's career is in tatters now.
• Black Comedy:
  • Used here and here, kinda.
  • Lampshaded: "Damn, son! That be that gallows humor!"
• Black Comedy Rape:
  • The dickwolves strip and the strips that followed it.
  • The dickwolves are amateurs when compared to the customer service droid.
  • And between the droid and the dickwolves, Velociraptors.
  • Airport security is very strict
• Bland-Name Product: Most products are named and mocked, but in two strips they were under a non-disclosure agreement, and decided to illustrate how silly the whole NDA thing is. There have been store and restaurant names such as GameShop, Taco Hole, and Wang's Chinese Restaurant, though Tycho once did refer to Barnes & Noble by its real name.
• Blatant Lies: "Gabe, sometimes in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies."
• Bloody Smile: In the commentary of one strip around when Undertale was first released and the fandom was at its peak, Tycho said that the game was "smiling, but it has blood on its mouth" to metaphorically describe how its tone came across to him: a hostile satire that presents itself as an Affectionate Parody of Role-Playing Games while simultaneously denouncing them as evil. In other words, what the game uses as a love letter to games that came before, he saw as a Compliment Backfire.
• Bold Inflation: Frequently, both in the comic and news posts, usually in places where one might naturally emphasize a word when speaking aloud. The tendency was lampshaded in one post where Tycho admits he "might have a problem with italics".
• Bookends: a textbook example of this trope.
• Bottom of the Barrel Joke: Best Punchlines of 2009 (that weren't actual punchlines that previously appeared in the comic), which consists of three unconnected panels - an alien that looks like a sperm except the head looks like a testicle which is holding a gun with a barrel that looks like a butt plug declared that the "Scrotuum" have returned, Gabe telling a cult member he joined the cult because of "All the unprotected sects", and Tycho with his groin bloody and concealed by Pixellation yelling "MY DIIIIIIIIIICK".
• Bowdlerize: Gears of Conflict Resolution
  • As mentioned earlier, the Fruit Fucker was renamed "Juice Bot" when appearing in Monday Night Combat. Also, in Poker Night at the Inventory, the Fruit Fucker appears on an unlockable table, but it is referred to as "Fruit Friend" (and even if you have the swearing uncensored, it still appears as "Fruit Friend").
• Boyfriend-Blocking Dad: Anne's parents say she can't date boys until she's married. Wait, what? She also brings out the Overprotective Uncle in Tycho.
  • Though she doesn't take it very well...
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Parabolic, a comic where Gabe and Tycho argue over The Stanley Parable, ends with the real life versions of themselves commenting over how real it was getting.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Somewhere between this trope and Revenue-Enhancing Devices is the Visa Crucible (for Everquest II).
  • Gabe cannot resist this in "premium content" model games such as League of Legends, often leading to him walking around in top-tier gear days into a game.
  • Mike states that he used to do this, but as he's gotten older, the experience has increasingly soured for him, and for the most part, he plays games to enjoy them instead.
• Brick Joke: Most people forgot about the Pac-Man watch, what with it not being mentioned for years. Then came the announcement that it's a Team Fortress 2 Spy unlock through Poker Night at the Inventory.
• Bring My Brown Pants:
  • Happens to Gabe upon being scared by Tycho while playing F.E.A.R.. He then tries to deny the fact that he pissed himself.
  Gabe: What, this? This isn't pee. You startled me, I spilled my... drink, is all.
  Tycho: So you didn't wet your pants. You were just drinking piss.
  Gabe: Yes, that's right. No.
  • Taken to an extremet here when Tycho plays Resident Evil 7: Biohazard in VR.
• Bullying a Dragon: Anyone who tries to push around Jerry and Mike. Penny Arcade has a huge following, and most of them are very internet-savvy. Do not attempt to threaten or bully its creators or their friends. You will be destroyed. Ocean Marketing and Jack Thompson found this out the hard way.
• Call-Back:
  • The comic from July 14th, 2010 has Tycho use the made-up racial slur "chuwero", first mentioned three and a half years ago. He will also use it on occasion in Poker Night at the Inventory.
  • Tycho invented a hippo.
  • In this comic, Gabe ends up choking Tycho over Soul Calibur III. Around three years later, Gabe designs a device to let him choke other Soul Calibur IV players over the internet.
• The Cameo: Adventure Time's Finn and Jake appear on a poster in one strip. Derpy Hooves, from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic appears in a few convention request strips.
• Character Blog: The corresponding blogs on the strips. More prevalent a few years ago, when the two would often argue on the front page, something that almost never happens anymore.
• Characterization Marches On: When the strip started, Tycho and Gabe were more or less interchangeable, with Tycho serving slightly as a Straight Man to Gabe's enthusiasm. As the strip moved on, they experienced wildly different development, with Tycho evolving into his current sexually depraved intellectual persona, while Gabe became dumber, more unhinged and randomly violent.
• Check, Please!: This strip.
• Chest Burster / Puppeteer Parasite: The Broodax, in spades.
• Christmas Special: Oh so subverted.
  • Combined with The Merch.
• Clandestine Cover: Penny Arcade released a collected book titled "The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition"; removing the dust jacket changes the title to "Almost 12 Years of Bullshit". Amusingly, the title change can be seen as representing the cover art, which shows Gabe enthusiastically riding a unicorn under a rainbow, while Tycho sits on the back looking annoyed.
• Clickbait Gag: This strip has Tycho worried that Loki (2021) worried that while the show is definitely great, there'll be some very Wild Mass Guessing clickbait-y articles along the lines of "Could Loki Finally MCU Marvel Infinity Stones Tesseract Space Stone?" Gabe wonders if an algorithm is writing it for other algorthims or if a human is human actually typed out the article. Tycho finds both ideas equally horrifying.
• Closer to Earth: Tycho and Gabe's wives Brenna and Kara come across this way, more for providing an outside perspective on their geeky madness than just being more grounded.
• The Cloudcuckoolander Was Right: In a joke about him being egotistical, Gabe thinks his birthday is an internationally recognised festival celebrated by everyone. Turns out that it is.
• Complaining About Things You Haven't Paid For: This newspost reveals that this is how Gabe feels about winning Nocturne in a competition. "Even when he gets your game for free, it would appear that you still owe him."
• Con Recap: In the filler strips.
• Confusing Multiple Negatives: It doesn't not work.
• Contemplate Our Navels: In-universe; what is delicious[sic]
• Continuity Nod: Fairly odd for a webcomic that features the main characters dying horrible deaths on a regular basis, but one comic introduced us to the idea that Tycho can't deal with the sun. More than six years later, Tycho is again seen trying to protect himself (although he only uses the helmet). And once more.
  • The zombie that "borrowed" Tycho's shirt has a small cameo in the Armadeaddon arc.
  • Tycho's penchant for rolling natural 20s is used to finish the Armadeaddon.
  • Extremely subtle, but you'll notice that the two children sitting in the middle are wearing shirts depicting the Merch and Fleshreaper.
• Contrived Coincidence: Tycho buys a Zune, Microsoft's ill-fated answer to the iPod, based on the selling point that you can trade songs with other Zune users, yet he's the only one who has one. He eventually runs into another Zune user... Bill Gates.
• Cool Uncle: Tycho to Anne, who in turn takes more after him than her Amazingly Embarrassing, Fantasy-Forbidding Parents.
• Cosmic Horror: The recurring concept and species known as the Deepcrow.
  • The nameless entity that possesses Tycho after his nightmares about Hell in the late 90's, which occasionally manifests itself during moments of rage, most memorably here
• Crossover: Telltale's Poker Night at the Inventory, sure it's typical for them to crossover a Video Game seeing that it's a gamer webcomic, but its really unlikely for them to crossover a Web Original and a Comic Book.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Gabe. Not only is he the Cardboard Tube Samurai - whose skills may carry over in some form to his civilian persona - but he has received a blood transfusion from Spider-Man, and may be Darth Vader's son. Taking all this into account, Gabe may have the potential to be a web-slinging force-adept with the ability to slice things to shreds with a perfectly round tube, to say nothing of the potential synergy between spider-sense and force awareness. He's also the Beta Whisperer.
• Crowd Song: This.
• Dada Ad: The Seinfeld Windows Vista ads, as seen here.
• Dada Comics: Twisp & Catsby.
• The Dark Age of Comic Books: Parodied with a Dark Age-style Comic Jumper◊ comic◊ done by Gabe, and the subsequent Rob Liefeld pose contest for an Xbox with the Dark Age-style Comic Jumper, which Rob Liefeld even entered but lost due to using photoshop and this one◊ won the contest for being 'disturbing and confusing' just like a real Liefeld artwork.
• Dark Age of Supernames: Parodied with Doctor Raven Darktalon Blood.
• Death Is Cheap: Both Tycho and Gabe have died a number of times in the comic's run. They're still doing fine.
• Delivery Stork: The Talk, By Abby Howard offers a... unique spin on this.
• Despair Event Horizon: Tycho is on the edge of one when looking up whether "Lord of the God-Kings" is a real book. If it is, he's going to kill himself and possibly others too.
• Digital Piracy Is Evil: From the rant for October 26th 2009;
  It is not a mischaracterization to say that conversations with the hardcore PC community about software theft follow these tenets:
  - There is no piracy.
  - To the extent that piracy exists, which it doesn't, it's your fault.
  - If you try to protect your game, we'll steal it as a matter of principle.
  It's like, who wouldn't want to bend over backward in their service? You need to know it, because nobody else is going to tell you: you guys sound like Goddamned subway vagrants.
  • Also Lampshaded here and here
  • "A Cyclical Argument With A Literal Strawman" The sad thing is that the strawman isn't really much of an exaggeration at all. They are using actual arguments frequently made by pirates.
• Disappointed in You: In this strip describing Gambit mode of Destiny, this line is dropped.
  If you drop ten motes, a dad will call you - not necessarily your dad - and will say that he and your mother are disappointed in you. But also not, like... surprised.
• Don't Explain the Joke: This strip.
  • This Paint the Line comic actually has a footnote for those lacking in table tennis knowledge.
• Double Entendre: Gabe tricks Tycho.
• Disproportionate Retribution: "I'm getting into my car, and I'm driving to Barnes and Noble. If that is the name of a real book, I'm going to kill myself. Others may die also. I'm going to play this thing by ear."
  • In a fit of rage, Gabe resorts to public crucifixtions to deter scalpers at PAX
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In a Shout-Out to Series/Dateline, Tycho is confronted by Chris Hansen over his intentions towards a little sister.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Apparently one shouldn't read the entirety of Gabe's thoughts for two years put down to writing.
  • Gabe and Tycho drive off a cliff Thelma & Louise-style after a discussion of the various freemium currencies in Diablo Immortal.
• Dumbass Has a Point: In one strip Tycho is pointing out that Gabe is playing a cell phone game where he matches cakes, commenting that the production values of said games must be terrible. Gabe shoots back that he'll have 50 games to Tycho's 1 and they'll see who has more fun after that.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The presence of some of the PA staff such as Batjew and Safety Monkey in some of the early 2000's strips, as well as them having their own posts on the front page, something which hasnt been seen in years.
• Dual Wielding: With Ping-pong paddles.
• Elmuh Fudd Syndwome: This strip invokes it for laughs. Subverted since Gabe does not actually have Elmer Fudd Syndrome.
• Epic Fail: Gabe and Tycho use Kinect.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Gabe and Tycho may do horrible things to other people and one another, but they do in fact have limits.
  • Another example here.
• Even Nerds Have Standards: Gabe does not approve of his son LARPing. Tycho, on the other hand...
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Tycho's explanation of a Mind Flayer.
  • There's also the comic called "Emerging From Hideous Cocoons" where Gabe and Tycho, well, emerge from hideous cocoons.
• Expy: L. H. Franzibald appears to be some unholy combination of Tim Buckley and either L. Ron Hubbard (creator of Scientology) or R.A. Salvatore (creator of Drizz't)— mostly Tim (and yes it's based on an outfit he wore, sunglasses and all).
• Escalating Punchline: Nintendo's 2010 E3 announcement...
  Reggie Fils-Aime: "New Zelda, New GoldenEye, New Kirby, New Metroid, New Kid Icarus, New 3D shit, no glasses, Santa Claus is real, he's in our booth, and he's giving out fucking handjobs. Nintendo, bitches! We out."
• Eye Scream:
  • THIS IS INCREDIBLE
  • Also, this.
  • And this.
  • Jesus FUCK my EYE CHRIST!
  • In the first panel.
  • Gabe tries to get a "reverse Lasik" procedure done (that is, using lasers to make his eyesight worse, so he can wear Nerd Glasses.) It goes about as well as you'd expect.
• Fantastic Racism: Their "Spin-Off" series Automata is set in a 1920s noirish universe where racism is saved for robots rather than other humans.
  • It's also the subject of this strip.
• Filler Strip: The Sketchbook-like updates that happen when the two are at various conventions.
• Fingore: Gabe once legit cut his thumb clear to the bone without even realizing it. In the accompanying strip, Tycho was less than concerned.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Tycho knows that Gabe often hangs out with Jesus (literally; they play video games), but is an atheist.
  • Lampshaded by Gabe in The Rant here.
• Forced Tutorial: Before you can skip the tutorial, you must complete the Tutorial Skipping Tutorial.
• Fourth-Wall Portrait: Gabe and Tycho look almost nothing like their real-life alter egos. In "Perhaps Too Real", Gabe tried to update the strip with a more detailed look, resulting in grotesque caricatures of Mike and Jerry.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: their "Error 500" message is as follows:
  Thanks a lot.
  You broke our website somehow. We are angry.
  An obliterator-class huntroid has been dispatched.
• Four-Fingered Hands: The norm, though subverted in one strip specifically for an extended pinky.
• Freudian Trio: Notably absent. Tycho typically fills the Superego role and Gabe is pure Id, but there is no Ego. The two are constantly fighting, and nobody cares enough to moderate. Their former roommate, Jim, was explained as filling the role before his death (canonically predating the comic's entire run).
• Fridge Brilliance: invoked Parodied here, for a Take That! at Halo.
• Funny Background Event: Inverted here where the event is in the foreground.
  • Here.
• Fun with Acronyms: While presenting dynamic story-telling in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, with the Variable Automated Global Intrigue Narrative Agent.
  • For Gabe's "Gamers Against Exercise" initiative, he had T-shirts printed out. This one may not be so quick to catch on, though.^note Hint:Read the acronym as one word, not letter by letter.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Their cat, apparently. Earlier strips had Tycho and Gabe with some extremely futuristic device, with no explanation other than "The cat helped".
• Gagging on Your Words: Gabe in this strip.
• The Game Come to Life: Ninja Gaiden's Hard Mode.
• Gilligan Cut: One covering twelve years and an Art Shift.
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: Heavily implied here. Also touched on in the legendary "carrot cake soup" blog post, where Jerry describes the unholy concoction's flavor as "the taste of watching girls make out."
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Often seen when the characters, especially Tycho, are angry. Here's just one of many examples.
• Godwin's Law: Tycho runs afoul of this.
• Gonk:
  • A somewhat more "realistic" drawing of the authors, though exaggerated for comedic effect.
  • A possible side-effect of raccoon AIDS.
• Got Me Doing It: Due to Gabe playing so much Red Dead Redemption II, Tycho confronts him about his new patois. Gabe doesn't care, making Tycho speak the same way during a fit of anger.
• Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die: The motto of the Lookouts in the eponymous strip is "May We Die In The Forest".
• Groin Attack: Here, here, here and here.
  • Click OK to be kicked in the beanbag.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: Gabe's mouth is not a pretty sight.
• Guest Strip: Rare enough to stand out; one example (necessary because of Gabe's swine flu) was done by Bill Amend.
  • And then mercilessly lampshaded by one guest artist himself by coming up with the same idea for the strip subject as one of the previous guests.
• Handy Feet: Gabe is pointed out to have monkey-like feet in one strip.
• Happy-Ending Massage: This strip.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Lampshaded here.
• Hell Is That Noise: The Patapon soundtrack apparently.
• Heroic BSoD: Tycho goes into one when he sees an ad for "Gamez N Flix", the mutilation of language reducing him to a catatonic state.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Tycho and Gabe, because they seem to spend a lot more time with each other than with their wives and children, and their periodic forays into sexual experimentation never seem to lead them together.
  • In fact, whenever one of them is stripped down to his skivvies or less, the other is outright disgusted.
  • Seems to apply to the series creators, too. In case we needed any confirmation, Jerry described Mike in a news post as "He's not my friend; he's more like my arm". He does jokingly make fun of this trope in one newspost where he mentions that "he and Jerry are not together, and only rarely have sex.
• He Who Fights Nerds: "Look at yourself. Look at what you've become."
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Tycho is occasionally mentioned to have had one.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: Gabe gets pissed off at one of Star Wars Legends's worst examples.
• Homage: The entire "Will She Complete the Training?" strip is a direct homage to the The Empire Strikes Back scene where Luke asks Yoda to train him. Kara (Luke) asks Gabe (Yoda) to give her a crash course in Quake (Jedi training) before she faces her brothers (Darth Vader) online later, with Tycho appearing as a bodiless spirit (Obi-wan) to counsel them but messing up his lines. The title is a Gender Flipped paraphrase of a scene quote as well.
• Homoerotic Dream:
  Tycho: Are you having another one of your Spider-Man dreams? Oh god... I'm not ''in'' it, am I?
• How the Character Stole Christmas
• I Call It "Vera": EB Games management in Penny Arcade is BADASS!
• I Choose to Stay: In the strip ''We Can Help'', the World of Warcraft movie ends with the nerd deciding that he belongs in Azeroth instead of the real world. Cue emotional goodbye.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: Parodied here and here.
  • As well as here.
  • And then hilariously averted here.
• I Like Those Odds: "This ain't really fair now, is it? I mean... there's only two of them."
• I'll Kill You!: How Gabe reacts to Tycho unboxing his new phone.
• Imagine Spot: In just the last panel of "Rawhide", Gabe imagines the developers of Duke Nukem Forever ^note (possibly the most notoriously stuck-in-Development Hell game ever) playing cowboy rather than working on the game, complete with thought bubble.
• Impossible Item Drop: Spoofed in this comic.
• Improbable Weapon User: Cardboard Tube Samurai
• Informed Obscenity: One strip showed Microsoft using the Precog-system from Minority Report to predict words that are about to become profanities. The word that gets pulled down is 'Ham Doctor'.
• Inkblot Test: In this strip, a psychiatrist tells Raikoh from Otogi: Myth of Demons that he has an obsession with demons after he sees them in every inkblot… and the water cooler.
• Interspecies Romance: Sexy, sexy giraffes. Also, jellyfish, birds and aliens.
  Tycho: How do you know this super hot ostrich is from my subconscious?
• Irony: The team hates game piracy, but both the real and comic Tycho openly admit to torrenting TV shows. And yes, they're self-aware.
• Jesus Is Way Cool: And also "fucking metal". He likes hanging out and playing video games, brings great food to Thanksgiving dinner, and buys christmas presents for his friends.
• Just One More Level!: World Of Warcrack reclaims Gabe as he knew it would. (Eventually Tycho succumbed as well.)
  • Gabe has been lost to Minecraft:
    Tycho: He's well and truly gone; the Gabriel we knew is dead. He delved too deep and was remade in the hot veins of the Earth. I have heard him suggest that the game is crack, but it's more like all of the ingredients and equipment that you need to make crack, which I'd say is worse. It's like: give a man some crack, and he'll... but if you teach him to make crack, and then... There must be a saying that explains all this, surely.
• "Just So" Story: What the tooth fairy does with teeth.
• Killer Rabbit: "The Omega Hare" has this in Final Fantasy XI with one turning Gabe's galka partner into mush in a Gory Discretion Shot.
  Hume: "Did you help him?"
  Gabe: "No. It turns out it was the king of all rabbits, indeed of all rabbit-kind. Their lord. The single template from which all other rabbits were wrought."
• Kill It with Fire: Effectively the MO of the Gabe's Dungeons & Dragons wizard Jim Darkmagic (of the New Hampshire Darkmagics) in their podcast on the Wizards of the Coast website. Scorching Burst was used to set fire to everything from goblins to zombies to vampires to berserkers to priests to Binwin Bronzebottom, the party's Dwarven Fighter.
• Kill It with Ice: Right here.
• Last-Name Basis: Gabe's first name is Johnathan, but this is of course rarely used.
• Late to the Punchline: Gabe finally learns where the “Arrow to the knee” meme came from.
• Least Rhymable Word: Acquiesce.
• Leave the Camera Running: The guys have described their pacing as a comic adaptation of this idea; many strips have punchlines in the second panel, and the frame will simply stay on the characters a little too long. The third panel will either be a One-Two Punchline, Overly-Long Gag, or Reaction Shot.
• Less Embarrassing Term: Doubly subverted in this strip where Gabe takes offence to his belt-mounted carrying bag being called a fanny pack, but then calling the second bag he's wearing a fanny pack.
• Life Embellished: Gabe and Tycho are not quite the same as Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, but the comic characters' opinions and lifestyle closely mirror the authors'. Comics are often written about real events and conversations, and real people appear in the comic, including the authors' families - often depicted even closer to how they are in real life than the main duo. Lampshaded in "It's a Problem" when the comic version of Mike's real wife Kara, who is presumed married to Gabe in-universe, calls Tycho "Jerry" and Gabe "Mike" prompting Tycho to correct her.
• Limited Wardrobe: Gabe wears his Pac-Man T-shirt over a darker yellow long-sleeve, and Tycho sports a two-tone blue sweatshirt, at nearly all times.
• Literally Prized Possession: Early strips had a Running Gag where Tyco and Gabe would steal a Pacman watch from one another (which served as shorthand for which of them needed to get even with the other this time).
• Long-Runners: The very first comic was submitted on November 18, 1998 and the comic continues to this day, with virtually no Schedule Slip.
• Looming Silhouette of Rage: Found here, along with a Shadow Discretion Shot.
• Lovecraft Lite: Several Eldritch Abomination like beings exists and are taken lightly.
  • An Orkin employee taming a Deep Crow.
• Low Count Gag: Tycho and his nemesis L.H. Franzibald are guests at a convention. Upon entering the hall for their panel, Franzibald notes to Tycho, "I see all your fan turned up." And there is, indeed, a solitary "furnie" on one side of the room.
• Luke Nounverber: Jim Darkmagic (of the New Hampshire Darkmagics)
• Merchandise-Driven: Lampshaded. See The Merch, above.
• Mercy Kill: As seen in The Unhorse.
  Game: First select the pistol, and then, select your horse.
  • Gabe pulls this on Sonic in "A Ring And A Prayer" by shooting him in the head, at the latter's own request.
• Mermaid Problem: Addressed quite directly here.
• MST: Admonishments, found here.
• Multiple Choice Form Letter: Tycho writes one comic this way as he wants to write a comic about the PAX East convention before he attends. Subverted when the first two blanks have been filled in with incredibly generic things virtually guaranteed to occur, then double-subverted when the last panel describes something no one could have predicted. (There really was a grown-ass man cosplaying as Chun-Li at PAX East 2011.)
• My God, What Have I Done?: The first part of the story arc Ripped From Today's Headlines has Tycho accidentally killing his wife when trying out a move from Splinter Cell, and feeling bad for it.
  Tycho: Oh my god. Oh my god. Please don't leave me!
• Named After Somebody Famous: Tycho Brahe.
• Nerf Arm: The Cardboard Tube Samurai, which has spawned more than a few instances of the deadly tube showing up in some games.
• Never Say That Again: Gabe evoked this response from Tycho.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Tycho is one. Apparently this trait extends to his real-life persona...
  • Another example.
• Ninja Log: Though it is uncertain if Gabe can choose what he leaves behind or if "the log [is] an inextricable part of the process".
• No-Sell: The main character from Sand has survived every attempt to execute him so far apparently without feeling any pain or taking any damage at all.
• Non-Indicative Name: See Species Surname below.
• Non-Lethal Warfare: Really weird, considering how often they do Sugar Apocalypses.
• No Medication for Me: Tycho spends a week off Lexapro, and is impressed with what he produced. There was the downside of "wrestling with demons of the mind" though. He contemplates this idea, in The Rant before rejecting it as misinformed. And even if the peaks are still attractive, they don't compensate for the troughs.
• No OSHA Compliance: Seen here.
• Not What It Looks Like: Tycho jokingly asks if the stains on Gabe's pants are semen. Gabe rebuffs him him by saying these are his painting pants, for an autobiography... which he's painting entirely in his own semen.
• Odd Couple: The bread and butter shtick of the comic. Tycho mocks Gabe's ignorance, Gabe derides Tycho's pretensions. Rinse and repeat.
  Tycho: Let me just ask you this: do you think that "cloud rendering" is something that happens in the sky?
  Gabe: Yes.
  Tycho: Alright. Check, Please!.
• Oh, Crap!: Gabe tries out Minecraft and realises he's gotten into something very addictive:
  Gabe: I guess you punch trees? Which creates... wood? Which I can turn into sticks? And then I turn the sticks into ... Oh no. Oh no. I'm in some real fucking trouble here.
  • Insulting someone bigger, stronger, and younger than you are is not a good move.
• Older Than They Look: Tycho and Gabe continue to look and generally act like slacker twenty-somethings well into their forties. Semi-justified in that they're simultaneously Author Avatars whose lives mirror the creators' and independent entities who operate on cartoon logic, so while physically they're Not Allowed to Grow Old, mentally they've grown into middle-aged men.
• Online Alias: Annarchy is of the "hacker" variety. Many MMORPG strips use the "Xtreme Kool Letterz and numbers" variety.
• Original Position Fallacy: Tycho gives a public service announcement about letting children explore the internet and accepting they may encounter things they are not ready for. He immediately transforms in rage when his son cheerfully tells him that he met a friend online who has "a peepee too."
• Our Monsters Are Different: Parodied with the works of L. H. Franzibald, where there are "Hermaphroditic Androgynite" Witchaloks and "Half-wolf, half android" Wolfoids.
• Out-Gambitted: A hilarious example.
• Out of Focus: Div. He still hangs around, and still occasionally gets lines, but the strip doesnt have much use for an alcoholic, obsolete piece of home entertainment hardware anymore.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Here, Kolibri is described as "arguably the finest hummingbird-based shooter available for the 32X". This becomes something of a Running Gag during the early 2000's.
• Pals with Jesus: Quite literally. Jesus seems to swing by the house frequently and gets along well with Gabe. He's polite to Tycho, but apparently the writer's nonstop blasphemy and questionable morality has already doomed him to Hell.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": When Gabe's Guild Wars 2 account is hacked, Tycho asks if he used the password "password" again.
  Gabe: No. Jeez! I put in a four instead of an A. High security. See? Four isn't even a letter.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Killographic, used also in Real Life, and stuponfuicous. Such words are often used by Tycho when he writes the news posts that accompany comics.
• Perverse Sexual Lust: Displayed with "Polygonous Polygamy".
• Plagiarism in Fiction: Played for Laughs with one of Gabe's later Dungeons & Dragons games, which is simply Dragonlance. Not even the campaign setting—the novels.
  Tycho: So you're just running Dragonlance? Are you switching it up at all?
  Gabe: No way. Actually, I'm just reading directly from the book. Every couple of pages I ask them to roll some dice. Then I just nod and keep reading.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: invokedDiscussed; one subject that's used for gags every now and then is that Gabe doesn't care about game stories, and just wants to get on with playing. Examples include here, here, here, here, here, and here.
• Poke the Poodle: Tycho, here.
• Potty Failure: The result of Gabe wearing his pants backwards like Kris Kross. (see Answer Cut, listed above)
• The Power of Hate: Gabe tells Tycho, "I wish I could hate you to death." And then his nose starts bleeding.
• Pregnant Badass: Gabe's wife Kara, as least according to this post by Tycho:
  I'm given to understand that she has the equivalent of Super-Strength in this "trimester" or whatever it is called, and has the capacity to deal aggravated damage. Gabriel informed me yesterday that she lifted a car over her head, and threw that car at another car and then climbed up an office building. After a spectacle like that, your discourse tends to bear the proper reverence.
• Product Placement: Surprisingly averted. It's a positively massive webcomic, with thousands of readers and big-name advertisers. Yet, if they mention a game in a positive light, they're playing it and having fun. In fact, some companies don't advertise there, simply because the mention of their game in Penny Arcade is publicity enough.
• Purple Prose: Sometimes, Tycho's newsposts fly off into a world of imagination and word-crafting.
• Putting the Band Back Together: Tycho and Gabe (and Ben) after falling out, and the Troperiffic faux-movie example from "Paint The Line":
  G-man: You're a hard man to find, Mr. Brahe.
  Tycho: Not hard enough.
• Race Lift: Parodied here
• The Rant: One for each of the duo.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Where half of the stories and humor come from, one example being the July 1st, 2013 strip where Gabe insists on building a retro video game arcade in his and Tycho's garage. In real life, Mike Krahulik had been doing just that in his garage.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning:
  • The Deepcrow and some of the Warhammer characters.
  • Whenever Tycho is pissed or evil enough (or both), his normally brown eyes get a nice red glow.
  • In this strip, Gabe (as well as Cole) gets a pair while he's repeatedly resurrecting and murdering a helpless civilian in inFAMOUS.
• Refuge in Audacity: Some of their more out-there content falls under this.
• Relationship Values: This strip has Gabe playing Scarlet Nexus and liking the combat but wanting to skip the "anime romance bullshit" until Tycho tells him he gets new powers based on this trope.
• Retconning the Wiki:
  • Tycho and Gabe. Gabe does that for fun, Tycho out of grudge.
  • There's also a strip where Skeletor can be seen vandalizing the He-Man page on wikipedia.
• The Rival: Scott Kurtz of Pv P. In reality he has collaborated with the boys many times, but in the strip he inevitably gets dubbed 'Steve Kuntz' and Mis-blamed for anything controversial. Scott briefly worked out of the PA offices, although he and PA have now gone their separate ways.
• Robot Buddy: Div, subverted. Although if you wanna get technical, Div isn't really a robot so much as he is a personification.
  • The Fruit Fucker is arguably a different kind of subversion.
• invokedRooting for the Empire: Tycho in this strip towards the zombies of The Walking Dead.
• Rule of Cool: Why does Penny Arcade think you should get [PROTOTYPE]?
• Rule 34: For the New Year, the guys have resolved to quit bizarre Internet porn (Tycho... coldturkeys.com?) and quit jacking off to the jellyfishes in the local aquarium (Gabe).
  • In The Love Nest of Har'akki
• Rule 63: To P Or Not To P turns Gabe and Tycho into female versions of themselves.
• Running Gag:
  • How many times have they killed each other and stolen that Pac-Man watch from the corpse? Even the wildlife has gotten in on it.
  • The repeated jokes that Gabe is secretly gay, (especially for Spider-Man)
  • Their comic counterparts' obsession with penises. But not in a gay way.
  • Punctuation.
  • Stem cell research.
  • Comic!Gabe's obsession with ponies.
  • Comic!Gabe's OCD in relation to Star Wars trivia.
  • Their aversion to exercise and/or healthy living.
  • Pokémon as disposable living weapons.
  • Gabe as a physically and emotionally abusive Pokemon trainer.
  • Comic!Tycho's weird fetishes:
  • Comic!Gabe's cybering adventures.
  • Reporter Randy Pinkwood.
• Sarcastic Confession: "He's absolutely right. I'm constantly going to the store to buy things I hate."
  • Bearing in mind that it is, to a greater or lesser extent, his job to do so. Comic!Tycho was speaking to a penchant for doing so of his own volition, independent of any sort of obligation.
• "Second Law" My Ass!: The Fruit Fucker, and Div.
• Secret Santa: Organized by Div... except that the only name in the hat is Div.
• Seductive Mummy: Parodied via a scene from The Twilight Saga when the characters predict what would follow up the vampire craze.
• Self-Deprecation: Pretty often, both in the comic and Tycho's missives, notably when Tycho explains the nature of Stylistic Suck.
  Tycho: "Making something that is bad on purpose - and not bad inadvertently, which is my usual process - is a whole-body thrill."
  • Tycho and Gabe teach schoolkids how to make comic strips:
  Boy: Miss, what's a cartoonists?
  Teacher: Cartoonists are society's waste products.
• Serious Business: Ping-pong.
  • Leaches into real life, as Penny Arcade Company frequently hosts ping-pong tournaments at their offices against game developers and reviewers. This has led to some instances of calling out that have backfired. Especially with regards to SOE.
  • Also, Warcraft games. One of the strips has Gabe mentioning having a glass eye as the result of a Warcraft 2 game that got out of hand.
• Shadow Discretion Shot: Found here, along with a Looming Silhouette of Rage.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Frank.
• Shoehorned First Letter: In this comic about Kirby.
  General: We call it the Kinetic Ingestion Regulator Bio-Yorganism.
  Meta Knight: Yorganism?
  General: Y is kind of a tricky letter.
• Single-Issue Landlord: The premise of "That's so locust!"
• Single Malt Vision. A variant. Gabe starts seeing multiples of things not because he's drunk, but because he cut his hand open.
• Slasher Smile: Gabe gets a horrifying one^note  Based off The Grinch's when the comic's popularity happens to cause trouble for Ocean Marketing.
• Slice of Life: As the guys have started having families, these sort of strips have started to happen occasionally. An example.
• Snap Back: Quite frequently, what with the Negative Continuity.
• Snarky Nonhuman Sidekick: Div.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Some days, it's some of the most erudite commentary on videogame culture out there. Other days, it's a series of knob gags. That's not even when it's "Semen Week". This is basically Terry Holkins' stock and trade, as all of the non-comic blog posts are written so much in this style that it's easy to imagine them in Tycho's voice.
  • Tycho. For a man with that big of a vocabulary, he sure does love using the F word. For example, "Things, Part Two".
  • In "The Verdict": "On the charge of manslaughter, we the jury find the defendant, Jonathan Gabriel, not guilty. Furthermore, the jury believes the deceased totally had it coming to him, on the account of the bogus shit he said about 'Jesse's Girl'."
  • All of "The Case Of Texas vs. CryoLord".
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: Referenced in this strip
• El Spanish "-o": In "The Ruse", Gabe tries to use this as part of a Paper-Thin Disguise. It almost works on the clerk. And somehow works on Tycho.
• Species Surname: You'd think that Catsby was the dapper cat, yes, and thus the demon Twisp? Subverted.
• Spin-Off: By now, Penny Arcade has spun off a bunch of side projects. Some were jokes from the strip that took on lives of their own, others were the creators taking the chance to do something different:
  • The Cardboard Tube Samurai, one of the oldest, got started when Gabe started waving a cardboard tube around like a katana, pretending he was a samurai. The character now gets pulled out whenever the creators feel like telling a serious samurai tale, never mind that the thing's made of cardboard.
  • Twisp and Catsby was a Stylistic Suck Dada Comic mocking It's Not Supposed to Win Oscars. ("I'd bet you'd love to criticize that, wouldn't you, you Critics! But you can't." "It's not for you.") Ironically, fans loved them.
  • Paint the Line, an Eighties Cold War Ping-Pong story.
  • They eventually put together a event week where the strips were pitches for new projects, and the fans voted on what they'd focus on first: Lookouts, Automata, and Jim Darkmagic.
  • They've since presented another round of potential spinoffs like Sand and Queen of Bells. One, The New Kid, was 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.
• Staging an Intervention: In one comic ("Just When I Get Out"), Tycho assumes that his "friends" are staging an intervention. He makes an emotional confession of his drinking problem and of thinking that nobody cared, and is grateful and optimistic now that they're rallying around him. Actually, they're there to pressure him into something else, and explicitly don't care about his problem.
• Stealth Pun: This strip. It's a riff on the show "Hoarders," and they're members of the Horde.
• Stylistic Suck: L. H. Franzibald.
  • The "solo comics" from when they supposedly fell out with each other: Tycho's is erudite but very poorly drawn; Gabe's is well-drawn but is just three unconnected panels of terrible things happening to Tycho.
  • Gabe's writing has improved to the point of having a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot by the time Tycho joins the writer's strike.
  • Tycho's own words on the matter of this trope:
    Making something that is bad on purpose - and not bad inadvertently, which is my usual process - is a whole-body thrill. It goes hard against every natural instinct to write this way. It has the delicious and irresistible texture of sin.
• Superhuman Transfusion: After a car accident on a snowy mountain pass:
  Gabe: "Check it out! Spider-Man gave me his blood! I got a blood transfusion from Spider-Man!"
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: From this post by Tycho:
  It's like when you download something off BitTorrent - something legal!!! - and the client begins by creating an entire empty file to contain the wholly legitimate, fully licensed content you are grabbing from an authorized source.
  • Neither Gabe nor Tycho like bestiality.
• Swapped Roles: For the Rule of Funny. Gabe plays the Straight Man while Tycho does a faux Cloud Cuckoo Lander impression, but they immediately revert back by the third panel.
• Take That!: Among the usual ones to specific video games, most biting uses are usually towards the likes of Jack Thompson and Tim Buckley.
  Tycho: I think Tim Buckley is the antichrist, and I think that miscarriage storyline was the first horseman of the Apocalypse.
  • Earlier than that, they created rampant plagiarist and egotistical hack author L. H. Franzibald as a facsimile of him. (examples: 1, 2)
  • "For Jack Thompson, because Jack Thompson won't."
  • But subverted here - "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
  • PAX 2011 was criticized for allowing Duke Nukem Forever booth babes (who were playing, more or less, actual women from the game), on the grounds that it was demeaning and objectifying. PAX 2012 was criticized for asking a scantily-clad official cosplayer of Juliet Starling, the main character of Lollipop Chainsaw, to tone down her outfit, on the grounds that the organizers were threatened by female sexuality or were "anti-fun" or were hypocritical because they allowed scantily-clad cosplayers. Mike's response was not positive.
    How about all of you that hate me get together and have your own conference. I need you to decide if half naked girls are empowered or exploited because I’m doing my fucking best here and it’s apparently always wrong. I swear to God I don’t understand how I’m supposed to know if I’m promoting the patriarchy or criminalizing the female body.
  • Interestingly, the commentary for the print version of a 2000 strip insulting Daily Radar suggests a lampshading on the petty and somewhat ineffective nature of this trope.
    Take that, gaming website! We certainly showed you not to, well, do the jobs that you get paid to do, I guess. Anyway, you were shown!
  • Tycho is not impressed with the Republican party.
  • Tycho claims that there is no better sign of quality than Polygon not liking something.
• The Talk: Unsurprisingly, Gabe screws it up.
  Tycho: You told him a wizard did it?
  Gabe: I don't know! I panicked!
  • Tycho got a particularly painful subversion of The Talk.
  Tycho: My mom told me my body was rotting because God had abandoned me.
  • When his son attempts to get the truth out of him, Gabe promptly attempts to get around it. The next several guest comics are other authors' characters giving the kid their version of The Talk.
• Tears of Blood: In response to a slideshow.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: In-universe; Gabe disapproves of D&D Essentials:
  Tycho: There was always one thing missing from your tabletop journey: a new version to revile, and an old version for you to cling to like a drowning man.
  Gabe: I don't know what you're talking about, but D&D sucks now. I'm going to go online and argue about it.
  Tycho: Godspeed. Brother.
• Toilet Humor: Quite a few strips, but here are some of the most notable examples.
  • Also, in this strip, Tycho appears to be sitting on the toilet.
• Too Dumb to Live: Geez, Tycho. Did you have to use a sharp knife to cut a banana?
  • Real life example: Ocean Marketing (or, rather, one person too high up the chain for his own good) picked a fight with Penny Arcade for the loyalty of the gamer population, was crushed like a bug and briefly became the laughing-stock of gaming media.
• Too Much Information: A common complaint in the strip. To boot...
• Total Party Kill: In the comic, this seems to be Tycho's main goal as a Game Master, and he advises Gabe and other DM's on ways to achieve it. Averted with the real Jerry as a DM, since if all the players are dead there's no audience for his intricately devised puzzles and lore poetry.
• Totem Pole Trench: Naturally, they take it to a dark place.
  "[Gabe's] the devil. No, he's like a devil perched up on the shoulders of another devil, wearing an overcoat so as to appear as a single, larger devil.
  It's a classic bit, and ordinarily it would be harmless. But in this case, it has terrifying ramifications."
• Troll: Gabe has a disturbing tendency to this, even if he condemns this behavior on other people. The worst part is, he can be like this IRL too, to the point Tycho has to stop him from delivering Your Mom insults to kids.
  Tycho: "Gabriel, one day the assholes of the world will come together, and they will build a statue of you."
• True Companions: Gabriel is not my friend, he's more like my arm.
• True Meaning of Christmas: It's not actually that complicated.
  Jesus: "Christmas is like my birthday, only instead of buying presents for me, you buy them for all your friends."
• Trust Me, I'm an X: "It's okay, I'm a dentist."
• Two Gamers on a Couch: The Ur-Example. However, as the comic goes on they're rarely sitting on the couch unless they're actually talking about the game in front of them. Instead, they'll be shopping, raking leaves, lying in prison beds, dumping a body, emerging from hideous cocoons...
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: There was a strip where Gabriel experienced this problem with Tomb Raider (2013), trying to figure out a way to get across a gap when Tycho suggests simply jumping over, which works, to which he responds "I don't think this is a puzzle room".
• Unexplained Recovery: Brenna returned almost a year after Tycho accidentally killed her with no explanation.
• "The Villain Sucks" Song: Open Mic Night.
• Virtual Danger Denial: As this strip shows, there was initially some reluctance to deal with Real Money Trade related scams, thanks to a perception that the goods weren't "real" anyway.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Combined with Overly-Long Gag in this strip about Gabe having motion sickness when playing Mirror's Edge... 's tutorial.
• Wall of Text: I Hope You Like Text. The comic strip is a Shout-Out to Back to the Future.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The basis of the Automata storyline
• When I Was Your Age...: Gabe rants about the Anti-Frustration Features incorporated into Pokémon X and Y, such as getting the rollerblades before the first gym, and the new Exp Share.
• Wild Mass Guessing: Combined with Intercontinuity Crossover here.
• With Friends Like These...: Gabe and Tycho.
• A Wizard Did It: Discussed here by Scott McCloud.
• X Days Since: here.
• X Meets Y: In-Universe. How Gabe plays his Link whenever he sees Bokoblins with a cooking pot has Tycho refer to him as a combination of John Wick and Gordon Ramsay. Gabe would watch that movie.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: Tycho does not like these.
• Your Mom: When Tycho comments on Gabe's playing style,
  Tycho: I feel like there's a disconnect between the shit talking and, you know... Armello's general aesthetic.
  Gabe: Oh yeah? I feel like there's a disconnect between your mom and my dick. ...Hmm. That one needed a little more time in the oven.

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