In light of the current (Jan 11, 2017) political sitch¹, and given the fact that many people are uncomfortable cold-calling their Congressional representatives, here is a script:

Hello. I’m [ YOUR NAME ] from [CITY, STATE] in the [ZIP] zip code. I want you to take the allegations against Trump seriously, and make sure that he is working for America, not for Russia.

I find it easier to work from a script when cold-calling anybody. This includes my favorite Chinese food place. There’s no shame in having a crib sheet.

If you need contact information, it’s available on the internet. Here’s a full list for Senators, but I found the easiest thing for me to do was Google my rep’s name, and the words “DC Phone number.” Then I picked up the phone and dialed.

That’s actually the hardest part. Pick up the phone and dial.

¹Any political situation that has you concerned² may merit a phone call.  

²If you don’t trust your representative, the script may simply be “I don’t trust you. I want you to start doing things to make me trust you.” Congressfolk take that kind of challenge pretty seriously.

Ordinarily I don’t review television programs, but there have been enough exceptions that I’m not breaking a rule at this point, you’re just experiencing another edge case.

Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is proving to be delightful. I’ve watched the first four episodes, and I’m hooked. The series has two of my favorite things in it: clever writing, and Patrick Warburton. Imagine Kronk, or perhaps The Tick narrating in the bleak tones of Lemony Snicket, and warning you at the beginning of each episode that you really don’t want to continue.

It’s a bold move. When your story, as part of the story, is telling people not to keep reading, or watching, you’d better be doing it in a manner so entertaining that the audience hopes the warnings will continue.

In this case it is, and they do.

There’s much more than just dire warning working in favor of this series. Malina Weissman and Louis Hynes are awesome, Presley Smith would chew scenery if given the chance, and over-the-top melodramatic performances are turned in by Neil Patrick Harris, Joan Cusack, Aasif Mandvi, Usman Ally, Joyce and Jacqueline Robbins, and Cobie Smulders, and I’m only halfway through.

Were this series available on Blu-Ray or DVD I’d cheerfully pay season-of-TV-series rates for it. It’s not, but by that math the series totally paid for two months of Netflix just by existing.

XXX: The Return of Xander Cage took some time to get moving, and the first half had enough skin in it to have nearby Bond films politely requesting that Mr. Diesel not track sand through their garden. Somewhere around the mid-point the movie engaged for me. I think it may have been when I realized that they were going to attempt an ensemble piece, and that they might just pull it off.

And they did! By the end it really was an ensemble piece, giving plenty of camera time to Donnie Yen, Deepika Padukone, and Ruby Rose¹. It also repented nicely for the Ice Cube installment of the Triple X franchise with some of the smoothest ret-conning² I’ve seen in a while.

The second half of the film saved the movie from the first half, but it made me sit up and ask why they bothered with the first half, and imagining the ways they could have done Act I more entertainingly. That right there is what’s keeping XXX: The Return of Xander Cage from clearing my Threshold of Awesome. And that makes me sad, because the Deepika Padukone/Ruby Rose scenes¹ in Act III deserve to be above the threshold.

¹ I would watch an entire season of TV built around Padukone and Rose being gunslingers, perhaps headlining a full ensemble of ladybro³ wit, wile, and badassery.

² So smooth it might not even be considered a retcon, really. Spy movies can do this well by giving us the “you don’t have the whole story” moments, and it’s not even cheating when they do it right.

³ “Ladybro” is a term I first heard from editor Navah Wolfe, and I might not be using it correctly. I think it means “all X-chromosome buddy-cop-style relationships.” If it doesn’t mean that, then I need a different word that does.

Schlock Mercenary is, in its heart of hearts, satire. It has always been political, but those messages are delivered in the abstract. It is sociopolitical satire framed in military sci-fi comedy. It invites the reader to laugh as they ask questions, but it does not commit to giving them hard and fast answers.

On rare occasion the blog posts beneath the comic have been a bit more explicitly political. Over the years I’ve determined that political punditry isn’t something I enjoy, and that the people who find it profitable seem to also encourage a widening of the spaces between us, driving both the left and the right to more entertaining¹ extremes. Mostly, then, my blog is about movies and merchandise.

Of late, however, my Twitter feed has been extremely political. This isn’t because I enjoy politics, nor because I’m seeking attention. It’s because important things are happening², and I believe they’re important enough for me to expend a bit of my social capital to boost critical messages. I still tweet the slice-of-life silliness I used to, but the mirth is diluted a bit.

The pattern described above is likely to continue:

• Schlock Mercenary is going to follow the outline I’ve established for it, and won’t wander off into what would definitely be the weeds for the story I’m telling in order to take specific political positions.
• The blog below the comic is going to focus mostly on movie review things, merchandising, and the occasional public service announcement.
• My Twitter feed is going to reflect my personal opinions on matters of the soul, the State, and a scattering of other things. It’s going to remain on the side-bar here at schlockmercenary.com, but you’re neither required nor expected to read it.

Regardless of what is said in any of these spaces, each of them belongs to me. I’m under no obligation, legal or moral, to give equal time to positions other than my own³. I do feel a strong obligation to say things that are true. I aspire to the high levels of journalistic integrity currently demonstrated by people like Farenthold and Tapper, but I’m not a journalist, so I’m much more likely to get things wrong from time to time.

¹ “Entertaining” in the same way that watching a car accident is entertaining. I hold the modern pundit-provocateur in extremely low regard. 

² Political protest appears to be on track to be the American national pastime for 2017, displacing Baseball.

³ My personal political positions have changed over the years, and some have flipped nearly 180 degrees. You can peruse howardtayler.com/blog if you’d like (not everything there cross-posts to schlockmercenary.com) but only the most current stuff is going paint an accurate reflection of what I think.

I’ve been consuming some history lately, including lots of American military and economic history. When I hear the #MAGA folks saying “Make America Great Again” I’ve begun looking beyond the obvious response (“America is still great”) and into a pair of deeper questions:

• What made America great?
• Should we keep doing that?

The answers, summarized, are “bad behavior” and “no.”

Before you scream at me, hear me out: Americans have worked hard, fought hard, and paid dearly to get here. But we’ve had some unfair advantages, and we should look at them.

Cheap Labor

Americans exploited African peoples for for decades after Europe had abandoned the slave trade. The United States put those slaves to work building an enormous economy (cotton was a big deal in the 19th century) at a fraction of what it would have cost if we¹ were treating slaves like actual human people. The wealth that poured into the American South during the first half of the 19th century put the economy of the United States on par with some of the great economies of Europe, and we’d been a nation for less than 100 years.

Free Resources

The United States was born with a frontier full of valuable natural resources which Americans claimed for their own during long string of violent conflicts with the indigenous peoples. Europe and Asia had similar resources, but the nations of Europe and Asia were hard-pressed to displace each other.

The United States grew westward for a hundred and fifty years, killing and displacing the Original Americans on no other grounds than that we wanted their stuff. I live in some of that territory. It’s rich, beautiful land that we took from someone else. I said “free resources” but it’s a little more accurate to say “stolen resources.”

War Profiteering

In the early 20th century the United States was an isolationist economic power. When the Great War broke out in Europe we pointed at the “foreign entanglements” that dragged nation after nation into a shockingly deadly conflict, and we patted ourselves on the backs for not being entangled. Then we sold weapons and materiel to anybody we could ship them to. A portion of the heavy cost paid by Britain and France during WWI was paid to the United States. We only entered the war in its late stages, and on the cold balance sheets of GNP, we came out of that war ahead.

In the Second World War we again gained an economic leg up with early isolationism, and even after we joined the war our geographic isolation continued to work in our favor. The enormous leverage we had developed in the previous 130 years afforded the United States enough of an advantage that following the war we had become a power, economic and military, that required the coining of the word “superpower.”

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

From the 1950s forward we leveraged that status. Two or three generations of Americans² grew up assuming that America was the biggest and the best by definition, forgetting the path we took, and the people we literally crushed to get here. Isaac Newton once wrote “If I see far it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” When we acknowledge those whose work came before our own, we must not fail to recognize those who did not do that work willingly.

Redefining American Greatness

When we consider the historical context, the phrase “Make America Great Again” is exceedingly problematic, and not only because the word “again” seems to say that we’ve lost our way.  The word “again” also suggests that we want to return to the injustices and exploitation of our past.

I don’t want that.

If you’re alive today, it’s because you had human ancestors who were brutally effective in a world where brutality was often the best survival strategy. Feeling guilty about that won’t do anyone any good, but neither will using that as a justification for brutality today. It’s not the best way to get ahead.

We’ve learned to communicate, automate, improve, and refine in ways our ancestors couldn’t even imagine. That is the path for further greatness, and we cannot walk it alone. We stray from it completely by shouldering other people off of it. If we want to make 21st-century America great, in our own eyes, and in the eyes of the world, it’s time to be done poisoning everybody with the smoke of burning bridges³.

The American people are, like all human people, brilliant and wonderful. Let’s educate them, and care for them, and prop them up so that when they stand on our shoulders, they see things we can’t imagine, and when they look back at us we’re smiling about it.

¹ I say “we” throughout this essay because my ancestors took part in most, if not all, of the aspects of this bad behavior. Also, I benefit, as do almost all Americans, from the economic and military boosts we unfairly acquired in the 19th and 20th centuries.

² I’m one of them. It took a while to disabuse myself of some of those notions. Today I look around and see that non-Americans work at least as hard as Americans do. If we’re ahead in any sense, it’s because our starting line was further forward. 

³ And other stuff. Burning things is terribly inefficient, and messy. We should stop.

I don’t watch much TV. We don’t have cable. If a program gets good reviews from my friends, I’ll pick it up on Amazon Prime, or I’ll wait until it hits Netflix. Sometimes I’ll buy DVDs and Blu-Rays.

My friend Myke Cole, whose books I’ve plugged in blog posts of yore¹, is featured in a reality TV program from CBS called “Hunted.” (Episode 1 is currently free to stream from CBS.²) Reality TV is pretty much my least favorite form of TV, but Myke is awesome so a gave it a shot.

No regrets. None.

A team of investigators, of which Myke is a part, break out all the tools of their trades to track down nine two-person teams of runners, who are playing the part of fugitives, with a $250k prize awaiting them if they can stay hidden for 28 days. We follow some of these teams each week, and each episode thus far has had at least one capture in it.

I have no idea what the actual mechanics are behind this game, but the tools and skills on display are the real deal. It’s a lot of fun to watch, and it’s entertaining to wonder how long you’d make it before Myke tracks your “untraceable” burner phone from a convenience store receipt and a traffic camera. (Answer: I can remain hidden for at least three meals if you give me a 1-hour head start. That’s probably it.)

Here’s the thing: The camera loves Myke. Several times during the first two episodes I noticed that shots were framed to include Myke in the background for no other reason than to make the shot look better. The costuming department is dressing him in t-shirts made of little more than paint and hard living, and I am forced to concede that not only is my friend Myke a fine human person and an outstanding writer, he looks really, really good on TV³.

¹ Here, here, and here. No yore was harmed in the reposting of these links.

² We’ve subscribed to the show via Amazon Prime, which is my least favorite part of this whole thing. Their digital delivery of HD is full of MPG artifacts that I never see from NetFlix. I’ll take MPG artifacts over commercials, but it stings to do that after spending actual real money on HD.

³That paragraph won’t embarrass Myke. His already-thick skin has been hardened under regular abrasion provided by his friend and mine, Sam Sykes, on Twitter. The Sam and Myke show (as I like to call it) is worth following: @MykeCole and @SamSykesSwears.

These are free for you to use however you would like. Click on each image for a 4″x6″ 600dpi version with 1/8″ bleed around the edges.

You can use these images however you wish. If you want to print your own postcards, go for it. Banner image on your social media? No problem.

We typically print our postcards with PS Print, but their prices are a little high for small runs. I’m printing a batch of 50 for myself through Uprinting.com , and it’s costing me $40. Here are the specs from my invoice:

I’ll report back if there’s a problem with what they delivered.

This header image should work well for Facebook and Twitter, should you feel inclined to display it that way.

I made this for me. You’re welcome to use it for you. No rights restrictions. Click on the image for the full resolution version.

#resist

If you enjoyed John Wick, which starred Keanu Reeves as a hitman whose retirement is interrupted, you’ll enjoy John Wick: Chapter 2, which stars Keanu Reeves as a hitman whose sabbatical from retirement is extended by more non-retirement.

Dog lovers might appreciate knowing that the death of a dog is not Wick’s impetus in this film¹. Car lovers² will appreciate John Leguizamo’s estimate about how soon Wick’s car can be fixed. People who love witty dialog in the style of superhero banter should probably just re-watch one of the Avengers films, or at least not show up for this film with high hopes for any of that.

I enjoyed John Wick 2, but it does not clear my Threshold of Awesome. The fight scenes are every bit as amazing as they were in the first movie, but the story is on rails. There are no plot twists, unless you count employer treachery as a twist, which is about as unexpected as a meet-cute³ in a romantic comedy.

So, you know… enjoy the fight scenes, and pretend that the world will be a better place without any of these nameless thugs, who probably eat babies with a garnish of puppy.

¹ I was asked very specifically about dogs by someone on Twitter.
² I was not asked about cars. 
³ If you re-watch THE MATRIX before seeing this film, pay attention to the meeting between Reeves’ character and Lawrence Fishburne’s character. I think they re-used some dialog on purpose, just to see if they could.

While it did not quite make it across my Threshold of Awesome, The Lego Batman Movie was plenty of fun, and had lots of awesome moments. It’s something I’ll probably want to pick up on Blu-Ray, because there are plenty of amusing, fannish, and/or Easter-eggy things going on in the background, and those are usually good for a couple of re-watches. At least for me.

The opening romp¹, in which our hero is awesome and makes it look easy, is possibly the most over-the-top action movie romp ever. Possibly. I hadn’t realized this was something for which I would want to be keeping score.

Unlike The Lego Movie, The Lego Batman Movie does not have live-action stuff happening outside the fourth wall. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Those scenes made The Lego Movie work for me², but I know they threw a lot of other people out of the film. I share this not as a spoiler, but as a meta-unspoiler. Don’t sit there waiting for live action moments to explain in-Lego plot points. You might be able to headcanon³ a few such moments (I know I did) but that’s always a perilous path to walk, since you’re putting things into the movie that the director did not put in.

¹ By my definition, the Romp is the Act I scene in an action/adventure film in which we see our hero(es) being competent and successful. It is used to make promises about the kinds of action we’ll see later, and it sets the bar for what our hero is capable of. Some films do it really well (Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation) and some do not (I won’t name names here.)

² The Lego Movie placed #4 on my 2014 list, and totally crossed my Threshold of Awesome.

³ “Headcanon” is usually a noun, but verbing it makes total sense to me.

On the just-eat-your-popcorn side of the cinematic fence The Great Wall is a pretty good fantasy movie. It’s beautiful, the monsters are despairingly powerful, and the action sequences left me wondering if Cirque du Soleil performers were on the stunt team. It doesn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome, but if you want to eat popcorn in a theater seat this weekend it’s not a bad choice.

Many of you may be happy to leave it at that, but I do have further thoughts. Nobody is going to make you read them, much less agree with them.

On the critically- and culturally-aware side of that fence the film is problematic. I feel just a little bit guilty for not feeling too bad about it. The Great Wall seems very much like a Chinese film expertly shoehorned into Western theaters, which I believe to be safely on the non-appropriative side of the fence¹.  This may seem like a double standard, but I think the Chinese studios should be able to use whatever Chinese cultural elements they want to without reproach. Western studios, on the other hand, earn all kinds of reproach. Hollywood continues to earn scorn from lots of people on this front.

I really am going to to talk more about the film itself, but before I do I need to drop a caveat: the arguments regarding cultural appropriation are far too involved for this post, and no matter which side you take in those matters I’m not going to be able to change your position here. So I’ll give that a wide miss, and tell you why I’m okay with Chinese monster-fighting heroes atop the Great Wall of China having their story told from the point of view of a white dude with a Skyrim accent.²

First, this film is dominated by Chinese actors who are speaking Chinese. It’s heavily subtitled, with only five English-speaking characters³. There are at least a dozen big roles, and only three of them belong to European-flavored hominids. As a white guy, I felt like a foreigner in this film, and Matt Damon was a pretty good proxy for my POV. I’ve never been left wanting for films that represent my particular phenotype, but if you’re after my movie dollar, this casting decision makes sense.⁴

Our female lead, Tian Jing, is the one with all the power in this relationship, and kicks all kinds of monstrous hindquarters. She takes plenty of heroic action without impetus or assistance from the white dude (or ANY dude.)  I think that if I were an Asian female, I’d also feel pretty well represented. I think. I don’t actually speak for that group, obviously.

This demographic contrast is most clearly evidenced in the marketing for the film. The image above was created for Asian markets. Matt Damon’s picture dominates the marketing here in the West. Here’s a side-by-side, with a monster in the middle.

See how the monster stares into your soul? I think it’s asking you how you feel about the images to either side, and daring you to express a preference. And no matter what you pick, it will eat you.

If you want to do a cultural barometer check on yourself, page through the IMDB images for The Great Wall and ask yourself which ones speak to you. Like actual barometric readings there’s no wrong answer here. Just interesting data.

Okay, I said “problematic” way up above in the 3rd paragraph. The problem is that Matt Damon’s character fits quite cleanly into the Great White Savior trope, which has been pretty threadbare since Fern Gully. It’s somewhat mitigated by the “we can only do this together” shtick, and some solid protagging⁵  from other characters, but only somewhat. If this particular trope is a show-stopper for you, I think that The Great Wall is a show that you’ll stop watching.

I’ve run on for long enough, and need to go make comics now. I’ll leave you with this: The Great Wall is a pretty cool movie that I think got a bit more shade cast on it than it should have. I had a lot of fun, and many of you will too.

¹ Or “wall,” if you will. I’m too good a person to make that joke in the body text above, but too flawed a human to leave it lying around completely un-joked.
² Matt Damon is my new favorite Nord. His accent was subtle enough that my ear didn’t have to reboot, but Nordic enough that I desperately want him to say “Ysgramor” and “draugr.” 
³ There are eight English-speakers if you count the three who die horribly in the opening scene. Spoiler alert, I guess?
⁴  I really enjoy seeing non-me-like people on the big screen. Studios should make more movies with non-me actors in lead roles.
⁵ Protagging is my word for when a protagonist takes initiative and does stuff to move the story forward. I’m proud of this word, in part because Brandon Sanderson uses it.

In 1935, at the rehearsals for his Symphony no. 4, composer Ralph Vaughn Williams said “I don’t know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.”

Artists of all stripes will find these to be words to live by. They’re also good words for those who critique all the stripey types of art, and they kind of describe how I feel about Logan. Paraphrasing with a twist: “I didn’t have fun, but I wasn’t supposed to.”

Logan is a powerful drama with elements of action and suspense. It earns its R-rating on all fronts, and with maybe one or two exceptions it only does so in strong service of the story. Everybody turns in brilliant performances, and they ground the fictional world of Wolverine and Professor X in a near-future that very much seems like ours.

If your only exposure to Marvel Comics has been through the Avengers cinematic franchise, Logan may leave you wondering when comic books started telling such deep stories. The answer is “since about the beginning of comic books.” Sequential art goes way back. Dialog bubbles and newsprint are new, relatively speaking, but we’ve been putting actual drama in those for a long time.

The salient point here is that if you’re hoping for something to whet your appetite for Spider-Man: Homecoming, or Thor: Ragnarok, Logan is not the hors d’oeuvres you’re looking for.

I loved Kong: Skull Island. Even with burning eyes and a tension headache from twenty-two hours awake, I loved it¹.  When it’s out on Blu-Ray I will own it. I do not love this movie enough to marry it because that would be silly, but if I saw this movie in high school I would totally have a crush on it and write notes to it in class.

It’s late. I’m really tired. That got weird². You get the point. Threshold of Awesome? CLEARED. This is easily my favorite film of the year thus far. The year is still young³, but for now Kong is totally King.

¹I saw it in IMAX 3D, and that contributed to the tired burning of my eyes, but the big factor was insomnia. No regrets. It was beautiful.

² I’m not ashamed of weird. I acknowledge it and move on.

³ Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2 threatens Kong’s top spot, but that doesn’t bother me. Whoever wins, I win twice.

Would you like to read Schlock Mercenary without the ads? How about a week at a time, in higher resolution?

The Schlock Mercenary Patreon¹ now offers all of that.

• Patreon supporters at the $2.50 level and above get ad-free browsing, and can read the archives a week at a time
• Supporters at the $5 pledge level get the ad-free, week-at-a-time browsing in Retina-resolution²

Our designer, Gary Henson, has done great work with this stuff. It’s a beautiful thing. When you go week-at-a-time, and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to navigate, the reading experience improves drastically.

Once you subscribe you’ll see a Patreon post explaining how to link your Patreon account to the Schlock Mercenary site. Here’s a link to that post, but only Patreon subscribers at the $2.50 and $5.00 levels can see it.

¹We’re using Patreon’s “Charge Up Front” payment method. Details on this can be found in the Patreon Charge Up Front faq. 

² Retina resolution strips are 2,000 pixels wide. Standard resolution strips are 780 pixels wide.

Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries is now available.

At this time, the book is only available from the Planet Mercenary backerkit page. The Planet Mercenary RPG is not yet shipping, so if you want your Seventy Maxims book to ship immediately, make sure it’s the only thing you put in your cart.

There are two editions, which we’re calling “Pristine” and “Defaced.” They are both in-universe artifacts: the pristine version is one of the thousands of copies of the Seventy Maxims book that the average connoisseur of 31st century printed collectibles might find themselves fortunate enough to acquire; the defaced version is the copy that CDS Sergeant Edwards¹ handed to Private Karl Tagon on March 1st, 3035.

Karl’s book has some mileage on it. He made notes on the pages, and on January 28th, 3093, handed it off to his son, Captain Kaff Tagon, who had it for six years, making his own notes. He gifted it to Captain Alexia Murtaugh in 3099, and she added her notes. When Murtaugh was injured in early 3100 Sergeant Schlock went through her stuff, and borrowed the book. He found a felt-tip pen, too, and treated the existing notes as permission to deploy it.

The pages of the two books look quite a bit different.

Both books have scholarly² commentary at the bottom of each maxim’s page, and and the scholars do not always agree with the sentiment of the source material.

This book took a lot more work than we thought it would, but based on the response from people who’ve already gotten their copies, all that work was worth it.

¹ Sergeant Edwards, later Banneret Commodore Edwards of the Continuance Fleet, does not appear in the comic strip anywhere. Maybe someday I’ll tell his full story. 

² The scholars in question are all me. I had far too much fun critically pontificating on my own writing.  

For me, Ghost in the Shell was big-budget ‘meh.’ I liked it okay, but it didn’t clear my Threshold of Awesome despite some amazing story telling.

I think the best part of Ghost in the Shell is the implicit question, “what is truth,” in a society heavily overpainted with augmented reality. We could have hours of discussions about the issues that arise when two people look at the same thing, but see different things, and how this conceit—conflicting augmented realities—is simply an exaggeration of how real humans differently perceive the world we live in.

We can have those discussions without the film, of course, and it might be easier to do so, because most discussions spawned by the actual film will necessarily focus on why Scarlett Johannson wasn’t the right person for the part.

For me, her mainstream Hollywood looks (and race, yes) were distracting and alien, and in a way that kept pushing me out of the story. There are better ways to say “this person doesn’t fit.”

I recently re-watched Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, and loved the way some of the big scenes were presented, with slo-mo, extreme slo-mo, and odd perspective cuts, mixed in with real-time action. These methods showed me how the characters felt about the mess they were in while simultaneously delivering some stunning visuals. Compare this to shaky-cam in the Transformers franchise, which is deployed as a shortcut, telling the audience that their own confusion is what the characters are feeling.

In short, “show, don’t tell.” Wherever possible, use the full suite of cinematographical tools to communicate nuances of story, rather than taking shortcuts.

That’s why I think Scarjo was the wrong pick for Ghost in the Shell. Her race and familiar looks are like shaky-cam, and will prevent many audience members from enjoying the story for having been pushed away from it. There are far better ways to say “this character feels out of place and alone,” and the filmmakers aptly demonstrated the skill necessary to make any of those work. I wish they had been given the chance.

The images above were created by Bogdan Bungardean, who did a lot of the interior work on Planet Mercenary. The travel posters are $5.00 each, but if you order all three, it’s just $10. They’re each  11″ x 14″, a perfect fit for standard frames you can find in walled markets, targets of opportunity, and deep jungles.

Bogdan also did one of my very favorite pieces in the book, an illustration of one of Eina-Aafa’s vertical hurricanes. This one’s 18″ x 24″

The poster has the logo and the slogan down in the white-space, so if you want to crop those and frame the image without them, you can do that. It’ll mean a non-standard frame size, of course, but it’ll look really nice on your wall.

Click here to see it a bit larger

These are the same vessels that will appear on the Planet Mercenary Game Chief screen, but this is an 18″ x 24″ poster. You can pre-order it here.

¹ I had some Star Wars travel postcards, which I think I got back in 1993. I liked them, but I found myself wishing I’d spent extra and made the space for the posters, which they also sold. Is this project inspired by that? Of course it is. 

² There are three scales. If you look closely, you’ll see that each section of the poster includes a shrink-box of the previous section. This was the only way to show a three-meter vehicle and an eight-kilometer Oafan cargo lifter on the same sheet of paper. 

The first six Schlock Mercenary books are available in PDF format.

That’s right, if you want to read Schlock Mercenary electronically, offline, without taking up the space associated with physical books, we have a solution for you.

For your convenience, here are abbreviated listings and specs for the PDFs.

THE TITLES

THE TUB OF HAPPINESS, Schlock Mercenary Volume 1

$12.00
240 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 305MB

Welcome to Tagon’s Toughs, a mercenary company whose newest recruit is almost as much trouble as the new owners. 

THE TERAPORT WARS, Schlock Mercenary Volume 2

$15.00
240 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 305MB

Schlock, Tagon, and the rest of the company hunt for eyeballs, embroil themselves in a battle for galactic domination, and then look for honest work. 

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT, Schlock Mercenary Volume 3

$9.00
80 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 99MB

Tagon’s mercenary company has been  company dragooned into government service. General Xinchub is going to pay them to hunt down their friends… unless they give him a reason to blow them up without paying them at all.

THE BLACKNESS BETWEEN, Schlock Mercenary Volume 4

$9.00
96 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 107MB

Captain Tagon, Sergeant Schlock, and the Toughs still have ‘government problems,’ but now they’ve attracted the attention of something ancient, invisible, and very, very much worse.

THE SCRAPYARD OF INSUFFERABLE ARROGANCE, Schlock Mercenary Volume 5

$9.00
80 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 162MB

In need of refits, repairs, and paying work, the Toughs find exactly what they’re looking for… except for the bit where the recipe for ‘landmine’ has been scrambled across the small appliance buffer.

RESIDENT MAD SCIENTIST, Schlock Mercenary Volume 6

$12.00
144 pages
Format: DRM-free PDF
File Size: 183MB

When teraports start missing their destinations across the galaxy the inventor of the Teraport must find a solution. Unfortunately for Tagon’s Toughs, said inventor works for them, and whether or not he’s got problems to solve they have incoming fire to deal with first…

Delivery, Bandwidth, and Future Plans

Any PDF purchases you make from us can be accessed immediately by logging in to your Schlock Mercenary Store account. An email will be sent with a link after the order is completed, but the mail-bot sometimes takes a day or so to come back from whatever passes for “break time.”  If you have any trouble accessing your file, email schlockmercenary@gmail.com. We’ll make sure you get your stuff.

Our store’s ISP handles digital delivery nicely, but there is some throttling going on, and bandwidth is not cheap. We’ll be staggering the releases of the later PDFs (Books 7 through 12, as of this writing) to conserve bandwidth.

Some of these Schlock Mercenary collections have been available in the past from Baen Books.

Here are the things you need to know, as a Schlock Mercenary reader whose tastes are statistically likely to align with my own on matters of humorous space opera:

1. See Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2 in theaters. It’s worth your top-dollar entertainment budget.
2. Good reviewers, like good friends, don’t spoil movies for people.
3. The opening credits “romp” is, in my admittedly non-expert-yet-neveretheless-non-humble opinion, the very best one that Hollywood has delivered in the history of these things.

There you go. My 21yo and I saw it last night, and were giddy all the way home. We discussed and deconstructed some parallels between GotG 1 and 2, and I cannot tell you more because spoilers, but it’s safe to say that these sorts of discussions are at their best when the movie is good enough to make them intellectually stimulating, which this one was.

There are movies that I watch again and again. There are movies I’ve seen several times in theaters. Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 is so good I almost want to wait until the Blu-Ray before watching it again, just so I can watch it three times in a row while taking notes, and eating something from my own kitchen.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 takes my top slot for the year, at least for now. Disclaimer notwithstanding, it may be tough to displace, because while all of the impending contenders are solid, comic space opera is in my wheelhouse, on my lawn, and in my heart.

Ten days ago I finished my last big piece of writing for Planet Mercenary. Yesterday Sandra and I finished the last small piece. Today we reviewed the cover layout, and realized it’s ready to be sent to the printer.

This has taken much longer than I wanted it to, but the project looks much, much better than I believed it could. Part of the delay is due to repeated discoveries that we could be doing something better, and then deciding to do it better. And of course another part of the delay is us not knowing how to work as quickly as we originally thought we could.

If you backed the project, your book (and anything else that ships with it) will be shipped July. If you didn’t back the project you can still use Backerkit to place a pre-order, but that link will go away in a few weeks. Eventually we’ll have Planet Mercenary in the Schlock Mercenary Store, but that’s not going to happen before July.

I need to write a whole different post talking about how awesome Sandra and Alan are, and how grateful I am that they figured out how to work with, and around me. For now I’ll just say that in terms of actual work done, Sandra’s name is listed at least one position too far to the right.

Note: The cover art above is by Jeff Zugale, and was laid out (along with the rest of the pages in the book) by Mike Brodu under Sandra Tayler‘s direction. The fact that the logo I designed two years ago is still a part of all this is evidence more of the force of my personality than my skill at logo design.