Space Opera with many HardScience Fiction aspects in the 31st century.Named after Schlock, an alien shaped like a pile of crap with eyes and a mouth who joins "Tagon's Toughs", a space-faring mercenary outfit. The cast includes the aforementioned Kaff Tagon, The Captain of the group, Commander Kevyn Andreyasn, inventor of the "teraport" system and all-around Mad Scientist, Ennesby, a former virtual boy band turned ship's AI, and many others.Consistent humor (it is very quotable) and we mean consistent — Schlock has been running seven days a week without missing a day since the 12th of June 2000 - eleven years. Sometimes it gets slightly political, but never partisan. Let's just say it's not for people who think governments deserve sympathetic treatment. This is a world where the only respected authority is the one with the larger gun - in other words, the perfect world for a mercenary company.Howard Tayler has given enthusiastic permission to John Ringo to write about the First Contact days. Titled Troy Rising and planned as a trilogy, it consists of Live Free or Die, Citadel and The Hot Gate. Ringo's enjoying himself, so there will be more than three books in this trilogy. However, the two worlds have drifted apart and Troy Rising is not currently considered canonical within the Schlock universe.Please see the Characters page for character-specific tropes.The comic can be found right here.
Justified for the Pa'anuri, who are hurt by teraport use; then again, their response to the invention of teraporting when they could manage it was to pulverize the inventors' civilization and then blow up the star for good measure.
Absurdly Sharp Blade: Many of the blades in the setting are capable of slicing through heavy armor. Tailor is particularly impressive, as he's able to dismember the hands of three heavily-armored Mooks in a single pass.
Somewhat justified in that example, since Tailor was designed to cut, create, and modify body armor.
On the other hand, the ones that were actively malicious (or at least terminally helpful) managed to fully purge themselves of their meat infestation.
Air Vent Passageway: A Running Gag in The sharp end of the stick is schlock hiding in air vents. Since he's an amorphous blob, the air vents don't actually have to be wide.
All Hail The Great God Mickey: Reverend Theo refers to 'The Gospel of Uncle Benjamin' when confronted with the quote "With great power comes great responsibility" and Greyskull's Power as part of an exorcism rite (the first time was in a dream sequence, but the second was a direct reference of his own).
Amazing Technicolor Population: Humanity is more varied that at present- the most notable examples are the Purps, a genetic offshoot who have purple skin due to a form of synthetic photosynthesis.
Tayler started that if the comic got 10,000 votes in a February 2010 Washington Post poll, he'd kill an attorney drone in the "Mallcop Command" arc, and that if he won, he would kill ALL the attorney drones. Sadly, neither came to pass.
Amusing Injuries: Anything at all happening to the above Amoral Attorneys, usually fatally. Also, given the state of medical technology, any injury that doesn't invoke the Chunky Salsa Rule can be made Amusing.
Anti-Hero: The entire central cast. Notable for mostly being played for laughs, instead of Angst.
Anyone Can Die: Throughout most of the series, Death Is Cheap. Characters can be regrown in a tank from just a head, preserved in a nanny-bag to prevent degradation, and Tagon, Kevyn, Elf, Xinchub, and Petey have all come back from far less. Which makes it that much more shocking when characters like Hob, Sh'vuu, Pronto, Doctor Lazcowicz, and Brad, some of whom had been around since the very beginning, were all Killed Off for Real.
Almost each book or story arc seems to have it's own phrase, which is usually the name of the book that arc's strips will be compiled into. Before "Massively Parallel" (also the title of the planned book), there was "Longshoreman of the Apocalypse." Before that, it gets a little hazy. There's also recurrent phrases mostly from the "Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries," such as "Pillage, then burn" or "There is no overkill. There is only 'open fire' and 'time to reload.'"
Armor-Piercing Slap: Mostly played straight (and since armour has gotten a little stronger in the past thousand years, the slap can be delivered in equally powered armour or by a bullet). Subverted here after a classic setup.
Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: The crimes Kevyn could hypothetically be tried for include: treason, high treason, and grand spamming. However, in the 31st century spammers are held in the same contempt as pedophiles so it's a subversion.
The future equivalent of DUI carries the death penalty because you have to be completely sober to modify the vehicle to make it possible to use manual mode while under the influence*
Played straight with a rounding error. Since the current list of crimes includes armed conquest and attempted genocide, rounding pi down to 3 seems like an especially trivial crime, even when you're charged by an AI.
Aside from the fact that rounding down would in that case doom everything in several hundred thousand cubic light-years of space.
Artificial Gravity: complete with exploration of technological consequences
Artificial Limbs: Frequently, and heavily lampshaded, though when possible they prefer to clone new parts/bodies.
Asskicking Equals Authority: Played with. Tagon likes this trope; whenever one of his men does something stupid (such as blowing up the ship/fleet/planet), they usually get a promotion if they survived.
At least, if they survived and blowing up the ship/fleet/planet did the job it was supposed to.
Tagon himself. He's not the brightest on strategy or tactics (though far from the worst at it, either), but nobody in the company can beat him when it comes to combat. He's extremely sharp in his own way when it comes to the things he's good at (which is, unsurprisingly, hurting people and breaking things), even if a little Book Dumb. He just looks dim next to the hyperintelligent warship AI and one of the single greatest scientific minds in the galaxy.
In the 2001 Schlocktoberfestepilogue, it's stated that the smuggler that brought the diamond-bettle eggs aboard the Princess Tyola as a suppository.
Action Girl Elf once treated a reality TV host to this trope with one of his own cameras.
To handle the toxic atmosphere of Ghanj-Rho when the Toughs were going on a mission to get a new set of eyes for Schlock, they are given with a device to filter the toxins out of their blood. They're not, unlike one grunt thought, to be swallowed...
Legs: Do you know what we call flying soldiers on the battlefield? Tino: Air support? Legs:Skeet.
Back from the Dead: Kevyn a few times and ways, Xinchub, Petey, almost everyone if you count decapitation
Tagon is an especially notable example, if you count the timeline being changed so that he never died in the first place as "coming back from the dead."
The Battlestar: Battleplates, plus Ob'enn Superfortresses and pretty much every ship made by the psycho bears, everything the Toughs fly in after the Kitesfear is destroyed, with the exception of the Serial Peacemaker, Petey's "Extortionator" class ships, and every ship equipped with a fabber.
Behind the Black: The Toughs frequently display their ignorance of the law, never seeming to notice their lawyer is present until Massey sticks his head into the frame.
BFG: Schlock loves them so much that he once actually rejected a far more powerful and efficient version of his plasma cannon because it was dinky-looking. And because it lacked the "Ommminous Hummm'.
Beyond the Impossible: Approaches this at times. How many times can you get paid for a single job? Tagon's Toughs' current record is five.
Big Book of War: The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries*
originally The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates; see below
A lot of pieces of technology have these "fiddly bits" on them with unclear or dubious purposes.
Exploding Bling Of War: Kevyn and Tagon's epaulets. Tagon just has a grenade while Kevyn has an antimatter anti-tank grenade in one and a 14-kiloton antimatter bomb in the other.
Blob Monster: Carbosilicate Amorphs. Like Schlock.
Breaking the Bonds: Jud mentioned in his memoirs that he realized his bonds were made of toilet paper and were easily broken. He didn't say that it took 15 minutes to free himself.
In one strip, Kevyn's glasses are revealed to be specially made to allow the user to see certain invisible spectra, such as infra-red. Cue December 2nd 2011, where Schlock tries them on.
Caught in a Snare: When the Toughs land on a planet only to discover it's home to a sentient stone-age race.
Cerebus Retcon: Subverted. The early gag of the "magic cryokit" modified by the Toughs' former doctor using his illegal research, including dumping his own memories into it, takes on surprising seriousness in light of later revelations about the doctor, his role in certain black projects, and what those projects are capable of. Also related, the apparent throwaway joke at the time that the doctor's corpse was missing unspecified parts when it was brought in for the bounty; it's not until more than six years later that we find out that said illegal research is capable of rebuilding people from parts of their dead body.Subverted in that it's done so subtly and over such a long period that it appears to be less a retcon than incredibly long-range foreshadowing.
Chased by Angry Natives: In Zoojack station, until the natives discover their targets can talk.
Chekhov's Armoury: The Massively Parallel arc has had so many Chekhov's Guns left lying around that the readers have probably forgotten half of them . . . should be fun once said guns all get chain-fired.
Excellent example is here, making Credomar a literalChekhov's Gun. One capable of firing across the galaxy.
Yet another rapidfire burst of gunfire: The end of "The Body Politic" arc had the Toughs' collective memories wiped in order to prevent them from being executed by the UNS in order to cover up secrets. The deal also included a complete cutoff from Petey. Two arcs later, near the end of "Massively Parallel", Petey bails them out as mentioned in the above mentioned literal 'Gun', and it's only Schlock's circumvention of the mindwipe rearing its head that makes Tagon listen to anything Petey has to say. Like the Toughs themselves, Howard sure loves his guns...
Averted for everyone on-screen. Duplicated characters are treated as legally and morally equal to the originals, and are usually Put on a Bus rather than killed. An extreme example is "The Gavs": a cameo by the creator of Nukees is duplicated some 950 million times in an instant, and is now a dominant ethnic group and marketing demographic in his own right.
Captain Tagon: Kevyn and, um. . . Kevyn, do you have any suggestions for how I handle paying you? I mean, there are two of you now. Timeclone!Kevyn: No. There is one of me, and one of him.
In Kevyn's case his gate clone replaced him completely, as he'd been killed by his own improvised gravy gun. His time clone (from an alternate future) retired after winning the lottery and apparently some mob-run horse races.
HOWEVER... Uncountable gate clones were tortured and murdered off-screen over all the time the F'sherl Ganni gates were the galaxy's only practical form of transportation.
Clothes Make the Superman: Even the standard low-profile powered uniform practically turns a soldier into a Flying Brick. You should see what the actual armor is like.
Coca-Pepsi, Inc.: From Ovalkwik to Samsony, several formerly competing companies have merged, as revealed by their portmanteau names.
Color-Coded for Your Convenience: In an in-universe example, Lt Shodan suspects that a bunch of new recruits charging ahead and blazing away with their guns were prevented from shooting one another only because they were wearing the same color.
Subverted and parodied on many occasions: "This is the punchline" or "I don't want a punchline" are recurring throughout the series (and might make this one a Running Gag in its own right).
Later, there's Credomar, a habitat founded on the principles of democracy that was near anarchy with at least six competing factions by the time the Toughs got there. They ended up electing a robot dictator who actually got things done.
Determinator: Howard Tayler, the author. Nothing can stop him from updating every single day. Not injuries, not software glitches, nothing. Even a transformer explosion at the server farm where the comic is hosted that took out two walls, several websites, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment did not stop Schlock Mercenary's update schedule; he just set up a temporary site until they got the main host back up. On one occasion, the comic was up several hours late. Howard apologized, and the strip was up by End of Business that day. One occasion in eleven years.
Seemingly any AI should it gain enough processing power. Lunesby, the accidental offspring of a holographic Boy Band and Luna's millennium-old filing system immediately decides to start streamlining the moon's labyrinthine bureaucracy. LOTA (the Longshoreman Of The Apocalypse) does pretty much the same thing on Credomar. OTOH, Petey is suicidally insane when the Toughs pick him up, but eventually becomes the core of the Fleetmind; a gestalt of countless Battleship Class AIs into one, big, (kinda) omniscient Uber-AI... that immediately decides to appoint itself guardian of the Milky Way Galaxy.
This could be Howard's idealistic side shining through the series' prevalent cynicism; organics are flawed, but machines just want to do what they're designed to do - make their creators' lives better. And given the opportunity, that's just what they'll do!
Petey doesn't even have that excuse, since he was originally programmed to help a race of xenophobic conquerors take over the galaxy. He's just awesome enough to disagree (the fact that he was insane for a while might have loosened his programming, as well).
Deus Exit Machina: Word Of God says it's hard to keep Petey's near omnipotence from slicing through a perfectly tangled Gordian-knot plot. This may explain why Petey was given a reason to avoid contact with the mercenaries at the end of Book 9 (they now remember him having abandoned them), and in Book 11 he has to use all his god-like power to fight the Pa'anuri of Andromeda and cannot spare any to act as Deus ex Machina for the protagonists.
One of the most common plot complications. For example, the gang didn't see a rogue Ob'enn hijacking the PDCL coming. Petey didn't see the UNS making the mercs think he'd abandoned them coming. You get the idea.
The narrator goes so far as to say, at one point, that good intel for any non-AI-directed military mission usually amounts to, "Crap, I think they heard us coming."
Double Standard: The standard outcome of an accidental insult or reflexive lechery from a male mercenary to a female mercenary is for her to break several of his bones. There's never any repercussions, and none of the men have ever assaulted any of the women.
Yeah, breaking of bones would be the merc equivalent of the Armor-Piercing Slap.
Also note that 1) there are only six females in the company (two of them not human, and thus of no interest to the guys), and 2) most of the men are a bit chauvinistic (which is one of the reasons they get hit).
Though usually the women are given far more leeway to hit men*
with reasons ranging from being in danger to the men making chauvinistic remarks to Tagon simply not realizing that Elf is coming on to him
this is interestingly subverted here when Breya learns that flying into a rage and attacking a mercenary is not a good idea.
Ear Worm: The Macarena has been banned dozens of times since its creation because it's proven to be catchy enough to literally be infectious. Even when you change the words.invoked
The Paa'nuri are strange dark-matter creatures that can't be seen and threaten to destroy the galaxy. It takes advanced science and lots of collaboration to fight back.
Enemy Mine: Several times, most often with General Xinchub.
Maxim 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.
Tagon alone has lost at least two over the course of the strip, the same one in the same book (medical cloning).
Others who have lost eyes include (but aren't limited to) Andy, Ch'vorthq, Ebbirnoth, Chisulo, Schlock (a special case - he can always go to his home planet and pick some more), and any number of anonymous enemy grunts. Given the state of medical technology, these are almost always either Amusing Injuries or the least of their worries.
It is also one of the few things the titular character has to worry about. As he notes when being shot by a sniper, only a hit to his eyes would even bother him.
Beyond a variety of "Race X hates Race Y and is trying to subjugate or destroy it," there's also a few cases of an extremely negative view of artificial intelligences, especially from Reverend Theo. Though he eventually came to terms with Petey (mostly) and had nothing against Lota becoming a supposedly benevolent dictator.
Faster-than-Light Travel: The nature and socio-political impact of the Teraport is a major theme of the series. The Wormgates also turn out to have far more plot significance than mere transportation.
Smutto (a mixture of natto and corn smut) would also be a good example.
Subverted with chupaquesos. They are delicious.
Foreshadowing: The fact that Kathryn is an ex-UNS captain was quite heavily foreshadowed several times, starting with her exceptional competence at planning and subterfuge, along with her adeptness at using firearms while rescuing Karl Tagon.
Fourth Wall: Gets progressively thicker as the series progresses. In the first volume, characters actively try to decide who's going to die on the basis of when they were introduced, who gets punchlines, and whether they're named. By later volumes, the wall gets nudged much more rarely, and fleetingly.
Amorphs use this to exchange memories, to fight, and to reproduce.
There's also an interesting one when Schlock tries to trade memories with a timeclone of himself - the intellectual thought-processes recognize two unique Schlocks, but the biology thinks it's recovered an errant fragment of the same amorph unit. What ensues is described (to give us non-amorphs perspective) as being sort of like trying to resist throwing up, except backwards, and with about the same inevitability of outcome.
Gadgeteer Genius: Kevyn; Dr. Todd, inventor of the "magic cryokit".
Generation Xerox: Played with and ultimately averted in a short storyline. General Tagon looks a lot like his son, which causes the latter to worry at one point that he's going to become his father as he ages, but an AI's projection shows that Kaff will look very different when he reaches his father's current age.
Prime example: Thurl and Tagon are discussing a mission (May 1,2008):
Thurl: I've run a cost-benefit analysis, and it remains profitable even in extreme contingencies. Captain Tagon: Did you just weasel-word your way around saying "What's the worst thing that could happen?" Thurl: Hey, you just now invoked Murphy, not me. Those weasel-words are there for our protection.
Good Angel, Bad Angel: As usual for this trope, massively parodied. Tagon shoots his shoulder angel with his sidearm because he thinks it's a mosquito, his shoulder devil tries to dress up as an angel, and his shoulder angel comes back to shoot it in the head for doing so.
Kathryn: (upon viewingcertain spy cams in Dr. Pau's facility) Hmph. Well, the good news is that I can now start killing and not feel in the least bit guilty. The bad news is I'm not going to feel the least bit guilty about the killing I'm about to do.
Ch'Vorthq: Sergeant, you will be drinking a very heavy stimulant cocktail cut with shampoo and inert ultra-tensile carbon. Schlock: I don't drink it. I eat it straight. Ch'Vorthq:(dryly) And I suspect you're addicted to it. Schlock:(drawing his BFG)Step away fromthe tub of happiness.
Hellevator: Both an escalator to hell and a space elevator on Luna, called the "Helevator".
Heroic Sacrifice: A couple, despite all the Comedic Sociopathy. Most notably Brad, who stayed on his crippled shuttle to jury-rig a self-destruct out of ordinance so it wouldn't crash in a city and kill hundreds to thousands of people. In a surprising twist, he actually died. He got a really big statue, though.
His last thoughts also "highlight his noble character." This particular sacrifice got all the hero mileage possible.
Honor Among Thieves: The Toughs may be Heroic Sociopaths but they steer clear of outright evil beyond what's Necessarily Evil to get the job done, and are very loyal to each other. Schlock in particular: to hurt someone he likes is not a safe place to stand. Nor, for that mater, is anywhere else downrange or in the blast radius. Case in point: here and here (death spoiler warning if you're mid Archive Binge).
Human Outside, Alien Inside: many of the aliens look more-or-less human, but have subtle or bizarre differences, like Lt. Ebbirnoth, whose species has their brain located in their pelvis.
Humans Are Special: "Rescue Party" variant; with less than a thousand years in space - a fraction of many prominent species' lifespans - humans have already spread an English-influenced dialect of "Galstandard" far and wide, ballooned to the fifth-largest sapient species and fourth-strongest military power yet seen, rediscovered an order-disrupting technology purposefully suppressed for six million years, and been indirectly responsible for the creation of a godlike AI hivemind. And now that hivemind has decided to express its gratitude...
Humans Are White: Averted, in that dark skinned people show up as often as they would in the modern day. Intra-species ethnicity seems to have become a less significant matter compared to the wide variety of sophonts in the Schlockiverse.
Hyperspeed Ambush: The way wars were fought in the galaxy was completely changed thanks to the invention of the Teraport and related inventions such as the Terapedo. It isn't long before various anti-teraport countermeasures are designed to bring a sense of equilibrium back to transgalactic warfare.
Also, a High Octane Nightmare Fuel variation on this trope, the Cool Gates used for faster-than-light travel before the invention of the Teraport would make a double of you every time you used it. The double would then be kidnapped, interrogated for any useful information, robbed, and then destroyed.
Hyperspeed Escape: Quite common, unless measures are taken to prevent escape via Teraport.
Major Murtaugh: ...Sanctum Adroit is never violent in anger lest we become the evil we behold. (report about Maximilian's team being wiped out comes in) Maximilian: (smugly) Well... well... Major Murtaugh, are you ready to become what you behold? Major Murtaugh: (looking at him with disgust) I'm ready to punch what I behold. Does that count?
Indy Ploy: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
Information Wants to Be Free: Early on in the series, the mercenaries are attacked repeatedly by the F'sherl Ganni Gatekeepers, due to experimenting with (and holding the patent for) the Teraport, a method of Faster-than-Light Travel that far outstrips the unwieldy stargates that got the F'sherl Ganni their name. Finally, Admiral Breya Andreyasn figures out that there's a way to stop the attacks: Release the Teraport into Open Source, essentially spreading the technology freely across the galaxy, and removing the Gatekeepers' reason to specifically target Tagon's Toughs.
Used during the "Massively Parallel" arc to communicate flashbacks.
Thurl: Okay, perfect. That should do it. Narrator: Rewind: seven hundred hours earlier, berthed at the High Olympus shipyards. Kevyn: Okay, perfect. That should do it.
Again, during "Force Multiplication." Someone steals a villain's visor computer, which doesn't log itself out. She gloats about how he must be stupid, or it must be defective, right before it blows up in her face. Cut to the one who blew it up complaining about how he always suspected it was defective when she lives.
Followed immediately by someone pointing out to the villain how stupid he was to have been walking around with a defective bomb strapped to his face.
Jump the Shark: Just in case anyone thought the introduction of time travel might be the shark-jumping moment for the series, the author lampshades it here.invoked
Kick the Son of a Bitch: Yes, the Toughs do some nasty stuff but we cheer for them anyway, because the current bad guys are usually nastier and deserve the pwning that's headed their way.
Killed Off for Real: So far, Doctor Lazcowicz, Hob, DoytHaban (presumably), Sh'vuu, Pronto, and Brad.
Ennesby: The Tausennigan Ob'enn warlords look like cuddly teddy-bears?
Petey: Yes, they do. And they'd cheerfully exterminate your entire race for making that observation!
Ennesby: I guess that explains their rich military history, then.
And inverted by the Kssthrata, the velociraptor-like species which evolved in the same system as the Ob'enn. Instead of continuing their counter-genocidal war with the Ob'enn, they just moved.
Loophole Abuse: Presumably, after this strip there's now a company policy regarding air vents, where there wasn't one previously.
Loads and Loads of Characters: Understandable, since it focuses on an entire company of mercenaries, but there's still a lot to keep track of. And the Big Guys tend to all look fairly similar. Not to mention 950 million Gavclones and assorted Gate Clones. Unless a character is confirmed dead there is a very good chance they'll show up again. This applies to everyone.
The mobsters that kidnapped timeclone-Kevyn and general Tagon actually force Kevyn to build a machine that they don't understand.
The original Kevyn turned a mini-wormgate into a gravy gun that splattered the UNS marines about to kill him, though it was fortunate he used it to clone himself first.
Also happens to Lt. Ventura. Her captor tries to be Genre Savvy by not having the innoncent-with-the-big-eyes looking girl guarded by an easily swayed human guard. This probably will not do any good for the captor's career advancement.
Several of the names in the series have gags attached to them (e.g., 'Corporal Oleo' getting sliced in two at the end of an Overly-Long Gag based on the saying 'like a hot knife through butter'; the planet Qlaviql, which appeared shortly after Tayler injured his clavicle in Real Life; the Tohdfraugs; Dr Todd, which stood for 'The Old Dead Doctor', who wasn't given a name until long after he was killed). Finally, Fanon holds that Kevyn and Breya's last name is meant to imply that they are descendants of a certain 21st century computer industry figure - who must have done very well, given that they are nobility back on Earth.
And, most significantly, the oft-injured Der Trihs.
The Reverend Theo Fobius. A comical inversion of "Theophilus" who crops up in both Luke and Acts in The Bible.
Howard Tayler loves playing with metaphors, almost as much as Terry Pratchett. Breya even revokes one character's metaphor privileges after a particularly Squicky one.
This happens to Schlock, too.
Ebby: I need to see if these lieutenant tabs will let me revoke metaphor privileges from a sergeant. Schlock: They don't. And even if they do, they don't.
Chelle: Why do you think the Barsoom Circus recruits new performers from all over the galaxy each month? People come to see the aliens do weird, alien stuff. Schlock: Are we joining a circus or a freak show? Chelle:[Deadpan]Yes.
Might Makes Right: Despite all the cynicism, this trope is usually averted. Oh, sure, the strong ones can do whatever they like, but at least no one pretends they have the moral highground.
Mind Rape: The "Mind-Rip," an invariably fatal method of extracting a being's memories. Funnily enough, it's been used by the "heroes" at least as often as the villains.
Misapplied Phlebotinum: Avertedhard. It took all of a few hours after open-sourcing the Teraport for pan-galactic war to break out. A short while later, teraporting missiles were put into service by most warships. On top of this, the bigger and meaner warships can use their staggeringly powerful annie plants to simply rip other ships apart with Artificial Gravity.
Gasht'g'd'g'tang: I'm Gasht'g'd'g'tang. Your gate-copy killed my son. Prepare to die.
Myth Arc: It's subtle, but the state of the galaxy is influenced a great deal by the Toughs, whether they know it or not. It begins with Kevyn's invention of the teraport, then the gatekeepers siccing the partnership collective on them to supress the technology. Which leads to The teraport wars, and then the war with the dark matter entities.
There's a second arc at play as well. Project Lazarus started as an even more subtle myth arc, but starting about here a lot of Chekovs Guns were fired in quick succession, bringing the arc to the fore. The Lazarus arc may not be as vast as the Teraport Wars or the Andromeda War, but it's a lot more personal - and what with Petey having taken in General Xinchub and possibly allied with him, the two arcs are likely to fuse into one.
No Fourth Wall: More frequently and noticeably in early strips. Nevertheless, recently Kevyn literally "met his maker" during a near-death experience, and instantly recognized him as the cartoonist, which led to this exchange:
Kevyn: Are you killing me? The Cartoonist: No. Kevyn: Oh. Goo- The Cartoonist:Blood lossis killing you.
Generally speaking, the fourth wall disappears when someone is dying (usually only for that character). Thus, when the entire galaxy is dying, the fourth wall may as well be nonexistent.
Odd Couple: Bunnigus and the Reverend (sounds like a sitcom title), now Happily Married. Except that they've realized their marriage was really just a fake memory implanted in them. It looks like it'll be resolved soon fortunately.
In fact, they are legally married at this time, they simply don't remember it, because the didn't get their old memories back Admiral Emm married them shortly before the mindwipe.
Oh Crap: Many, but Tailor's expression here is notable, just having realized that a gunship is about to shoot his restraints off.
Orwellian Retcon: "The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries" used to be "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates," and the "maxims" referred to as "rules" (with the explanation that each "habit" comprised several "rules"). Eventually, the publishers of the real "Seven Habits..." caught wind and made him change it. ("Eventually" here defined as "after over eight years, when the joke had already long since undergone Memetic Mutation...") To soften the blow however, Howard Tayler admitted he was glad for the excuse to make the change, not least because the new title could be used for The Merch.
Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Averted; religion is alive and well among many different cultures, and the Tagon's Toughs have their own chaplain (Reverend Theo). In his first appearance, Howard Tayler included an editor's note stating that this trope is what's "foolishly optimistic," not religion.
Overused Running Gag: In-Universe, this is what Tagon considers Shodan's continuing to bring up the accident during the Mall Cop Command arc where Tagon got a fork stuck in his eye.
Tagon: Clever, but I bet a professional comedian would have moved on to new material by now.
Overly Prepared Gag: One of the ships the company gets was christened the "Serial Peacemaker."
Ennesby: Everyone stand by to pour some Serial Peacemaker into a big bowl of "no-problem." Tagon: How long have you been waiting to use that stupid "Cereal" pun? Ennesby: Ever since you let me name the ship, sir.
Painting the Fourth Wall: Characters routinely lean on or brace themselves against panel borders.
People Jars: At one point, the author gets away with a full-frontal nude shot of a woman in a regeneration tank by making her too nude to have skin. "I'm as naked as the day I was born. And then some."
Phrase Catcher: Schlock's faster than he looks. Finally lampshaded:
Pau: Don't worry about me! Worry about that turd-tentacled monster! He's faster than he - Schlock:Say "Looks."
Physics Plus: Gravity manipulation (but not generation — ships are built around spheres of neutronium as sources of gravity to manipulate), a process which is as well developed as electronics, and playing the result to its natural conclusions; ubiquitous flight, Deflector Shields, traversable wormholes (one example which Justifies a Time Travel storyline), and quantum teleportation. Some find the easy nanotechnology a bit of a stretch.
Powered Armor: And how. Besides the standard stuff, the Toughs are equipped with low-profile (to the point of invisibility) armor built into their uniforms that helps diffuse energy weapons and lets them fly.
The Power of Friendship: A twisted sort of application of the trope. The Toughs can't count on their allies, because they're mercenaries and your allies might be the guys you're hired to kill tomorrow; they can't count on any of their respective home governments, for pretty much the same reason; they certainly can't count on their employers, who are frequently known to try to backstab the Toughs since, well, they hired a band of mercenaries to begin with, so why not add "screwing over those who make a living with violence"? But they know they can count on their friends (which, admittedly, is usually limited to "each other", but the sentiment is there).
Projected Man: most of the shipboard AIs; also, Ennesby before he joined the crew and got a body of sorts.
Psychic Powers: It is stated early on by the narrator that someone with "psychic sight" can see the bullet destined to kill someone. This is dropped in favor of harder sci-fi, but psychic powers such as (radio) telepathy get referenced every once in a while.
Punctuation Shaker: The F'Sherl-Ganni typically have three apostrophes in their names
And they call a certain enemy the Paan'uri, or is it Paa'nuri, or Pa'anuri?
Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The misfits and more exotic alien members of the team are all assembled in a squad led by Schlock himself. Tagon and his command staff treat them as an elite force they don't so much deploy as unleash.
Ralph Wiggum: A number of clients, especially those from the government.
Played straight with The Partnership Collective, combined with Lawyers Are Abhorrent
However, the Kssthrata, neighbours of the cute and furry but genocidal Ob'enn, are much nicer.
Retcon: Due to trademark issues, the Big Book of War of the series needed to be retitled. Formerly "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates", it is now "The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries".
Ridiculously Human Robot: Human in basic emotions, very not human in every other part of their outlook.
Rubber Forehead Aliens: Averted. The alien population is extremely diverse and well worth studying if you'd like to break out of that anthrocentric mold.
Especially averted in the title character, he doesn't even have a head or a bipedal humanoid form.
Rugby Is Slaughter: All sports, from Ballet to Deathball, share a league. Rugby is not allowed.
The most enduring example is that Schlock looks like, well, a giant pile of crap. Nearly everyone who sees him for the first time mistakes him for a moving pile of poop.
Der Trihs ending up as a head in a jar; Kevyn surviving repeated deaths; Schlock crawling, or squeezing, through air vents and pipes; the names of the ships in Petey's fleet; the Toughs killing lawyer drones on sight; the Gavs. In Book 11, the recurring question What Would Schlock Do?
And then Schlock shows up to deliver a superb "Show Not Tell" answer. "This."
Every time Kathryn gets her bus repaired, the Toughs hijack it. Three times.
It's almost impossible to keep track of the amount of times when kitties are involved and Schlock tries to eat them. Fortunately for the kitties, he never does.
Schlock being faster than he looks, much to the surprise of those facing him.
The in-universe Schlock Mercenary TV show, it comes around every now and then to overshadow the protagonists and causes them inconveniences.
Sapient Ship: it's a rare exception when a capital ship is flown by a human pilot or even a mobile robot. Almost every armed starship we see is inhabited by its own AI, who "is" the ship and considers the whole structure its body.
Schedule Slip: Completely and absolutely averted. The strip was a couple hours late—once. Because comic's server farm exploded.
Science Marches On: The Milky Way is consistently depicted as a regular spiral; fortunate, since a barred spiral would have made this strip a bit more blatant.
Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Cheerfully lampshaded: The narrator will go into great effort to describe exactly how big the universe/galaxy/star system is, and how abysmally low the chances of some event happening are, and then the event will happen. A lot of these are Justified much, much later.
The author is a Mormon from an Irish family. The BH-209 comes in two models, "M" and "I," for "Mormon" and "Irishman." The difference? Ethanol tolerance.
On the Nejjit:
Petey: They are also deathly allergic to chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, and anything that's been fermented with yeast. Narrator: Wow. You'd think they were Mormons.
Set Right What Once Went Wrong: When Kevyn travels back and therefore the Bad Future is erased, this is effectively conveyed with a panel that imitates the look of loading a saved game in DOS.
Your current game will be lost. Reload from previous save? Y/N > Y Loading...
Slasher Smile: Most of the Toughs' offciers can do this, notably Tagon (example here). He likes violence and he likes getting paid. If he is smiling, pray you are his employer.
Smart People Play Chess: AIs play chess for fun. You can tell when one of them is seriously outclassed because his opponent will be able to predict the entire game before the first move is played.
The characters are mercenaries, after all. Priority number one is to stay alive long enough to get paid. Priority two is to get paid.
Breya: What about priority three? Feel good about yourself? Tagon: Do what I do: Learn to feel good about getting paid.
Petey on the other hand is very much against this philosophy, which is largely why he declared war on the Ob'enn, and eventually the entire Andromeda galaxy.
Petey: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Tagon: I haven't heard that one before.
Space People: The F'sherl-ganni/Gatekeepers, to the point of being able to survive vacuum.
Spit Take: Kevyn gets several in a row, starting here.
Spy Speak: In this strip,Maximillian Haluska's use of field operative terminology gave away he was more than just a well-equipped thug. The "Aunt Amy" and "Uncle Bob" thing comes up again here, in conversation with Para Ventura.
Starfish Aliens: Schlock is really, really weird. Most of the others we meet at least breathe oxygen, and a lot of them are something vaguely resembling humanoid. But the Pa'anuri are the weirdest of all.
Stealth Cigarette Commercial: The in-universe Plasma Cannon Safety Coloring Book, printed jointly by Magic Dreamland Entertainment and Strohl Munitions.
Story Breaker Power: Petey could deal with most of the issues the heroes face on a whim. He has purposely done things in a less efficient way just to give them something to do in a few storylines since his ascension to Fleetmind.
Super Serum: Soldier-boosts; illegal if done without a license, but that doesn't stop anyone.
Super Soldier: Several, with the Doyts being particularly notable.
Take Our Word for It: The artist knows full well that sometimes the readers' imaginations can come up with a far more epic scene than whatever he might've had planned, so he employs this.
Talking Your Way Out: Most characters employ this (even the supposedly dumb ones) to some degree, but Kathryn in particular is an artist. No small wonder, considering her background. Case in point here, talking her way out of being held at gunpoint.
Teleport Interdiction: Teraport Area Denial systems were introduced within days of Kevyn making the blueprints for the Teraport open-source. Removing the Tough's massive tactical advantage.
Theme Initials: all of the PD Fleet ships have names with the initials 'P.D.'[1]
The Noun Of Adjective: All the Ob'enn ship names follow a strict pattern: The [Object] of [Pretentious Adjective] [Pretentious Principle]. If it is a defensive ship, the object will be a piece of armor or article of clothing; if offensive, a pointy handweapon of some sort. Lampshaded when Tagon discovers his recently-acquired fabber is of Ob'enn manufacture:
Tagon: Let's slap a drive and crew quarters on it and christen it the Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. Kevyn: Making fun of Ob'enn ship names is like shooting fish in the barrel of circular swimming.
One plotline invokes bothhalves of this in quick succession.
Time Abyss: The Really Old Dude and Very Old Guy, members of the species that originally created the amorphs.
Fobottr Tenant: Are you claiming that your people have been on the surface for over ten million years? Rod: Oh, my people have been down there for much longer than that. No, I was just talking about me, personally.
Time Travel: Only once, under exceptional, non-repeatable circumstances.
The Command and Conquer chapter returns to the time travel concept, giving hope that time travel can be performed using 140 character messages.
Title Drop: The seventh strip. The individual physical book collections also have their titles dropped at some point during the events portrayed within.
Toilet Humor: Characters frequently point out that Schlock looks like, well, crap, but that's only about half of it, to the point of an Overused Running Gag.
Unit Confusion: Being reasonably hard SF, it's usually pretty good, but with the occasional slipup.
Especially early on, "watt" would occasionally be used as a unit of energy instead of power.
Kerchak made this mistake as late as 2010, but that time the author claims it was intentional.
Upon getting his head around that one, Tayler made the different error of using "terawatt-nanoseconds" to mean "an incomprehensibly huge unit of energy"*
Power is energy divided by time, so "terawatt-nanoseconds" would have been simply "kilojoules," or about a hundredth of the energy the human body gets from a carrot. He was most likely trapped in the more common mold of "x per second," where, for instance, terajoules per nanosecond would be the extremely large "zettawatts."
."
Gav once refers to the "radius" of a Negative Space Wedgie where the author probably meant "diameter" (a slip-up from him being a bit less plausible than one from Kerchak), since a later strip has it swallowing a ship at a bit over half the "radius" given.
Also teraporting seems to result in a sound of PORT for short hops or TERAPORT if you're planning on staying, although it can vary depending on circumstances.
Tailor: His eyes promise only death, and his words are worse. Is he some kind of serial killer? Bunni: A serial killer? No, if anything he's massively parallel.
Uplifted Animal: Humans have uplifted elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees, and possibly others.
Webcomic Time: Somewhat subverted, in that the author has never missed an update (see Determinator above) but frequently played straight and Lampshadedby the narrator
Wham Episode: Schlocktoberfest in general. When it's Halloween time, the story often takes a darker turn and characters will die. (Though, not always permanently.)
What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Usually subverted, in that it's not being non-human that makes killing someone acceptable. It's getting in the way of the Toughs completing a contract.
World Shapes: the Bu'uthandis are a variant of a Type I Dyson Sphere (see also Hollow World), while the Zoojacks are literally shaped like toy jacks, and the Tinth look like giant subway sandwiches
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