Category Archives: Essays

This is a very boring name for me writing about the stuff that’s on my mind. I strive to make the essays more interesting than the word “essays” and this description.

Memorial Day 2021

This Memorial Day I wish to acknowledge those who continue to fight on the front lines of the pandemic. Their service has saved millions of lives, often at the expense of their own.

This Sunday I met a young woman who has been working as a nurse in rural parts of Utah. Our conversation was brief, but I could tell she was carrying a very heavy burden. To her, and to uncounted tens of thousands of people like her, I say thank you.

My household and I—all five of us—got vaccinated as much for them as for our own selves. For my own part, I view my body as a temple, and now it’s a temple where certain coronaviruses can come to die. SARS-COV-19 won’t amplify itself on my premises, and I won’t be darkening any hospital doors with a load of it in my lungs.

This Memorial Day, as we pause to reflect on those who have passed, especially those who have done so in service to us, let’s ask how we might pay their service forward. Like the Minutemen of the 18th century, we can arm ourselves, not with muskets, but with antibodies. The pandemic continues to rage, but we can eradicate this particular enemy from our shores. From every shore.

Gird up, get vaccinated, and soldier on my friends. It’s never been easier to save lives in the service of others.

Done, At Least For A while…

When I started creating Schlock Mercenary it poured forth like a dam had broken. I was driven—whether by deep personal need, or demons from the deep, it doesn’t matter—to make comics, and I felt compelled to deliver them daily.

Then there was this thing, this sort of a watershed moment, just fifteen months after I started making comics, in September of 2001…

Lots of us in the webcartooning space sought to express our feelings—of grief, anger, patriotism, fear, it’s a long list— and I realized that my story-based comic strip just wouldn’t work well for that.

So I decided to keep telling the story I was telling.

The only change I made was to amp up the triumph and the funny a bit, because I had this epiphany (or at least this slow dawning of realization) that my job was to help people cope by letting them laugh and cheer. I was still writing social satire (a fact which the dawn of realization didn’t break over until 2008, which stands as strong anecdotal evidence that you can make a thing without knowing that thing’s name) but just because it’s got the word “social” in it doesn’t mean it can’t also have joy, with laughter and cheering. Kind of like how a really long paragraph can be comprehensible, but also have multiple parenthetical phrases slipped into it.

Parentheticals aside, here we are, 19 years after 9-11, and I’ve been doing this job pretty well—or at least very consistently—for that entire time.

But it is now entirely time for me to stop.

I need a break, and it’s the kind of break which, until I take it, I don’t know how long I’ll need it to be.

A break? REALLY? I look at the world around me. I know in my heart of hearts (or perhaps by the yammering of those 1st-paragraph demons) that the world needs joy and laughter and cheering and triumphs in their entertainment just as much now as they ever have.

How can I possibly LET myself stop?

And then I have a pair of epiphanies, which are kind of like dawning realizations, except on a very swiftly-spinning planet—no glow, no warning, just the instant awareness that it’s time to find shade and sunblock.

Epiphany the first: I cannot create enough joy to save the world. If I live a thousand lifetimes, and pack all the work of those lives into this moment, it still wouldn’t be enough.

Epiphany the second: The 20 years of Schlock Mercenary I’ve made won’t vanish just because I stopped making them. If I’m lucky, and the internet keeps furiously pumping words and pictures through tubes, maybe I CAN let myself stop. Maybe, when I take a break, people will still get enough joy to get by.

Because while I can’t do it all, and although what I’ve already done won’t be enough, that’s pretty much the whole human condition. That’s the story of all of us—not being able to do it all, and never being able to do enough.

So I’ll show my demons the door, and then try very, very hard to allow myself some contentment, some satisfaction, with what I have been able to do.

At least for a while.

That door won’t hold for long.

It’s trying to do the job of a dam, and it’s just a door. It won’t be enough.

Still Thankful After All These Years

This is our 19th Thanksgiving since creating Schlock Mercenary, and our 15th since it was our primary source of income. This is a great time of year to sit back and contemplate ways in which to counter that old saw about familiarity breeding contempt. Just because it’s gotten difficult to remember NOT being supported by the kindness of friends, fans, and strangers on the internet doesn’t mean it’s any less magical.

Thank you! If you’re reading this, you’re one of the reasons this exists. Maybe you’ve shopped with us. Perhaps an advertiser has sent us some money in exchange for the opportunity to pester you. It’s possible you’ve contributed to our Patreon, signal-boosted a Kickstarter, or simply PayPal’d us some change. For any of that, we’re grateful.

But our gratitude needn’t be for transactional stuff. The fact that you read this is itself a reward. Telling stories for other people is incredibly fulfilling, and we’re super-fulfilled for having been able to do this for nigh on two decades.

Thank you!

Terminator: Dark Fate

Hey! I finally got back out and saw a movie!

Nothing screams “I am not a real movie reviewer” quite like me not seeing movies. But some of you seem to like knowing what I think about the latest cinematic releases, and I’ve been letting you down. There just hasn’t been time.

There wasn’t time today, but I went and saw Terminator: Dark Fate anyway, and I have no regrets. It’s a perfect Terminator film, and while none of the reveals were surprising, none of them needed to be.  Linda Hamilton, Natalia Reyes, and Arnold Schwarzenegger were perfect, and Mackenzie Davis¹ absolutely crushed it as the augmented soldier sent back in time to stop Gabriel Luna’s “Rev 9” Terminator. Luna was terrifying, and sure, he had help from the SFX department, but his robosociopath was easily on par with Robert Patrick’s, back when the franchise introduced us to liquid metal.

The film brought to mind an entire category of questions which are getting asked a lot lately:  what does the rise of the serialized franchise mean to traditional cinema? What do direct-to-streaming blockbusters mean for TV? What will all these streaming services do to my VHS² collection?

I don’t have any answers, but I do have a response. See, I remember seeing Star Wars in 1977, and thinking it would be AMAZING to have NINE WHOLE MOVIES telling a story, but I couldn’t possibly wait 27 years for the big finish. 10-year-old me would be pretty disappointed to learn that the central Star Wars saga would take more than 40 years to reach Episode IX, but that kid would shake off the funk when told that I’d get a 3-movie Lord of the Rings³, a 23-movie superhero epic which got told, start-to-finish⁴, in just 11 years, and that the nerdy, weird things I loved were appearing on so many different kinds of screens I wouldn’t be able to watch them all.

The Terminator films are not my favorite film franchise, but they’re pretty dang cool. They’re not be-all, end-all movies, but this latest one crossed my Threshold of Awesome. I’m pretty happy to have lived long enough to enjoy this latest era of cinematic output, and I look forward to enjoying as much of what comes next as I can make time for.


¹ Mackenzie Davis played my favorite character in The Martian. She was the one who figured out that Mark Watney was still alive. It was a small part⁵, but her performance still makes me tear up a little. 
² Ha-ha I kid. I live in the future. I need a way to rip my entire blu-ray collection onto my FitBit.
³ I read LoTR in 5th grade. If any single road can be given credit for leading me out of The Shire it was that one, which my Dad put my feet upon by handing me a book. 
⁴ I know, I know, the MCU hasn’t actually wrapped, but Endgame was a good enough ending that I’d be willing to let it end there. 
⁵ The old saw about “there are no small parts” does a disservice to those scenes where an actor must carry the entire weight of the story for their few moments on screen, and where most it has to be carried without using words. Actors are amazing.