Today, June 12th, 2019, marks the 19th anniversary of Schlock Mercenary on the web. The comic has updated daily, every day, without fail, for nineteen years now. Not because I’m a machine, but because I plan ahead, and have always had smarter people than myself handling the automation.
Still, nineteen years. That window is large enough for there to be people who began reading the comic when they had no children, and who are now grandparents.
I don’t think that’s likely, because the starting audience was not large, but that’s what nineteen years looks like.
Here are a few of the marker-and-ink caricatures I’ve done recently. Most of them are for an ESO guild, Black Dragon Apothecary. A couple are for other things (Pokémon Go + The Dark Crystal, Good Omens). More may follow…
The embarrassing thing is not that Pokémon Go is the most exercise I’ve had in a year, nor that I still haven’t figured out how to dodge during a raid battle.
The embarrassing thing is that I’ve been playing for three weeks, and I only came up with this today.
Apologies to Niantic, Jim Henson, and all those Valor and Instinct players who find their new affiliation unpleasant.
Note: For those of you who keep track of this kind of thing, the idea hit me around 11am. I put off doing anything about it until 12:10pm. Reference art took about two minutes to locate. Rendering took about 30 minutes. It’s ink and Copic on Deleter manga board.
Tonight (Tuesday, June 4th, 2019) at 7pm (9pm EDT) I’ll be a guest player at the Typecast RPG table. That link leads to their Twitch stream, so you’ll be able to watch live as I make a half-orc of myself.
The game is run by Dan Wells, and the three core players are Charlie Holmberg, Mari Murdock, and Brian McClellan. The setting is a D&D 5 home-brew featuring magical flying cities and other stuff I still need to read up on.
I really do need to read up, because tonight I’m playing a half-orc bard, a traveling scholar who does bounty hunting on the side. It would be pretty embarrassing if I didn’t know at least some of the lore of the place. Especially if the occasion calls for me to set some of it to song during battle.
