Four and a half months after Sakura Con is complete at the downtown Seattle convention center, the Penny Arcade Expo and gaming show moves into the same facility for a three day run. It's a sign of the ultimate success for writer Jerry "Gabe" Holkins and artist Mike "Tycho" Krahulik, the Seattle-area team who produce one of the hottest web comics. It's a property so big that Penny Arcade strips are sold in books, and the team is going to have its own video game - appropriate for a web comic dedicated to gamers. It's also a sign, along with events such as Gen Con Indy, to show the world that gamers are now mainstream people. "I don't think that anyone tries to hide it," Krahulik (pictured) said. (Holkins wasn't on hand for the interview session.) "I don't think it's the same when I was in high school and I didn't let anyone know that I read Nintendo Power magazine." Learning from artists he liked such as Jim Lee and the art styles on Cartoon Network shows, Krahulik handles the art as the team cranks out three strips a week. "I don't think we should go better than three comics a week," he said. Many of the strips cover three panels, but not all - the cardboard tube samurai epic used more than three panels in each episode. What the strips do avoid is any sense of continuity. "We look at continuity as being a crutch. If you use continuity, writing is so much easier, but coming up with one-off gags is really hard." While Penny Arcade's characters often mention and play real-world new games in the strips, Krahulik said there's no movie-style product placement of those games in the web comic, and their business manager said the comic is "untouchable."

"Fans are the only reason there's a Penny Arcade. Otherwise, we would have had to go back to our jobs and quit the comic," said Krahulik. Fans also are the reason for the Penny Arcade Expo that will be held in Seattle in August of 2007. In the same way that Sakura Con started small and finally had to move into the convention center, the Penny Arcade show has had the same sort of growth.Krahulik said the web comic team has been amazed at the show's growth, which has been so rapid that many people speculate it may serve as a replacement for the recently-defunct E3 show. "We're very hesitant to let PAX become what E3 became," Krahulik observed. At the time of its demise, E3 had the reputation of being mostly a business-to-business sales event, while "...with gamers it was a horrible place to play games. With the influx of companies coming to PAX, we're trying to keep it as a place to play games." Game companies are going to be allowed to buy space at the Penny Arcade show, but they won't be allowed to use he huge multi-level booths that big corporations use as trade shows, he said. Next up for Holkins and Krahulik is a Penny Arcade video game, where Krahulik said "...everything you see in the game is coming out of me. I'm drawing the cut scenes." Inspired by the classic Squaresoft playing system, the game will be a role-playing adventure where Gabe and Tycho are paranormal investigators.