In which my friend @Muskrat_John is congratulated by me, @wilw.

Posted on By Wil

The gaming industry, like the voiceover industry or the genre fiction industry is not very big, when you really get down to it. In fact, among creators, the overlap between "industry" and "community" makes almost a perfect circle. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else, and good news travels as quickly as bad.

Yesterday, one of the truly great people in the gaming industry, who I think we all believed had reached maximum character level, surprised us all and leveled up a little bit more:

John Kovalic's Dork Tower joins WIRED's GeekDad.

If you know of Dork Tower, then you’re already squee-ing in excitement right alongside us. If you don’t know what Dork Tower is, then either you’re about to add a new layer of happiness to the Photoshop composite of your life, or you’re slowly beginning to realize you didn’t click through to the Monkey Bites blog.

Dork Tower has, in its decade of life, existed as a standalone comic book, a featured comic in Dragon, Scrye and Games magazines, and one of the earliest regular webcomics online. Its creator, John Kovalic, is also the illustrator and co-creator of world-renown games Munchkin and Apples to Apples. But perhaps his greatest creation is his new daughter, whose existence has transformed him from a simple, Bruce Banner–like comics and game illustrator, into a hulking green(bay) GeekDad. Which is where we come in.

This is kind of like my favorite indie television show getting picked up by a major network. It's such a perfect match, I can't believe nobody ever thought of it before. You know those people who are so delighted to be a parent, they sort of jingle and glow and levitate off the ground with joy when they talk about their kids? That's John. You know those guys who you know you can speak to in the most obscure geek dialect, secure in the knowledge that they'll grok you? That's John.

Congratulations to John and GeekDad, and to all their individual readers who are about to discover an awesome new level of the dungeon to explore.

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Comments (9)

  1. Great, another blog to follow. Ever since I started reading WWdN:IE, I keep having to add new stuff to Google Reader, and now I just had to make a Geek folder because I’m tired of scrolling around so much. WWWWHHHHEEEEAAAATTTTOOOONNNN!!!!

  4. I’m so glad that there are people out there who jingle and glow and levitate when they talk about their kids. Being a single mom I have to do double the levitating, and that can be tough. Especially when there is this odd uprising of women who can’t stand the idea of pregnancy and childbirth (FB teaches you so much about people). It’s good to hear that I’m not the only one who gets high off how awesome it is to have kids 8)

  6. Funny thing is, we feel exactly the same way you do, Wil! I can barely remember now the reason why John and I had traded some communication or another, because everything is a blur before I made an inane offhand comment about how cool it would be if we could run DT on GD one in a while, and John not only said yes, but was overwhelmingly enthusiastic about it. After chatting with him a few times in the run up to this announcement, it’s only become more and more clear that not only is John Grade A Prime geek, but he’s also a totally doting dad. We are so happy he’s becoming part of the GeekDad Family (or are we becoming part of the Dork Tower family?). This is so totally FTW!

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