Scud the Disposable Assassin comes from a gritty future where megacorporations are openly owned by monstrous aliens, cybernetic mutants roam the streets, and, oh yeah, if you want somebody dead, you can hire a hitman from a vending machine. The titular hitman, like all of his robotic kind, are resourceful and focused on their assignment, and aren’t the kind that blackmail you when the job is done, because, as it says on the label, they self destruct when their target dies. Which is convenient, except to the robot.

I’m not the only one writing about this today!

Scud as a character is a bit uneven; he’s motivated by not self destructing first and foremost, but he also has a bit of a sense of justice, mostly along the lines of “I don’t care what you’re up to so long as you don’t mess with me.” Of course, being an action packed comic book starring a killing machine, others mess with him. One of them is Voodoo Ben Franklin. Who isn’t just styled after Ben Franklin, he is Ben Franklin. And he uses the power of lightning and kites to animate the dead. Like dinosaurs in a museum. Which he uses to eat the mafia for refusing to buy his zombies.

Scud aggressively world builds on the fly. Voodoo Ben doesn’t even make a reappearance until later, after Scud has fought a werewolf trying to touch the moon, a group of bizarre monsters blackmailing a neo Western town mayor who was using the town’s funds for drug money, and basically done the story equivalent of “lets put all these things and some honey bees in a jar and shake them up.”

What amazed young me when I first picked this up was how well it worked. Like, it didn’t actually work, but because the action just rolled with whatever bizarre crap was going on, you had no choice but to just go along with it. I had never really read anything like that before; stories were hella scripted when they were just words, and when you involve actual comic artists, well, then you really see the planning involved. Not this one.

Scud strangely holds up. Not all my favorite indies from the early 2000’s did, but this one is so crazy I still love it after all these years. I can’t actually trace any inspiration of my current work to it, but the free flow of making crap up and if it works, great, if not, put bullets into it and off to the next caper, is a level of fun story telling I hope I can nod at as an inspiration

There’s one last mention I wanted to make, and that’s Drywall. Drywall is another mercenary. He’s not particularly good at his job, but he gets paired with Scud, can only speak in |||||||||| gibberish that only robots can understand, stores anything he steals inside of his interdimensional space. Also he was made under a contract with Lucifer to store all the good stuff Earth had before Armageddon. He absolutely makes no sense and I love him.