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Schlock Mercenary

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Wednesday 25 September 2019

Daily strip for Wednesday 25 September 2019
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New speculation: since the invading megastructure is the equivalent of Laz-R-Us mind-backup nanotech for pa'anuri, it must have pa'anuri minds stored in a conventional-matter substrate, from which they can be extracted with Petey's soulgig tech. This is how we'll finally get to see their side of the story.
 
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strange_person said:
www.schlockmercenary.com

Wednesday 25 September 2019

Daily strip for Wednesday 25 September 2019
www.schlockmercenary.com www.schlockmercenary.com

New speculation: since the invading megastructure is the equivalent of Laz-R-Us mind-backup nanotech for pa'anuri, it must have pa'anuri minds stored in a conventional-matter substrate, from which they can be extracted with Petey's soulgig tech. This is how we'll finally get to see their side of the story.
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Interesting.

Though, where does the dark matter come from? That's my question.
 
Difficulty visualizing the dark matter combat (established starting here: https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2019-08-04 ) could be foreshadowing some issues with Kevyn's ability to provide tactical advice during the assault on the core generator. Para Ventura will almost certainly need to be involved, figuring out some way to isolate and display the relevant data without crippling the AI's reaction times, and thus ability to win the overall battle. Kevyn and Para's lack of personal fragsuits, and Para's lack of practical microgravity experience, may also become an issue, if some near miss during the fight pushes the newly upgraded DCI too close to it's yet-untested breaking point.

In the current strip Wednesday 25 March 2020 Cindy's greater overall age is irrelevant, since (although admittedly he's not explaining it very well yet) Kevyn has far more experience in the specific relevant field of making heavy-duty wormhole generators explode, going all the way back to the first time he died. Before traveling in time he provided at least two strategically pivotal insights (technique for refitting parts of the Gatekeeper network to drain energy, thus delaying or conceivably halting the overall galactic cataclysm, and the paradoxical causality framework within which useful time travel would be possible at all) that Petey couldn't have come up with alone.
 
I'm resurrecting this thread to mention that Schlock Mercenary has officially ended (this arc, anyway). After 20 years writing, drawing and publishing Schlock Mercenary, Howard Tayler has completed his comic.
www.schlockmercenary.com

Thursday 23 July 2020

Daily strip for Thursday 23 July 2020
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What do y'all think about the ending? What about the story as a whole?
 
I enjoyed the ending arc, but I did find the epilogue a little lackluster.

There was a lot of talk about, oh, the ramifications are too big to really talk about, but there really weren't that many details we learned that we couldn't figure out already. Some things I think they could probably cover in a few strips:

What's up with the Toughs? They're going to be living on Schlock's ship, sure, but what are they doing? I can't really see them reasonably returning to mercenary work. I mean, with the three "god" like beings of two galaxies, and the lord of the afterlife being ex-members of their roster, any situation they stick their oar in would instantly be insanely political, to the point where I'm pretty sure that people would be willing to pay them to just sit in the planet sized battle armor and sip margaritas just to avoid the mess, and I don't think that they're inclined to run that kind of extortion racket. Are they fully retired, or going to take more of a consultancy role? All we currently know is that they intend on sleeping on Schlock's figurative couch, which will also have dinosaurs.

What's going to happen with the Plenipotent Dominion? Petey is apparently "broke", to the point that he can't pay the Toughs. They were a pretty major power block, with civilians and everything. Is Petey retired now that the threat that he's been spending so much of his time trying to address resolved? Was his government disbanded? Is he somehow also going to be bumming on Schlock's couch?

Will there actually be romance between Cindy and Schlock? It kind of feels like that was implied and then immediately and awkwardly brushed past?

There are couple of other minor questions, like what is going to happen to Schlock's TV show now that he is a super powerful dark matter entity that owns one of the galactic cores. How the hell are they going to adapt that arc to the cartoon? Like, they could take some creative liberties before, but now DMSchlock is one of the top most important people in the galaxy, and that kind of changes the equation a bit. Kind of hard to make a fun kids show adaptation of a real story that actually just happened covering his involvement in the traumatic galactic war of genocide, since quite a few people were probably thinking that their entire civilizations were about to be wiped out. Though I admit that as far as hanging plot threads go, "What's up with Schlock's TV show?" is pretty low on the list.

I enjoyed Schlock Mercenary as a whole, though the idea of rereading the story now that it's finally over is a bit of a daunting prospect, considering its size.
 
Sir Bill said:
I enjoyed the ending arc, but I did find the epilogue a little lackluster.

There was a lot of talk about, oh, the ramifications are too big to really talk about, but there really weren't that many details we learned that we couldn't figure out already. Some things I think they could probably cover in a few strips:

What's up with the Toughs? They're going to be living on Schlock's ship, sure, but what are they doing? I can't really see them reasonably returning to mercenary work. I mean, with the three "god" like beings of two galaxies, and the lord of the afterlife being ex-members of their roster, any situation they stick their oar in would instantly be insanely political, to the point where I'm pretty sure that people would be willing to pay them to just sit in the planet sized battle armor and sip margaritas just to avoid the mess, and I don't think that they're inclined to run that kind of extortion racket. Are they fully retired, or going to take more of a consultancy role? All we currently know is that they intend on sleeping on Schlock's figurative couch, which will also have dinosaurs.

What's going to happen with the Plenipotent Dominion? Petey is apparently "broke", to the point that he can't pay the Toughs. They were a pretty major power block, with civilians and everything. Is Petey retired now that the threat that he's been spending so much of his time trying to address resolved? Was his government disbanded? Is he somehow also going to be bumming on Schlock's couch?
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The Toughs ran exactly that kind of extortion racket against the UNS - by accident, admittedly - back before Petey went full Fleetmind.

Petey's broke because he owes the Oafans for all those PTU-rich hulls he broke up for scrap and sold to the UNS. That was a debt of terrifying magnitude even before he lost the Milky Way core generator, and he's still got all those civilians - who've likely become accustomed to a level of angelnetting that's actually very expensive to maintain behind the scenes. With all the exogalactics coming back, he's not even in a dominant position with regard to computing power anymore. So, he's got a lot of problems to juggle.

Last time galactic society got abruptly reorganized around more convenient travel and communication, it was called the Teraport Wars. Exogalactic worldship residents are uniformly older and wiser, but that doesn't mean they can't still have fundamental philosophical disagreements with major policy implications, and pursue those conflicts with some degree of violence. Tagon's Toughs may be out of that particular business, but Colonel Pranger and many others will likely have opportunities to continue operating somehow in the new environment.
 
Well, that ended...kind of abruptly. I feel like we made a bit of a thematic 180 there. With the Kevyn's soulgig arc, and the fate of the gasbag aliens, and the general approach towards immortality, I thought we were going to go towards a meditation about how going into a simulated paradise, or even a simulated make-work keep-you-busy world was not really a fate worth living, and that being on the outside and actually interacting with reality mattered. But nope, we got the dark-matter aliens slotted into their heaven in barely a few strips. For them to accept this as a solution, given that they were previously existing in a state of perpetual antagonism with baryonic matter save for what they could control, seems really weak to me.

I feel like everything after Schlock went dark-matter was rushed, myself, and focused entirely on getting to an ending as soon as possible. It's definitely deserved, after 20 years of continual daily updates, but I feel it could have ended on a stronger note.
 
Yeah, it kind of ended with a thud.

All the extragalactic worldship stuff ended up accomplishing nothing. Ennesby and Schlock have strong fights with cool stuff happening, then kind of just win off camera and show up with for the epilogue.

Still, it's been a good twenty years of comics, overall.
 
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