I’ve not actually read a lot of gaming comics. This might seem surprising, considering that Penny Arcade has inspired countless thousands of fans to dabble in the dark arts of cartooning before finding what little bit of their life has been sacrificed in the vain pursuit of readership and pointless laughs. The field is so cluttered that even the use of various gimmicks rarely helps gamer comics stand out from the dross surrounding them. Into this vast wasteland of mediocrity comes Fanboys, which combines several tropes in an effort to stand out.

We have two guys and a girl living together, each of who plays games from one company platform. Oh, and they almost never change their outfits (to the point that the girl continues to wear a long-sleeve hoodie in the middle of sweltering heat). Naturally enough one of the guys is an obnoxious jerk, while his friend is cheerful and fairly clueless, leaving the girl to fill the middle niche of the decent intelligent one with just enough mixture of cynicism and optimism to be actually interesting. As with so many of its peers, Fanboys started out as a series of one-shots and slowly grew to incorporate continuity and occasional short storylines. And if not for one thing, Fanboys would sink into the morass of other gamer comics with nothing to differentiate itself: Sylvia’s preferred gaming platform is the X-Box 360.

That’s right, the cute gamer chick is into Microsoft. In an amusing twist, later on Lemmy (who only played Nintendo) ends up “cheating” on his system by trying Sylvia’s 360… without realizing that she’d decided to try out his DS. They start dating as a result. Fanboys suffers from several flaws, such as frequent use of CaP and comics that often rely on idiocy. However, there’s a certain spark to the characters that kept me reading through the archives and adding the comic to my reading list. If Scott Dewitt would start to branch out into more storylines and less idiocy, then Fanboys would emerge from its peers. Until then, it’s just another gamer comic, though one worth reading.