Scud! the disposable assassin

 

One of my favourite books, comic, or otherwise, is Scud: the disposable assassin. I call it a book because I have the complete story in one big volume, although it was really a monthly comic book title. It's odd that when it was all said and done it came together as well as it did all things considered. The bulk of it was done back in the 90's, and was written in a style that seemed to cater to the fact that writer and artist, Rob Schrab seemed to want to draw whatever he wanted from issue to issue. So he just shifted the story drastically towards whatever subject matter tickled his fancy. I think that's one of the reasons I liked it so much. It was pretty popular in the 90's to the point Oliver Stone wanted to make a movie out of it. As the story goes Schrab was getting pretty depressed on the direction they wanted to take with the movie. Concerned they would fuck up his baby, he pulled the plug on the film and stopped doing the comic. Not before writing himself into one hell of a corner though. Over a decade went by, before he decided to give Scud a conclusion, and somehow it really worked.

 For those of you not versed with the story, the basic premise is pretty awesome. In the near future, after the rapture has taken place, a company called Scudco offers you the service of robot assassins conveniently available out of vending machines. You give the Scud his target, which he kills and promptly self destructs. Our hero, a Scud robot is assigned to kill a a crazy monster named Jeff (it's a girl monster). While on his mission Scud pops into the washroom where he notices in the mirror the warning label on his back about self destructing. Not wanting to blow up, Scud Seriously injures Jeff instead of killing her, and puts her up in the hospital on life support. Now he has to take on missions in order to pay the mounting hospital bills.

I actually drew these a long while ago when I first read the full book. Only found them recently, so I decided to ink and colour them. I drew Scud with his loner arm, that he has while his robot arm is in the shop. That there is his sidekick Drywall. He's my favourite. Wish I'd drawn him with his piranha gun. Maybe I'll do that some other time. He's like this sack dude with zippers all over him with these arms that come up with stuff from this weird storage dimension inside of him.

One other thing that I thought was pretty cool about Scud, that's sadly not included in the big book I've got, was with the issues he used to have "suggested voice talents" for the characters. So if you wanted to, you could imagine that actors voice as you read the dialogue. Recommended voice talent for Scud was John Malkovich.