Archives
The Schlock Mercenary archives are deep. This handy page breaks them down by book, and provides teasers for each. Looking for a good starting point? If you don't want to go back to the very beginning, scroll on down to Book 10: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse!
Book 1: The Tub of Happiness
This is the first 507 days of Schlock Mercenary. Meet Schlock when he enlists, meet Breya when she buys the company he enlisted with, and meet Captain Tagon, who doesn't want to take orders from a woman. This 240-page collection of strips is in print, and you can buy it here.
- Meet The Mercenaries
- Diplomatic Pouch of Doom
- Mini-Adventure Number One
- Everybody's Gotta Eat
- BOARDERS!!
- The Shopping Trip
- Bureaucracy Bountiful
- Bombs Ahoy
- Bounty Hunting
- Interlude: Interrogation
- Big Haunted Battleship
- Battle for the Wormgate
- Union Blues
- Interrogation Interruption
- Equivocated Prevarication
- Magic Dream-Land
- Schlocktoberfest 2001
Book 2: The Teraport Wars
You've met the mercenaries. You've seen them kill or be killed. You've seen them kill AND be killed. Now see them recover lost body parts, fight in the biggest war on record, and create an entire demographic of clones. This positively ginormous assemblage of 493 strips, the second (and demonstrably better) half of the first 1000 in the archives fills 228 pages of book.
Book 3: Under New Management
Captain Tagon, Sergeant Schlock, and the rest of "Tagon's Toughs" have been dragooned into hunting down an old friend. The trick isn't finding her. The trick is surviving long enough to get paid.
Book 4: The Blackness Between
Tagon and company finally track down Admiral Breya. Explosions explode, treachery treaches, and the gorillas get naked.
Book 5: The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance
Captain Tagon, Admiral Breya, and their little fleet go hunting for work and spare parts... but not adventure. No, that was NOT what they were looking for.
Book 6: Resident Mad Scientist
Tagon and company take a vacation, take a new job, and make some powerful new enemies. And then they discover that the galaxy may just need saving....
Book 7: Emperor Pius Dei
The Toughs get a new ride, an old vacation, and a chance to be on TV. Meanwhile, in the galactic core...
Book 8: The Sharp End of the Stick
Somehow Kevyn, Elf, Schlock, Brad, Nick, and Pronto have gotten themselves into primitive circumstances. Maybe things will get better if they make them worse first.
Book 9: The Body Politic
How much money do you need in order to swallow your pride (and sanity) and rescue a mortal enemy? How many times can you get paid for stealing the same corpse? How many of those payments will you actually remember to collect?
Book 10: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse
New memories, new recruits, and a new contract. Welcome to Credomar, where things look like they can't possibly be made any worse.
The print edition is 160 pages thick, and includes the bonus story "Schlocktroops" by Jim Zub, illustrated by Ben McSweeney, and colored by Travis Walton. Wondering what a reboot of the Schlock Mercenary TV show looks like? Wonder no more!
Book 11: Massively Parallel
Our merry band splits into four commands to raise money for repairs. They are going to get interrupted.
The Massively Parallel print edition is itself massive, at 256 pages thick. It includes the bonus story "Parallel Perspectives" by Howard Tayler, illustrated by Brenda Hickey, KelianaTayler, and Travis Walton.
Book 12: Force Multiplication
Hand-delivery of a wedding invitation drops Schlock, Bunni, Para, Legs, and Tailor into the middle of a drug war. They didn't start it, but they just might end it.
Book 13: Random Access Memorabilia
The Toughs take a job helping Gavcorps secure an artifact the size of a planet, and learn a thing or two about identity management in the process.
Book 14: Broken Wind
No ship, no job, and no prospects. But somebody did just pop a sapient balloon. Let's find out what's inside...
Book 15: Delegates and Delegation
Hey, here's an idea. Let's take a job back in Sol System, one of the few places in the galaxy where they know our names and want to arrest us.
Book 16: Big, Dumb Objects
"Space is huge. This should be obvious, given that space is where the universe keeps pretty much all of its stuff. This means everything you can actually see must be very close, very bright, or very, very big."
The Toughs have so much money that it has stopped being "money" and started being "wealth." They can now be choosy about their missions; exploring big dumb objects, seeking out old life-forms and dead civilizations, boldly discovering that when a mercenary company's net worth exceeds that of entire planetary systems, clients may cross that final, clientary frontier, and boldly out themselves as enemies.
Book 17: A Little Immortality
"My statue is holding a bomb, and doesn't have his helmet up."
Captain Tagon is back from the dead, re-grown just in time to risk his new self in a hunt for some missing researchers. He only lost about an hour of his previous self's memories, but he's been gone for four months, and things have changed.
Naturally, what appears to be a simple case of corporate espionage is something else entirely; something much larger, much older, and infinitely more dangerous... something Tagon's employers really should have mentioned.
Maybe things haven't changed that much after all.