Howard Tayler

Ok, I didn't expect to adore this one, but I do. It really ramped up gloriously and kinda blew my mind with its great uses of nanotech, AI, dark matter monsters, and silly amorphs who are too stupid to know they can't fly without a full kit. The pacing was fantastic and even got my heart pumping near the end even if this was supposed to be a humorous space opera comic. Great stuff!

This might just be my favourite book in the series. From start to finish we had a wonderful setup with a 30 million person station full of hungry anarchists (sorry, i mean adherents of democracy), crazies with antimatter annihilation factories, and the all-time best robotic hero and pallet-master, The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse. It had all the best elements of a heroic story, right down to a capital-class starship bouncing around like a pinball inside an extra-large Rama city and a show more classic stare into the abyss cinematic.

The whole story was smooth as ice-cream and just as delicious. show less

So, does massively parallel refer to massively parallel serial killings, or storylines? Answer? Both.

I'm appreciating the amount of skill put into this storytelling. It could have been pulled off so much worse, but instead, I feel like I just got woven into a nice little rug. I am hugely entertained.

I've even got the ride of the valkyries playing to a great rhythmset in my imagination, now, and that was just on a few hints in the comic. That's impressive. And scary.

Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management, and its author Howard Tayler, is unlike anything I've ever read before.

Wait--hold that thought. It's not completely true. Yes, it's unique, a veritable cornucopia of creative energy and humor, entertaining and--dare I say?--educational at the same time.

But it is also reminiscent, in so many happy ways, of the late Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The setting is space, the humor is satirical, and the plot twists are absurd and show more unexpected. And yet, like Adams, Tayler makes ample use of big numbers and real science to make his comic more than fluff.

Indeed, if Adams were alive, I think he'd have little problem plugging Arthur Dent into one of Tayler's panels, alongside Ford, Zaphod, Trillian, and all the others...

But enough about Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide. This is about Schlock Mercenary.

Schlock Mercenary: Under New Management is the first print collection of Tayler's webcomic Schlock Mercenary. The story of a semi-disciplined band of mercenaries but ostensibly about Sergeant Schlock, who really just wants to "hurt people and break things" and will warm up his plasma cannon at any excuses, this installment includes extensive annotations (which left me wondering if Tayler was tricking me into learning something about science, space, physics...yeah, seriously. I was laughing and learning about science at the same time) and an origin story about Schlock (and don't ask me exactly what Schlock is. Apparently, he's all but indestructible, not to mention as malleable as Gumby).

I've long listened to Tayler on the Writing Excuses podcast ("It's all about eyebrows," says Tayler) that he does with Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Mary Robinette Kowal (and for which they won a Hugo this year...a Hugo!), and I felt lucky when was able to track him down at the Salt Lake Comic Con. He's about as cool as anyone I met there and was glad to pose (and I do mean pose--the guy just doesn't take himself serious, which is refreshing) for a photo.

I'm not much of a comics guy, but I'll keep reading Schlock Mercenary. The story telling is solid, the jokes are clean and clever, and the creativity is refreshing. It's enough to make a fan out of me. show less