The Final ’90s Countdown: Part Sixteen.

The Final ’90s Countdown continues, with the next alphabetical entry in the one-vote getters:

Scud: The Disposable Assassin (Fireman Press, 1994 – 1998)

Now this was one popular series. Scud (as we will refer to it here instead of your pal Mike typing out the full name every single time) was written and drawn by Rob Schrab, a quite talented gent that surely is most famous for being in the Dead Alewives, but also did some other stuff too (like co-creating and directing the Sarah Silverman Program, directed some Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, and plenty of other movie and TV work.

The comic’s premise presented a world in which one could purchase a single use assassin robot out of a vending machine that, upon completing its mission of, y’know, killin’ a dude, would self-destruct. The hero of our comic, Scud, is one of those robots, who figures out a way to avoid self-destruction (i.e. just hurting his target somethin’ fierce instead of killing him) and then goes freelance.

As I said at the start, this was a very popular comic book, selling lots of copies to kind of the same crowd that was getting Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and other quirky indie titles. There were spin-off titles as well, such as La Cosa Nostroid (probably the most popular of the bunch, dealing with Tony Tastey of the Cyborg Mafia, but unfortunately unfinished), Scud: Tales from the Vending Machine (five-issue mini with other creators telling stories about other Scud robots), the one-shot Drywall Unzipped and the two-issue Drywall and Oswald, with side adventures of Scud’s partner Drywall.

The main Scud series itself initially stopped at issue #20 in 1998, leaving the story incomplete. It wouldn’t be until 2008 that Schrab would be able to fit in the production of the final four issues amongst his showbiz work to finally give the series its proper sendoff. Following its completion, the entire Scud series was collected (along with Drywall: Unzipped) into a big ol’ volume called Scud: The Disposable Assassin: The Whole Shebang! which still remains available, and relatively popular, today! (The other tie-ins do not appear to have been reprinted.)

That Schrab went back and completed the story sure kept this series from becoming a forgotten floppy in the bargain bins to an in-demand, in-print graphic novel. Can think of a few titles where I wish they finished the job so we could get sellable trades out of them. Imagine a world where, like, the Bone comic book series petered out about halfway through. A classic series of graphic novels would be missing from the market, Jeff Smith wouldn’t be getting any of that income, hundreds of thousands of kids wouldn’t be exposed to the joy of sequential comic book art (at least until Dog Man showed up).

Anyway, glad Scud is still around.