Guilded Age

Figure since we’re going through everything, it’s worth taking a day to honor this illustration and all the extra work Phil was putting into the comic around this time. For G-Day 2012, he added a ton of things that we sadly did not see fit to maintain over the years since, mostly due to reader disinterest and our resources getting stretched too thin, but also due to a shift in economics away from the everything-is-free model to the Kickstarter/Patreon axis.

The one I regret abandoning the most was the Guilded Age wiki, which could’ve done a lot of justice to our elaborate universe of characters, but neither Phil nor I had the time to foster its development and no readers were willing to fill the void we left. Others included a multimedia page, an updated cast page (which remains but didn’t get updated after that), and the contributions of Phil’s high school friend David Wurzel.

Penny Arcade, you will recall, was still a business model we were reviewing closely, and part of PA‘s eventual transition from gaming comic to multimillion-dollar game-fan empire was the gaming commentary it delivered in text, outside the comic. Phil was too busy to write more than a very occasional gaming article, and I gamed so rarely that I would’ve turned the whole thing into a Scrabble blog, so we thought maybe we should get someone else up in this space. You can see the results here, here, here, here, here, and here. The reviews didn’t really mesh with our brand the way they did with Penny Arcade‘s, nor would they have even if it had been Phil and me writing them, but it was a fun experiment.

Most of David’s writing work these days seems to be behind the scenes as a researcher for EurekaFacts, LLC, but I see him on Facebook and he seems to be doing well.