Schlock Mercenary

There are some new items, some limited items, and some on-sale items in our store this week!

I’ll be live streaming a D&D session again tonight with the Typecast RPG group, but this time I’m not a “special guest.” I’ve been invited to join the party as a core member of the cast, which means this D&D streaming thing will happen again next Tuesday, and every Tuesday that follows. There have been two sessions since Sandra and I appeared on the stream, so I’m not entirely sure what trouble the party has gotten into in my absence. I’m confident, however, that they’re in a lot of it.

I’ll be at NASFIC/Westercon/SpikeCon this weekend¹ in Layton Utah with Sandra Tayler and Keliana Tayler. Come see us in the dealer’s room, and admire Keliana’s work in the art show. Outside of that, you can find Sandra and/or me at the following places and times. THURSDAY

The game session of Typecast RPG I announced two weeks ago is now live on YouTube! If you’ve ever wanted to watch me do the role-playing game thing, the moment has arrived. Also arriving: I’m doing it AGAIN TONIGHT on Twitch, at twitch.tv/typecastrpg. The game starts in about ninety minutes (9pm EDT), so yes, it’s short notice, but I did have enough time to come up with a nice patriotic song for the flying prison island from which my cheery bard hails. As an extra-special super-bonus, Sandra will be joining the game for the evening. I have no idea what she’ll be playing, but it’s possible she and I will have BANTER.

Sergeant In Motion: Schlock Mercenary Book 20, will be the last book in the Schlock Mercenary “mega-arc,” the unbroken¹ string of 7,300-ish² days of daily comics airing here at schlockmercenary.com. At that point the continuity of the Schlock Mercenary universe will include those twenty books, assorted bonus stories (which appear in the volumes in print), the Seventy Maxims book, and the Planet Mercenary RPG materials. Many of you may be asking (and indeed, many of you have already asked) “what comes next?” Good question. The answer requires a bit of cold, calculated business stuff. See, it’s much easier to sell a collection of stories in print when you can tell a potential buyer that the collection is complete. So no matter what comes next, it won’t make the twenty-book story feel incomplete. I’ll be leaving lots of room for readers (and RPG players) to tell their own stories about what comes next for such characters as survive the events of this final book. That sounded a bit more ominous than I meant it to. But only a bit. Also, all I’ve done is answer the question “what DOESN’T come next?” and that’s not what anybody is asking. In the face of a crassly commercial decision about what NOT to make (and let’s be blunt here—between the words “schlock” and “mercenary” there is a broadly telegraphed justification for me to be crassly commercial) I need to give people a reason to keep showing up. So here is a bulleted list of things that will definitely be here after Book 20 wraps.

Amazon’s Good Omens miniseries is a rare thing. Exceedingly rare. So rare, in fact, that I can’t off the top of my head name another thing like it, though I’m certain others must exist. It is a TV show which is as good as the great book from which it was adapted. There have been plenty of TV shows which failed to live up to the brilliance of their namesake novels, and more than a few which have outshone the prose from which they stemmed. And of course there are countless programs which reached equilibrious mediocrity with their so-so source material. Good Omens, however, is brilliant in both mediums. The book, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, is a classic of modern literature. The new miniseries from Amazon is every bit as artful. It plays with the form enough to surprise us, but not so much as to alienate the audience. It subverts some expectations, exceeds others, and will someday serve well as a master class in “how to turn a book into a TV show.” It’s a far better piece of work than the fan art it inspired from me, but that didn’t even slow me down.

Today, June 12th, 2019, marks the 19th anniversary of Schlock Mercenary on the web. The comic has updated daily, every day, without fail, for nineteen years now. Not because I’m a machine, but because I plan ahead, and have always had smarter people than myself handling the automation. Still, nineteen years. That window is large enough for there to be people who began reading the comic when they had no children, and who are now grandparents. I don’t think that’s likely, because the starting audience was not large, but that’s what nineteen years looks like.