The Player: An Interview With Scott Kurtz

It started out as a way to relieve frustrations over a video game, but it's become a career. Now the creator of PVP has other webcomic creators asking him to lead the way. Ninth Art goes one-on-one with Scott Kurtz.
15 September 2003

Scott Kurtz has been writing and drawing the online comic PVP since 1998, and since 2000 he's been doing it full time. While he's been well known to gamers and to people who read webcomics, this year saw Kurtz's introduction to a wider audience, when he joined Image Comics and started putting out a bimonthly PVP book with a mixture of reprints and new material. Wizard magazine gave PVP a rave write-up last year and this year his first Image issue was on the cover of Previews. But for those who have yet to discover the book, an introduction may be in order. What is PVP?

"It's Dilbert on crack. No, it's an existential examination on the inner truth of life using popular culture as a vehicle, a mirror held up to my friends and family set in a video game magazine, a sitcom about people in their thirties who were raised on popular culture more than literature or the fine arts," explains Kurtz. "I've thought about this a little."

He's had enough time to, having spent the past five years writing and drawing the strip, the title of which stands for 'Player Vs Player'. It all started when Kurtz began creating cartoons about a video game called ULTIMA and posting them online. "The only people who saw them were other people addicted to the game or the people who made the game," notes Kurtz. "I was addicted, and every time I got really frustrated with it I stopped and wrote a comic about it.

"This guy who had a site approached me about doing some content for them, and he asked if I had a comic about video games. I lied and said yes and he said he wanted to see some samples that Monday. It was Friday. So that weekend I dug out some old strips I had about elementary school teachers and used a lot of material from those. I didn't want to just make it a strip about people who play games, 'cause I thought that would be limiting and I also didn't play a lot of video games and I figured I couldn't do a lot with that. And I got paid 500 bucks a month for that.

"At the beginning, I really didn't care about the characters and I was mostly doing the strip for the money. And after a while I was getting frustrated by the whole thing and thinking of quitting. It was my wife who really pushed me not to. And I started going through some old artwork and realized that the stuff I was doing two years ago was better than what I was drawing now. So I called the guy up and said I wanted to take a week off to redesign the strip. He said no you can't, you'll lose your readership. I said fine then I quit. He said all right, take the week off."

The strip went from five days a week to seven, and the readership steadily grew until it reached over a million hits per month, at which point Kurtz realised he might be able to make a living doing this. "My wife encouraged me to quit my job and try this full time. She was working and said at worst I'd do it for like six months and I could just put down that I was self-employed at the time. So I took advantage of that and with my free time tried to find alternative revenue streams. That was in 2000, and I've been doing it ever since."

Over the course of five years, Kurtz's style has evolved, and many of the characters have been redesigned - most recently, the magazine's intern Marcy. "Some changes happen gradually and people don't really notice them, but other times I'll have to stop myself from redoing certain things," says Kurtz. "Once something becomes big, people aren't into changing things.

"Like recently I was experimenting and came up with a new way to draw Jade that I really liked and I just going to draw her like that one day. It was my brother who warned that, no, I had to do it over, like, five years. Do it gradually and incorporate the small changes, so if you notice you'll see that recently I've been drawing her ponytail in a new way. Next year maybe I'll change her eyes.

"I never liked the design for Marcy, and then I came up with a design I really liked for her and I wanted to nail it down before her first appearance in the comic. I've gotten some comments from people who were upset about it and that's hard, because the vast majority of people you don't hear from. I try to go with my first instinct on these things. With Marcy it was hard because for the longest time I just couldn't figure her out or what she looked like so I ask the readers to be patient with me, because right now this is how she's always looked in my head and for the most part people are good about it."

Kurtz is hoping to follow up on the success of PVP with a new strip called SUMMER DAYS, working with LIBERTY MEADOWS creator Frank Cho.

"It's about a girl named Summer who grew up in this small town and then after graduation moved to the city, though she's not happy and is at a crossroads when the story starts. She finds out her uncle died and he left her this diner, which is the focal point of this small town, and so she goes back to run the diner and it's this triangle of her old life in town and her new life in the city. It's a self-contained story that has a beginning, a middle and an end and we have about five years or so worth of stories to tell."

Kurtz met Cho at the San Diego Comic Con in 2001. "I had put out two issues of [PVP] from Dork Storm and I went around to creators whose work I knew and who I really respected - like Sergio Aragones and Jeff Smith and Cho. When I first thought of doing it as a comic and reprinting a lot of the strips, I thought I was being innovative. Because that's what the first comic books were, just repackaged newspaper strips, and that would be part of the hook. I went to my retailer and asked if he thought that would sell and he said, 'Oh yeah, LIBERTY MEADOWS does real well.'

"I got a few copies and loved it and was excited about it. It really gave me a push to put the PVP book out, so when I met him at San Diego I told him the story and he looked through the book and asked, 'Why aren't you syndicated?' And I said 'Cause it sucks, doesn't it?' And Cho was like 'Yeah it does. I'm trying to get out of my deal'. He was just a good guy."

Cho and Kurtz became close friends. "For a while my friends referred to me as Scott 'Did I mention I know Frank Cho' Kurtz", the creator admits. "He asked if I wanted to do a comic together and I was terrified. But I said yeah absolutely.

"[SUMMER DAYS] could be a syndicated newspaper strip. We wanted to make something our parents could read and enjoy. We both enjoy small town stories and it's a kinda sappy sweet tribute to Midwest life and small town settings."

SUMMER DAYS will debut as a nine-page preview in the Baltimore Comicon Anthology Book, a benefit book for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. "[The strip] might change a little because we're still working it out. We're both writing it and drawing different elements. Like Frank is drawing all the hot chicks and I draw all the goofy characters. I was nervous but Frank said that when it was inked I'll notice that our drawing style has a lot in common. We're waiting until Frank's current deal with Marvel is up and he has more time to work on it. It'll be nice not having my dad complain that I put the word ass in a comic."

The way PVP is printed and bound sideways is another thing Kurtz has in common with Cho, who uses the same format for LIBERTY MEADOWS. "Cho first published the comic normally, so you had to turn it sideways to read it, and when he moved to Image he made the decision to bind it differently, like the old Garfield collections. He did the cover in the upright manner which makes it easier for retailers, but he figured the book would work better that way and I knew that was how I wanted to PVP.

"There are millions of comics on the rack, and the design of it is different and when people open it up and see it's a collection of strips, people smile cause it's familiar and something they know. Some retailers have complained about the books bowing forward but I haven't heard anything bad from the readers. I mean some customers are these obsessive types who want everything in mint condition and bag them right there.

"I want people reading it to have the mindset of the funny pages in a newspaper, 'cause it's a very different mindset than picking up a comic book. It's more accessible and engaging. I think that Image [provides] the opportunity to have a syndicated strip that I always wanted but without the problems involved, and I love that."

Being one of only a handful of creators who makes a living from webcomics is an unusual position to be in. Do other cartoonists regard him as an oddity, or do they see his work as a sign of the possibilities available to them?

"It depends who you ask. There's some truth to both. I'm not the first one to make money off a strip, and there are plenty of others like the PENNY ARCADE guys, who started around the same time I did, but right now not everyone can make a living off it. Scott McCloud has this utopian idea of how the more readers you have the more money you can make. Which is a noble goal, but I'm not sure how practical or possible it is. I mean the more hits you get, the more expensive it is also. There are people on both sides really, and neither's true. I'm just lucky and trying to make the most of it.

"At San Diego I met a lot of webcomics people. I bought a book from John Allison, who does SCARY GO ROUND, and he wrote 'Scott, show us the way', which kinda freaked me out. I mean I know people read me and check out the site, but really, I'm just winging it."

You can read PVP online at the aptly named PVP Online. The Baltimore Comic Convention is this coming weekend, 20th-21st September, at the Baltimore Convention Centre.

Alex Dueben is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

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