Servants Of The Imperium - Television Tropes & Idioms

The SotI cast from left to right; Severus, Bob, Lyle, Aki, Brianna and Krin

is a Warhammer 40,000 comic that follows a team of Inquisitorial agents in their adventures across the Imperium of Mankind. The comic is based around the Warhammer Role-Playing Game Dark Heresy, but also takes inspiration from the tabletop wargame, and the skirmish game Inquisitor.

The artistic style of the comic has often been compared to Order of the Stick, with which it shares many similarities.

The main characters to date:

Lord Severus Hunt - The leader of the group and a member of the Imperial Inquisition.
Krin O'Kar - A bounty hunter who serves as second-in-command. He has a huge crush on Brianna.
Lyle - An Imperial Psyker. Lyle often serves as the straight-man and voice of reason in the group.
Brianna - An Imperial Assassin and object of Krin's affections.
Bob - A servo skull the party found on a pirate moon and adopted. In life he was a pirate lieutenant.
Aki - A teenage ganger who the party picked up in their adventures on Gloaming. Handy with a pistol and seems to have some medical knowledge as well.

This show provides examples of:

Ambiguous Gender: Farseer Aerian Alathatar, being an Eldar.
Art Evolution
Artificial Limbs: apparently Krin has a bionic eye, artificial heart, synthetic shin and a bionic appendix. Brianna has also claimed to be heavily augmented
Badass: Pretty much the whole party
Bait-and-Switch Boss: The Chaos Magus Brianna kills then turns out to be inhabited by a daemon which manifests upon his death
Bald of Awesome: Krin and Severus
- And Lyle as well I guess
Berserk Button: Don't hurt Brianna when Krin's around
- For that matter, avoid Lyle when he's ticked off
Big Damn Heroes: Bob saves Aki from a Genestealer with its tiny buzzsaw.
Bithe Way: Aki, by name even.
Blank White Eyes: Lord Severus's default expression, with no eyebrows and his goatee hiding the mouth. So, nobody knows what he thinks.
Boobs of Steel: Brianna
Calling Your Attacks: Lampshaded and Justified. Aki asks why Lyle yells the names of his powers. He says everyone but him makes a huge racket with their guns; he feels left out.
Click Hello
Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Krin shows shades of this sometimes
Clothing Damage: Following Twink's attempt to kill them Brianna's costume gets a number of strategic rips in it.
Colour-Coded for Your Convenience
Crapsack World: It's Warhammer 40,000 after all, but the planet of Gloaming springs to mind, where everyone but the noble class live in eternal gloom causing them to suffer from rickets and anemia and as a result are given life-shortening drugs just so they can work unceasingly for the nobles
Curb-Stomp Battle: Brianna vs Twink
Defrosting Ice Queen: Brianna, as shown by the increased frequency of her eyes being round with eyelashes, as opposed to her original slitted 'angry' eyes.
Does This Remind You of Anything?: Bob and Severus' little conversation about his "buzzsaw".
- I was only one more seminar away from attaining level three.
Dungeon Crawling
Everything's Better With Bob: Servo-Skull lieutenant of Janus Blackstar.
Expy: The quartermaster complains that Krin never gives his stuff back in one piece. Just like Q from Bond.
Four Temperament Ensemble: Severus is Choleric, Krin is Sanguine, Lyle is Melancholic and Brianna is Phlegmatic
False Friend: Twink
Guns Akimbo: Brianna almost always uses two pistols
I Call It Vera: Krin refers to his rifle as 'Betsy'
I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: how Brianna gets Krin to stop looting as the asteroid starts to break down.
Lampshade Hanging: In issue 110, Inquisitor Hunt and Lord Judge plan to make a large military operation with Imperial guardsmen and PDF forces to purge the Genestealer threat. They consider mapping out their forces with mina tures and then realize it would be an utter waste of time painting them and setting it all up.
Lock and Load Montage: Invoked by Krin, as the party goes to arm up to fight the genestealers and their cultists
Machine Worship: The tech priests
More Dakka: Krin seems fond of this. Lamp Shaded in one of the first strips when Severus points out Krin carries 5 guns but only has 2 hands
- Although recently Krin has revealed that, as he never uses his pistols, he now uses the holsters to hold snacks
Oh Crap: The daemon gets a brief one of these
- When the team realize that the guy driving the car is part of the Gene Stealer Cult.
- When the Tech Priest Gunner when he realizes that his missed shot is going to hit the moon that everyone is on.
- When the Genestealer psychic realises that Lyle has managed to use an illusion of his body to sneak behind him and kill him with a PSIONIC BLAST!.
Our Weapons Will Be Boxy In The Future: This is a Warhammer 40,000 comic, so that's pretty much a given
Pirate Booty: The hoard that made up the goal of the first story arc
Plunder:
Severus: Krin, what is that you're holding?
Krin: Standard-issue looting sack M'lord.
Severus: Of course it is. How silly of me.
Psychic Powers: Lyle is an Imperial Psyker with the powers of Illusion, Electrokinesis and PSIONIC BLAST!
Rocks Fall Everybody Dies
- Except for the heroes. The Dark Eldar, Cultists and the Treasure.... Not so much.
Red Shirt Army: The PDF, or as Aki calls them, "the Imperial Speedbump".
Sinister Silhouettes: One has appeared in strip #130, apparently saving Severus from a Cultist.
- They turn out to be Eldars, who are in a mission to protect Severus and his companions, as the Farseer states their survival is important to the Eldar schemes.
Shout Out: So far Monty Python, Starsky & Hutch, Judge Dredd, Blade Runner and a few others.
- Bob is a talking skull.
Stick Figure Comic
Technicolor Eyes
Thrown Out The Airlock: They're called "airgates" but the same thing when Brianna threatens to throw Krin out one.
Throwing Your Sword Always Works in this case it's a gun, but Krin nails a chaos cultist with one early in the series (and then steals his, just to add insult to injury)
Tsundere: Brianna seems to return Krin's affections some of the time (and has gone so far as to flash him as a reward for saving her life/abandoning loot for her), but at other times has punched him and threatened to toss him out an airlock.
- Here's a perfect example.
X Meets Y: Warhammer40000 version of Order of the Stick

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This show provides examples of: