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.

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