Brain Uploading: It's possible to upload a person's memory into a computer. Uploading that memory into another body is considered a crime, tantamount to murder,even if it is a reconstructed clone body that may have been awake for only a few seconds. Doing so is most likely considered the equivalent of smothering an infant in it's crib. And Uploading into a computer itself is rather horrendous as well, see And I Must Scream above.
Cool and Unusual Punishment: The Patoodines have a rather unique legal system: they launch criminals from a catapult a distance calculated by adding up the total and severity of your crimes. If you live, you're free to go. But if your crimes are severe enough, well...
Cool Starship: Both Quentyn's own ship, the Thunderbird, and the Sapphire Star — a luxury cruise ship with a diameter measured in kilometers.
Corporate Warfare: About thirty years previously a coalition of six stellar nations, including the Empire, declared war on the RIAA because they'd started brain-stripping elderly artists and scientists. They took the RIAA's heavily fortified central office planet in a week when it turned out the nations they were counting on for defense hated them too.
Death World: The Kvrk-Chk homeworld features extremes of pressure, temperature, acidity, salinity, toxicity, and radiation unimaginable to most sentients. And an ecosystem so savage that they need to eat their prey alive before scavengers and parasites do. As a result a single unarmed Kvrk-Chk can slaughter a group of wannabe pirates with artillery.
Disproportionate Retribution: The Kvrk-Chk. Was destroying an inhabited system too much, or the only way to make a hyper-carnivorous, Scary Dogmatic Aliens species stop trying to eat people long enough to make them listen to reason?
Mind you, given that the Kvrk-Chk declared war first, it's a case of Combat Pragmatists giving the Proud Warrior Race a taste of what real war is like. "Yeah, we suck at close combat. It's a shame you'll never get there." Besides, the Kvrk-Chk are considered a horde of alien locusts with Explosive Breeder tendencies, with an extreme monoculture that stamps out all individuality. So, you wiped out 100 billion bugs? Well, there will be ten times that number born in the next 20 years, and if you've met one Kvrk-Chk, you've met every Kvrk-Chk.
Here's something else to put things in perspective: the only reason that there's any debate on the Kvrk-Chk is because they are sentient. If they were non-sentient life-forms that committed their atrocities out of pure feral instinct, no one would bat an eye at wiping them out even if it demanded wiping out several systems using a stellar lance, as long as the Horde of Alien Locusts was stopped. After all, no one wants to be eaten by bugs, and you can't negotiate with a non-sentient lifeform. However, since they are sentient, all this discussion and debate occurs, despite the fact that they declared a war of annihilation on every sentient species in the universe, and have no compunctions against eating and killing (in that order) other sentient beings, even, or especially, unarmed and defenseless ones. While you can argue that they are a product of their original environment, that doesn't change the fact that as a species, they chose to treat all other sentient species as chatty food. The only real difference between the Kvrk-Chk and a non-sentient species with the same biology is that, if you hit them with a big enough hammer, they'll realize that maybe all-out war isn't a good idea with a technologically more advanced species.
Distressed Dude: Like in an emergency evac suit in outer space with only a short range communicator and the ship swanning off without you.
Disproportionate Retribution: When the Kvrk-chk ate a Racconan colony ship's passengers, the Empire retaliated by roasting one of the more populated Kvrk-chk star systems with a stellar lance.
YMMV - the Kvrk-chk are a species that regards every other carbon-based lifeform as food...and sapient lifeforms are just extra-talkative food. This also came after they had broadcast the consumption of the passengers and crew of that colony ship, as a "you are next" kind of message. In short, they'd made it very clear that nothing other than a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown would make them back off and leave the Racconans alone.
The Confidantines enact very severe penalties for anyone who abducts and/or interrogates one of their own. The reason for these penalties is rather simple: The Confidantines were the first species to perfect FTL communication, and share a collective memory that allows them access to a huge amount of information, a great deal of it classified or personal. They also hold a great deal of control over all hypernet access in the universe. To prevent that information from being used by unscrupulous sources, if one of their own is captured or interrogated, then either they are forcibly disconnected from the collective, or disconnect themselves. They consider this a Fate Worse Than Death (since their mind exists outside of their own head, this basically reduces the person in question to a drooling infant, and while it may be possible to partially restore their faculties, they are never the same afterwards). For this reason, in order to ensure that no one tries, they will penalize not just the individuals responsible, but also their homeworld, any organization they work for, and potentially their entire species by cutting off their hypernet access for a century, if not longer.
This penalty can easily cause the bankruptcy of the company in question, cause the homeworld in question to fall into economic ruin, and change a species from a major intergalactic superpower to the equivalent of a third world country practically overnight. This would be the modern day equivalent of suddenly being banned from all internet, telegraph, telephone, television, and radio access, and having to rely on only postal communication for a century. This would be painfully slow, inefficient, and expensive, and in a competitive economy, the equivalent of a Game Breaking Injury for a person, company, planet, and/or ENTIRE FREAKING INTERGALACTIC CIVILIZATION! Even after the ban is over, it would be centuries before the economies affected would be able to catch up with the competition, and even then, odds are that they'll never reach anything approaching their previous ability in comparison to what was lost.
Fantastic Racism: not so much subverted or inverted as turned completely inside out with the W'naybeans, a race of behavioral and cultural mimics (modeled on the real life Mimic Octopus.) Their habit of imitating not just other races and ethnicities but other race and ethnic STEREOTYPES caused them a great deal of trouble with various easily offended PC types, but eventually they became so ubiquitous that they are routinely employed in various tourist traps preferentially over the very natives they imitate as being "more authentic." The author's point is that "nobody seemed to be too upset as long as it was SOMEBODY ELSE being mimicked..." Ergo, if seen humorously, both racism AND ethnic hypersensitivity are easy to recognize as ridiculous.
Good Republic, Evil Empire: Seemingly inverted, the hero works for the "Empire of the Six Systems" while the Star Trek Parody Federation is highly incompetent (and socialist). But according to Word Of God the Empire is a parliamentary republic and the emperor is mostly there to look good on TV.
Have I Mentioned I Am a Dwarf Today?: In the "Federation" arc, Groonch the G'norch makes a point of emphasizing his warrior-race pride (his hat, given by Captain Pidorq, is "token noble savage")—- only to have it subverted when it's pointed out that his "race" has dozens of languages and hundreds of cultures, and "noble warrior" isn't even in the top ten....
Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Quentyn states that as an Imperial Ranger he has the authority to act as judge, jury, and executioner in cases of extreme lawlessness, e.g. The Serqeti and Gestaltian ambassadors illegally cloning assassins and neurally templating them with the Serqeti's wife's "backup".
The Serqeti embassador when he learns that being in neutral space will not protect him from his crimes and... well see Judge, Jury, and Executioner for why this is bad for him.
One-Way Visor: The cabbie mimmic, despite his eyes being on the ends of his "Rasta dreads".
Only Sane Man: The titular character and his AI companion seem to be this most of the time.
Pleasure Planet: The Sapphire Star, though actually a massive starship.
Also (mentioned in passing) "Queela Quoola," which translates roughly as "Planet of casual sex and cheap beer..."
Reasonable Authority Figure: The Cosmic Being in the Glorious Undertaking arc, who, out of pity more than anything, basically took an entire civilization under it's wing and gave it interstellar travel in the hopes that space travel would broaden said species horizons and help them to correct the shortcomings of their society.
Scarily Competent Tracker: The snorf can pick up a scent from a description of whom they are looking for.
Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Kvrk-Chk are explicitly stated to be under the Nazi category, with their entire civilization being under an absolute dictatorship that allows no variation in culture, law, beliefs, anything in their society. This is a society where the nail that sticks up isn't just hammered down, it's violently ripped out and eaten on sight. And this is a civilization that occupies multiple star systems.
Take That: A big one directed at Star Trek runs from Page 14 to Page 44. The author's politics are on full display. Most of the subjects he brings up were addressed by either Deep Space Nine or the TNG movies.
May be nothing more than if all the other characters are cranked up to eleven to show their silliness, cranking "Dweebley" up to eleven turns him into a Foil.
Looks like Affectionate Parody considering the obscurity of some of the Trek references (e.g.: rice-harvester accident, "make things go", etc.) but demonstrates that the author has done his research and shown his work; the tone is anything but affectionate.
"The Reason You Suck" Speech: The Cosmic Being gives a rather severe one to the captain of the Glorious Undertaking, in front of his own crew, outlining every flaw and shortcoming of their civilization, and everything that he has to do to keep their entire civilization from collapsing upon itself. Again.
Time Dilation: A narratively brilliant example, which should be used more often - though Faster-than-Light Travel is fairly Casual, the amount of time trips take is randomly inconsistent, since time doesn't "flow" homogeneously through the galaxy, due to gravitational anomalies, the rotation of the galaxy, and distance from the galactic core. This means that years can pass while a traveler is gone for a few months. It forces more independence on the setting, and hardcore spacers Can't Go Home Again.
to give the reader some perspective: the mere gravitational difference between the Earth's surface and orbit is high enough that the atomic clocks on GPS satellites have to be readjusted by software on a continual basis, otherwise the satellites would be off by 38 microseconds—- and their coordinate readings by TEN KILOMETERS—- in a single day.
Too Dumb to Live: Somehow a large portion of the universe's population seems to fit into this category. Thankfully, there appears to be a large number of unimaginably powerful beings that roam the stars, taking care of species like this.
Walking the Earth: The Rangers' jobs pretty much require it. Running around the frontier exploring new systems, making First Contact with unknown alien races, and occasionally acting as lawmen. Plus the effects of Time Dilation listed above.
The Watson: Omnibus, his frequent role seems to be to ask Quentyn questions, justified as even though as a Galactopedia AI he has an extensive archive of information he doesn't collate and cross-reference like organics do. Which is actually the reason why he was partnered with the Commander.
Omnibus: On a personal note, I'm finding your associative processes to be more... complicated to follow than I ever expected.
Quinn: heh. You're lucky I choose to take that as a compliment.
What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The source of much debate on the Cartoonist's own forum. The Kvrk-Chk are made of pure Obviously Evil, and they commit a truly grotesque act of aggression. Even so, it's disconcerting to see the heroic Empire of the Six Systems unleash a Class X-2 Apocalypse on "one of (the Kvrk-chk's) most heavily populated solar systems".
, a webcomic by Ralph Hayes, Jr. and a Spin-Off of Tales of the Questor, deals with one of Quentyn's descendants centuries down the track, IN SPACE!!
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