And the artists won’t complain because it’ll give them a free plug and a link. I hope. Stay tuned for further updates.But I digress.

I could not remain silent when one of my all-time faves had not Jumped the Shark, but Jumped INTO the Shark, like this guy. And I don’t mean Schlock Mercenary, in spite of its current digression out of Space Opera into Creative Near-Death Experience, complete with knocking a hole in the “Fourth Wall” big enough to drive a Mothership through (Or maybe Nuking the Fourth Wall from Orbit). I am still fairly comfortably on board for this Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride With Alice in Wonderland From The Enchanted Tiki Room To The Haunted Mansion, but if comicker Howard Taylor detours into It’s A Small World, I’m going back to the front gate to demand a refund.

No, it wasn’t Schlock but one of may favorite Krispy Kleenex Komix that has served me up a massive disappointment on a shingle. The offender is 9 Chickweed Lane, the stylishly-drawn home of independent sexy women, a cat who doesn’t need to talk to show attitude, a madman philosopher in over-alls, and scenes from the seemingly un-comicky fields of Academia and Ballet. For some time, comicker Brooke McEldowney (whom I was disappointed to learn is a guy) has been brewing up one of the better “we’re gonna get nasty letters about this” plotlines about an emerging romance between a lapsed nun and a semi-lapsing priest. At the beginning of July, the whole Chickweediverse was shaken by a prediction from the madman philosopher that apparently the lapsing priest was taking very seriously.

At this point, the plotline slowed to an agonizing trickle, making room for a sitcom’s worth of misunderstandingsand arguments, AND taking a week off while the syndicate showed some surrealistic rerun strips from two years ago…

(Personally, I feared that the distributors had vetoed McEldowney’s storyline, or were at least trying to talk him out of it). After two long months, all the confusion had been de-confused and the disagreements agreed upon and the not-so-young lovers had decided to choose Love over God when, on the Saturday of a Labor Day weekend, when readership was sure to be at its lowest, Brooke hits us with this:

(Try to remain calm, Wendell, try to remain calm)
A FREAKING ASTEROID/HEMORRHOID PUN? THAT WAS THE ULTIMATE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND ONE OF NEWSPAPER COMICS’ MOST TABOO ROMANCES?

That hurts, Brooke, that really really hurts. It’s going to take a long time to forgive you for this. (And it’s why I have no qualms re-weblishing four of your strips without permission) It’s a good thing I ponied up for the “Comics Extra” so I can go back to 1993 and re-read your first Chickweeds, back when we were all a lot more innocent, and a lot less Hemorrhoidal.

So, for what he refers to as “Book VI” of the Tales of Schlock Mercenary, creator, writer, artist and deity Howard Tayler used not one but two devices that have been known to get serialized comic strip writers into trouble before. First, he dropped us in media res, meaning smack in the middle, and quite a middle it is, with a small contingent of the regular mercenary company stranded on a strange planet, stripped of everything high-tech, including their Scifi-military uniforms and fighting off predators not too different from some we have on earth. In fact, Howard chose to give them a familiar-sounding name: Jeopards.

Well, not exactly, but in this situation, you knew that somebody was going to end up in dire need of high-tech something, and, with devious logic, it is the strip’s number one human master of technology, Kevyn Andreyasn. One of the comic’s favorite characters, and one who has been as important to the storylines so far as any. (And the one who physically most resembles the cartoonist… [Freudian Hmmm])

Which drives us full-speed into Howard’s second high-risk pot-stirrer, a near-death halucinnation in which Kevyn comes face to face with the God of his universe… the cartoonist. (When I called Howard ‘deity’, I meant it.) This is Fourth-Wall^ damage in the First Degree (as well as an opportunity to show off that Howard/Kevyn resemblence). In his forums, he commented that his preferred terminology is ‘opening a window in the Fourth Wall’, which I guess is appropriate - if it was the window of a pressurized airliner flying at 50,000 feet!

And now, after a brief stop for exposition and clarification, we return, gasping for breath, to a moment soon after the end of Book V to begin filling in the story leading up to this. It is hard to believe that all this took only 18 days in a comic that has been updating reliably daily for six years. It seemed a lot longer. But then, I, personally, have never gotten accustomed to shows which spread 24 hours out over 24 weeks.

But dedicated followers of Schlock can’t approach the next few weeks of plotline as they usually do, knowing what they know of what will happen… and knowing that we are less than 4 weeks away from Howard Taylor’s annual pre-Halloween scarefest that he calls “Schlocktober”, and that is the one time of the year that a beloved character is most likely to get killed off.

The trademark “ominous hummm” of the title character’s weapon of choice is going to be drowned out for a while by an even more “ominous hummm” coming from the cartoonist’s pen.

After the “kiss that changed everything” in the Garfield comic, it probably was inevitable. I’m just surprised they showed it in a Sunday comic. (Yeah, I know it happened Saturday Night…)

But still, is this or is this not the totally obvious grin of a guy who “got some” for the first time in… how long has Garfield been running? Whew!