Back of the Envelope

Sluggy Freelance — Torg decides that the best way to survive in the Dimension of Pain is to release all the good that's stored in the Demon King's Fridge of the Heavens. But first he has to find it, and in the process he stumbles upon a trapdoor arachnaseuse's trap, made to look like the Demon King's abode. Fortunately, the spider-like creature turns out to be on Torg's side, and she helps him find the real Demon King home, which is near the Elder Village (where the Demon Spear was).

It's Walky! — And that's it... It's Walky! is done! It was fun, wasn't it? And they all--meaning those who were still alive--lived happily ever after. David Willis isn't going away completely, however. He will continue to draw new Roomies comics on Tuesday and Thursday. Roomies was the comic that preceded It's Walky!, and it featured many of the same characters. It's not clear where exactly the new Roomies strips fit in the timeline, but it's clearly before Joyce was inducted into SEMME. Although it's vaguely possible that Willis will do something very evil with the new strips and make all of It's Walky! a dream.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — Oh my! Roger's mom dies dramatically in Roger's arms. And there's Margaret, who killed her. What will Roger do with her? And, of course, there's going to be a scene change before we find out.

General Protection Fault — Finally! Nick has proposed to Ki, and she's accepted. And Trudy sees it all and finally realizes that she has no chance with Nick. I actually feel sorry for her, even though she's a murderess who tried to take over the world.

Schlock Mercenary — Tagon makes it to the escape pod--technically a teraport cage. Unfortunately, everything's already gone wrong, and he has to cut his losses. Starting with killing the prisoner. What comes next? Technically, I already know since I've read Sunday's by now, but I don't want to believe it. My guess is you won't want to either.

Now that It's Walky! is done (although David Willis is continuing to do bi-weekly updates, but the updates fit in the timeframe of Roomies, which was the prequel to It's Walky), I'm going to be adding a new webcomic to the update list to replace it. I won't link to this comic yet, but it is the sequel to Bobbins, which ended in 2002 after four-and-a-half years. I read this new comic's entire archive (it's not very long) before I realized it was a sequel. I was wondering why the artist was tossing in characters with little or no explanation and referring to events he had never shown. I'll get into the sequel later, but for now, you may want to start reading through Bobbins, from the beginning.

The last strip is today. I'll miss it. I think It's Walky! is the third webcomic I started reading, and the only one of those three which I still read regularly. It has a great story, which the artist describes as Dawson's Creek meets Men in Black. It originally started as a regular college comic strip called Roomies about Danny, his horny roommate Joe, and the cute girl with a crush on Danny, Joyce. Danny's girlfriend from high school, Sal, is the first indication that something weird may be going on, as she appears and disappears with little explanation. Then the aliens arrive. Soon characters are dropping out because of this alien subplot, and then Roomies reaches its conclusion and It's Walky! begins. In a way, it'd be more accurate to describe It's Walky! as a spin off, where a lot of the characters who dropped out of Roomies or were just recurring guests in the first place become the major characters of the new strip, which is focused on the alien invasion. Overall, it's a lot of fun, and I suggest you start, at the beginning.

Sluggy Freelance — So the nuke wasn't a real nuke. Arghhh! The DoL is so lame it makes me want to scream sometimes. It has the same effect on Torg. So they escaped the lame-nuke by slipping into the DoP, and now they're trapped there with demons wandering all around. Fortunately, they managed to coerce Sweral and Tryka into helping them. But I was right about Alt-Gwynn. She did teleport to the portal. It remains to be seen whether she'll interact with Torg and Zoe again, or if she'll just close the portal behind the demons, trapping them in the Dimension of Pain once again.

It's Walky! — This week we're growing a new body for Walky while getting bits and pieces about everyone else's life. My, it looks like Jason and Sal are getting along swimmingly. Joyce is spending time with the new Walky, since she's been pardoned for that murder rap from the whole anti-Joyce incident. And they all live happily ever after, except for the ones who died. Hey, they could still come back. We may be resurrecting the whole lot of them, but I sort of hope not. Seems... cheap.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — And while I wasn't paying attention, Maritza does a weekend. So, Margaret shoots Roger's Mom with a shotgun. I hope she survives. Meanwhile, Marsha and April are freaking out about Mike's "coming out." Meanwhile-meanwhile, Blue explains that the green pill is a tracking device (incidentally, this tells us why Jay wanted Thadeus's password and thus how he found Dave) which can also explode on cue. Cool! And now Dave and Blue are on a quest into the dungeons. That's always fun, especially if there's some laser action.

General Protection Fault — And what do you know--Trudy shows up. This may be interesting. She and Yoshi have a little chat, and she tells him to stop building all that high-tech stuff she stole from Nick. A repentant Trudy? I'm not sure I like this turn of the story. I mean, I'm all for redemption in real life, but sometimes it makes fiction less interesting.

Schlock Mercenary — So Tagon and Elf and the prisoner survive while Schlock is blown to bits. This isn't the first time that's happened. Since Schlock's an amorph, it's relatively easy to put him back together again--although it's harder this time since most of him's been atomized. What's left doesn't seem to have much of his personality. Hmm, scratch that. It may be child-like, but it's still acting like Schlock.

Last week's "Weekly Webcomic Upate" got a link from Comixpedia's blog. It makes me wish I had put more work into it, as it frankly wasn't my best. I've been doing this for a while, for reasons I outlined when I started--mainly to get people interested in the webcomics I read. So without wasting more time describing why I do this, why don't we get on with it.

Sluggy Freelance — Torg lost the sword! Torg. Lost. The. Sword. This is bad, very bad. And, oh yes, the Russians are planning to nuke the US to get rid of the demons. That's not good either. On the bright side, we get a very sweet scene between Torg and Alt-Zoe, Torg is alive and with friends, and it doesn't look like the DoLers transformed into demons are any good at it. I bet if we were somehow to get rid of all the Dimension of Pain demons, like if Horribus were to send them all chasing after Torg and he were to lead them all into the Dimension of Pain while someone closed the portal behind them and Torg somehow used the Halloween weakening of the barrier to slip into his home dimension, then everything would turn out all right. Yeah, like that would happen. I'd still be very disappointed if there were no showdown between Torg and Horribus before it were all over.

It's Walky! — Yay! Jason and Tony are alive! Wiigii! Whump! Oh, um... Yay, Jason's alive! Wiigii! And at least Tony died heroically. Meanwhile, Walky's been pushed into the Canadian anomaly, where he's apparently merged with the Cheese. And we finally find out the identity of the Cheese, and I'll admit it's one of the last people I expected.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — So Dave winds up in bed with Jay. Hey, not like that, no matter what sick Boardie fantasies it would fulfill. After that he has an argument with Blue, where I really wish he had said, "Look, Blue, your ex-boyfriend shot me, and if he doesn't remember the beating I gave him afterwards, I better remind him by doing it again." Then we return to Margaret, who's living in the woods with something that's been eating people. Is it Roger's mom?

General Protection Fault — Nick finally pops the question--to Ki's dad. As I pretty much expected by now, he's not going to give his permission for his daughter to marry a gaijin. When Nick calls him on his racism, he explodes. I'm not surprised, but I'm glad to see Nick finally speaking his mind.

Schlock Mercenary — While Kevyn is keeping the rest of the crew in hand, Schlock, Elf, and Tagon are on a special mission. It involves swimming in sewage. I'd expect this to go smoothly, only this is this year's Schlocktoberfest, which is code for the fact that things are going to get bloody. (Like when Sluggy's background goes black, you know trouble's around the corner.)

Wednesday's Schlock Mercenary demonstrates why it's always useful to have a mad scientist around.

Copyright © 2000-2004, the Tayler Corporation. "Plotting to take over the world since 1998" Used with permission.
Click here for today's Schlock Mercenary.
If you want to know more about Kevyn the Mad Scientist, you should read Schlock Mercenary from the beginning.

Update: It took me several tries to scale the graphic so it fit in my weblog format even at 800x600 resolution and was still legible. To see the comic in its full glory, click on the image and you'll go to its page in the Schlock archives.

Sluggy Freelance — So Mosp saves Torg and Alt-Zoe. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like she's willing to do it again.

It's Walky! — Uh-oh. It looks like Walky's dead now. Of course, he can't die that easily. Now we get some afterlife shots.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — Maritza's back! Darn computer crash. And now Mike and Roger are in a car crash before anything gets cleared up. (Like that's surprising.) Meanwhile, all's not well with Dave on the home front. Well, what do we expect? It is Mike's home.

General Protection Fault — Nick goes golfing with Ki and her dad. It doesn't go well.

Schlock Mercenary — Moral crisis sidetracked for the moment, Tagon explains to his mercenaries the benefits of a paid vacation. Paid. Most of them have trouble with the concept.

Update: Wow, I wasn't expecting Comixpedia's blog to link to this post. This is a weekly feature that I've been doing since I started blogging, beginning with this post. My rationale for doing these particular webcomics is here. By the way, if you click on Webcomics under categories on my sidebar, you'll find more, but not a lot more. The problem is that categories are a relatively new feature at Powerblogs, and I haven't gone through my archives and assigned everything to a category, and there are quirks that prevent every new post from being categorized. In any case, all that aside, there will be a new "Weekly Webcomic Update" Saturday night.

Howard Tayler of Schlock Mercenary has quit his job at Novell in order to become a professional webcartoonist. This is a huge leap of faith (literally). Professional webcartooning is very hard to do. The only artist I know who lives off of his webcomic is Pete Abrams, and his traffic's somewhere in the middle of five digits, I think--on the order of Instapundit. (Depending on how Glenn Reynolds measures his traffic, I'm thinking that Pete probably has more readers, since you generally aren't checking a webcomic every hour.) I wish Mr. Tayler luck, and I'll be sure to direct people to him often. I'm hardly qualified to offer advice, but I think one of the best way to advertise online is to allow people (such as bloggers) to inline strips. I know that Chris Muir of Day by Day went so far as to create a script so that bloggers would always have the current comic on display. While this doesn't direct people to your main site like you'd probably prefer, it does expose more people to your strip. Of course, you'd have to require that the websites inlining the strip give proper credit, and you wouldn't want them posting your whole archives, but I think that, done within reason, it's an effective way to advertise online.

Meanwhile, if you're looking for some humorous hard science fiction, check out Schlock Mercenary, from the beginning.