A small change in evening routine

[brooksmoses]

One of my evening computer routines is checking the next day's webcomics, since most of them post before I go to bed. The various comics in the routine change by day since most aren't daily, and by year as comics come and go and creators go on hiatus or come back from it. However, there has been one constant that anchors the routine: Schlock Mercenary, a science-fiction webcomic about a company of mercenaries, somewhat centered around an odd creature named Schlock.

Howard Tayler started writing, drawing, and posting Schlock Mercenary some time in 2000. I don't remember when I discovered it and started reading, but I know it was well before 2004, when he was able to turn it into a full-time business with his wife as business manager. Since then, he (and Travis Walton, whom he brought on to do the coloring in 2010, and Gary Henson, who runs the server) have posted a comic every day of every week of every year, without a single missed day -- and without even resorting to a "fan art" day or a "filler comic" day. The closest they came was one day quite a few years ago when the server was misbehaving, and the comic went up an hour late.

Until this past Friday. Schlock Mercenary has reached its end, all the story arcs have come to a close, and Howard is taking a well-deserved break.

It's a bit weird, not having this to start out the webcomic routine, and not having the certainty that there will be at least one new one to read. (None of the other ones I'm currently following are daily, and none of them post on Thursdays.) Someone was commenting on Twitter about "ruts worn in their brain" with the strength of habit of checking the site at the time when the comic went up, and Howard replied with a comment that he was doing the same thing because he always habitually checked to make sure it had gone up correctly.

Comments

[keshwyn]

WHAT.

He finished it? OMG. That was an awesome strip, but I dropped off it sometime around when they destroyed Petey and the crew ended up in one of the giant ship's gunships. (Which was necessary - Petey was a wickedly overpowered and overbalancing toy. But I wasn't in the mood to deal with the sudden change at the time, and I never got back to it.)

[brooksmoses]

I remember that! It turned out that Petey-the-AI survived the destruction of Petey-the-ship, and he went on to become wickedly overpowered on a scope far exceeding his power as a single giant ship -- but as a separate character with his own agenda and goals, and his own reasons for not necessarily being a deus ex machina for the Toughs all the time (as well as them having reasons for not asking him to be).

That was in late 2002, it looks like. It's been a while.

The story arc as a whole is quite interesting in terms of increasing the "power level" and keeping things balanced. Part of it is that, once Petey-the-ship is gone, they're back to being a mercenary company that's not particularly rich, and so for paid jobs they get resources that are roughly proportional to the job they're being asked to do. The stories also end up doing things that mean that previous sources of power aren't necessarily relevant, and those become more nuanced over time. Early on (but after you stopped reading, I think), there's a storyline where they get stranded on the planet equivalent of a desert island and have to survive with little more than sticks and stones. Later, the stories are often ones where shooting things doesn't solve the problem, or only solves parts of it. This is intermixed with the usual sort of escalation that one would get in a long role-play campaign with characters advancing through many levels; by the end, they are saving the entire galaxy in a war that involves planet-obliterating shots being fired through teraports from one galaxy to another.

FWIW, Howard's planning to write more comics in the same universe, once he's done with vacation and the itch to be writing is too much to resist.

[hitchhiker]

when i worked for a startup i got the entire office turned on to 'ozy and millie', and it became a sort of ritual for the first person to notice a new strip to call it out, and everyone would go check. it was sad when it stopped updating.

[brooksmoses]

Nice! And, indeed, very sad when Ozy and Millie stopped; suzannekmoses and I were very fond of it. We have a couple of original-artwork strips on the wall.