Our good friend Howard Tayler received a nice write-up in the local paper regarding his 10 year milestone of producing his Shlock Mercenary webcomic.
When you ask Howard Tayler what launched him on a journey that now spans 10 years and uncounted strange new worlds, the answer sounds so simple.
“I think the first thing that suggested a crew of mercenaries,” Tayler said, and then paused a moment to find just the right words. “It seemed like a very reasonable way to have people going to new places all the time and doing violent things.
“I wanted to write space opera.”
That was in early 2000, and the urge to write about itinerant spacers-for-hire blossomed rapidly into “Schlock Mercenary,” a pioneering online comic. Tayler doesn’t remember the exact dates, or even the exact day of the week, but said it happened more or less like this:
“I started doodling on a Tuesday, and by Friday I had convinced myself I wanted to be a cartoonist.”
Here’s to another 10 years, Howard.
This is one strip I just don’t get.
Alot of the long tail junk people talked about five years ago was junk, but the truth is few people are so weird that they can’t find 50,000 or so people who share their weird. And there isn’t anything wrong with that.
Schlock Mercenary’s kind of a weird strip. It’s epic sci-fi storylines presented in a gag-a-day format. Kind of a funnier, more amoral, Flash Gordon. Damn straight there’s an audience for that on the internet.
Anyway, good work Howard!