I got stuck yesterday working on the daily comic strip. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t get a pose right. I sketch, erased, sketched, erased. It was proving to be a bit of a challenge.

During all this, I was talking with Kris on video chat over Skype. Kris, as you may or may not know, is already up in Seattle. He moved up a couple weeks ago and is settling in. Yesterday he happened to be up at the Penny-Arcade offices and so I had this video conduit in my soon-to-be new office. Technology, you see, is very bad ass these days.

Mike Krahulik walked by and started to chat with me as well. I pushed my desktop through Skype so they both could see what I was working on and soon I had enlisted Mike and Kris in helping me figure out this tricky pose. Finally I asked him to demanded he just draw what he was trying to explain and email it to me. So he did.

Now I saw what he was talking about. ReTweet should already have followed through with his swing. I suddenly realized that Mike’s had more time observing little kids in various poses because he has a son running around the house. Observation is the cartoonists GREATEST asset.

Well, it didn’t take long to drop Mike’ sketch into my panel, drop the opacity and draw Retweet on top of it.

In a couple months, I’ll be working out of the Penny-Arcade offices and more than anything it’s this kind of interaction that I’m so hungry for. Not only that but during the same exchange, Mike was complimenting me on the improvement I’ve made to drawing hands and mentioned how he was pushed to draw better hands now because of it.

I want to encourage all of you out there interested in cartooning to find a peer group whose opinion and feedback you value. Push each other to do better. Even if you can’t be in the same city, use Skype, Camtwist and Ustream to share your process and build virtual studios. The technology is here to use.

And, to make this very self-serving, let me also recommend that you check out Webcomics.com. Since the relaunch of that site in January, we’ve built quite a great little community of serious cartoonists dedicated to this sort of thing. It’s a great place to find that peer group.

I am very excited to announce that PvP now has an official iPhone app. It’s downloadable for free in the Apple iTunes store.

The PvP application is a skinned version of the iVerse comic book reader with a little extra added on for PvP’s daily content. Where most comic book creators only have finite series to sell, PvP has daily strips and blogs for consumption. To this end, the developers at iVerse designed a “dailies” page that grabs the current strip and blog posts, and provides links to the official PvP website and online store.

Click to read Today’s Strip and you’re taken to a landscape view of the day’s PvP comic (or if it’s late, yesterday’s. heh). Once you’ve had you chuckle, tap once to bring up a navigation screen. Press Previous to easily back up and catch what you’ve missed this week. Pressing done returns you to the home screen.

The PvP app is free, as is our daiy content. But clicking on the New Releases button at the top of the home page will bring you to our digital store where you can make in-app purchases of PvP comics and books. We’re just starting to build up the PvP digital store. Stay tuned for more announcements. I’m really excited about the possibilities.

Please tell your friends about the PvP app. If you like it, I would humbly request that you post an honest review in iTunes. I can’t stress enough how much doing so would be helpful both for me and iVerse.

The iPhone (and soon the iPad) are interesting new platforms and I’m really excited to see where it takes us. Please let us know what you think of the app.