Schlock Mercenary Has Come to an End · 6:37pm Jul 24th, 2020
Surely the author won’t mind me using the logo of his comic to promote it, right? Right?
If you’ve perused my website a little, specifically the links page, you may have noticed that one of the links I’ve had around since the very beginning leads to the most-excellent webcomic Schlock Mercenary, by Howard Tayler. Schlock Mercenary has been a long-time favorite of mine since checking it out in … 2005, I think (?), after I saw Howard present at a few panels at a convention and speak on two topics, one of which would go on to play a vital part of my future career. The first was about how comedy writing was really hard, which I noted. But the other, the big one, was how to take something independent, like a webcomic, and make a living at it.
‘If you can get 5000 people to be fans who will buy and watch your stuff,’ Howard said. ‘You’ll make it. That’s what you need.’
And he knew what he was talking about. See, Howard had left his middle-management job to pursue being a writer (and artist) in the webcomic sphere full time, selling books, prints, and as he once noted with “dark scatological undertones” … maybe even Schlock-in-a-cup.
It's the end of an era for me as well. Schlock Mercenary has been consistently funny, and Howard managed to keep things fresh and the quality good all the way through.
It's a bittersweet time. I've been watching it since... gosh, since high-school. I discovered *Schlock* on a different Internet.
It has been one heck of a ride, hasn't it. Twenty years. Man.
I'm even running a Planet Mercenary (the RPG system associated with the IP) one-shot for a few friends as a sort of celebration/tribute. Has anyone here ever played it? It's a lot of fun, and has just the right amount of chaos to it.
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Same. Pretty sure I found it during high school via StumbleUpon. Is that service even still running?
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I'm actually running another session of a pretty long-running PM game today, in fact!