Schlock Mercenary

"Now they're turning us into monsters

Turning us into fire

It's all desire, it's all desire..."

 

Gorillaz - Kids with Guns

 

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As links to the strip itself span its entire run, some spoilers are inevitable. Long story short: worth an archive binge for SciFi fans.

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I've heard Schlock Mercenary routinely mentioned in the same breath as my favorite webcomics for two decades, but the couple of times I tired to get into it failed to really grab me. At its start in 2000, it relied on a repertoire of recycled action movie scenes, toilet gags, "meta"-humor like characters talking to the narrator and random half-baked ideas, without the self-conscious charm and building momentum that made such gimmicks work for Sluggy Freelance. Its drawing style was flimsy and inconsistent; its characterization and plots more so.

A passing footnote somewhere on last year's internet tipped me off to Schlock ending, and so I decided to give it one last chance, this time suffering through enough initial fumbling to reach this page. It may look mediocre, but for a randomly goofy explosion-thick comic with no backgrounds and a tenuous grasp on causality, that moon landing counted as the author's declaration of intent to improve on everything holding him back. So this time I stuck around, and improve he did.

Given its somewhat meandering nature (even had a chapter about space-parkour at some point) it would be pointless to try charting twenty years' worth of storylines here, so I'll stick with three observations:

1) Once the strip found some measure of SF footing (as opposed to just space cowboy antics) its episodes came to be defined in sequence by whatever speculative technology caught the author's fancy: teleportation, anti-gravity, antimatter annihilation, nanobots, artificial habitats, AI, sentient dark matter, etc. Fixating on a particular phlebotinum at any one time could have fragmented the overarching plot, but they're worked into existing conflicts quite nicely. The major players change only gradually, but the action is maintained by their acquisition of fresh arsenals - not merely bigger guns but guns that shoot in new ways.

2) The male-female dynamic shifted twice. In its infancy, the strip consisted of macho, somewhat bumbling 1980s action heroes, with the marginally humorous twist of their mercenary company being bought by a female. With the addition of a couple of female underlings and a female antagonist, the humor abruptly retrenched to the sitcom norm of women browbeating, demeaning and abusing the men around them to presumed choruses of applause. Especially interesting the change in Captain Tagon who would metamorphose for a few years at random intervals into a Zapp Brannigan clone. When his machismo was not deliberately being made an issue, he would qualify as somewhat greedy and bellicose but also a competent manager, inspiring leader and occasonally savvy tactician. As soon as a female stepped into the scene however, he would default to an arbitrarily assigned role of punching bag, cursed with Gilligan levels of ignorance and incompetence, and his underlings fared little better. Though the presumption of male inadequacy kept cropping up until the end, a surprising sea change took place through the strip's second decade. Males began getting a word in edgewise. Females began disagreeing with each other and having the occasional bad idea and, heavens forfend, being corrected by a man instead of constantly pulling biological rank. To me it culminated in this strip in late 2018, just as #MeToo was reaching peak mass hysteria; just as the rest of the world lost their remaining wits, the author regained some of his.

3) Schlock Mercenary's original cast was a pile of cliches and one-shot gags, and instead of outgrowing and abandoning, it spent quite a bit of its later years trying to reconcile them, to give old characters their appropriate send-offs (the "admiral" and AI-implanted supersoldier, the dimension-hopping scientist, the myriad clones from another comic strip, the wise-cracking floating AI, that one guy made of exploding cake) and this included, at long last, the title character. Though retaining so many faulty characters resulted in a bit of stagnation, it was ultimately quite gratifying to see the strip gradually speculate on what life might actually be like for an amorphous blob, or more importantly finally dealing with that farcical '80s action movie violence from the comic's first year or ten.

 

Overall, Schlock gives me the same impression as Dr. McNinja or Sluggy Freelance: a relic from the Internet's toddler years, whose author proved his talent but was by now being held back by an old project he had long outgrown.