Earlier last year, the Penny Arcade creators Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik and Robert Kho, president of operations and business development, launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise enough money to eliminate ads from their website. One of the stretch goals was to create a strip search contest to find a worthy up-and-coming cartoonist. The contest, which was already conducted late last year, was set up and filmed as a reality TV show. The show will debut on PATV next month.
Robot6 interviewed Jerry and Robert about the endeavor:
You recently announced your 12 finalists ? what exactly will they do in Strip Search?
Holkins: They?ll be made to suffer terribly in a fine house we rented for them, while they do battle with one another for cash and prizes. Literally.
What are the challenges and eliminations like?
Khoo: The vast majority of events are designed to stress test the different facets of a professional webcartoonist. For instance, one of the earlier challenges is to work with Penny Arcade?s design team to create a real-world product. To put even a little more skin in the game, we?ll be offering said product for sale online, with the profits going to the winner of that specific challenge.
The winner takes home a $15,000 cash prize and is also given office “space in Penny Arcade?s Seattle offices for a year, complete with support from the company with merchandise, marketing and infrastructure.”
Hopefully there’s some eating of entrails involved too. What’s a humiliating challenge without it?
Catchy name. They may have had a good shot a being
picked up by one of the major cable channels that run
“Pawn Stars” or “Hardcore Pawn” if they had named it
“Stripper search”
Or better yet. Work the word gold into the title. Stripper
search gold. Comic strip gold…
You know I’ve never been excited about Penny Arcade, but they’ve done amazing job of connecting with their audience and they have been extremely shrewd businessmen. They’ve managed to turn a relatively generic gamer comic into a sprawling business empire, so it will be interesting to see what they achieve here.
The first challenge is highly relevant to succeeding as an online cartoonist, and the exposure of the profession should help the industry.