Scud the Disposable Assassin

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"Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. Not anymore! Get your bile piled up, get your spite in a bag... It's the best damn vengeance you've ever had! Scud Disposable Assassins"

Scud the Disposable Assassin is a graphic novel series by Rob Schrab, set in a bizarre, hideously amoral world where robotic assassins called Scuds are readily available on every streetcorner, and dispensed from vending machines. Scuds are deadly, agile, remorseless, heavily armed... and they explode upon terminating their assigned target, so you never have to worry about incriminating evidence. Our protagonist is just another Scud, hired to clear out a pest control problem, a monstrous creature called Jeff. Realizing that killing Jeff means immediate death, Scud painfully immobilizes Jeff and has her hospitalized. Seeking the necessary cash to keep Jeff's medical bills paid, Scud now has to go freelance, in a world that seems doomed to eternal peril.

The series originally lasted for 20 issues, published from 1994 to 1998. The final issue ended in a cliffhanger. Four additional issues appeared in 2008, continuing the original numbering. The #24th issue is so far the finale for the series.

Tropes used in Scud the Disposable Assassin include:
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: System was initially built for evil, but nobody expected him to out-evil Satan himself and take over hell.
  • A Fate Worse Than Death: The werewolf in issue 11 explodes in the vacuum of space, then his natural Healing Factor reassembles himself, then he explodes again, and reassembles himself again, and so on until the end of time.
  • Always Save the Girl: Scud agrees to kill the world in order to bring Sussudio back from the dead. This is not presented as the right choice, and Drywall calls him out on it.
  • Anti-Hero: Throughout the comic, Scud's pretty much looking out for himself, and doesn't really do anything that won't directly benefit him in some way (For example, refusing to help the mafia fight off the dinosaurs, even though he's right there, until they pay him.) He is an assassin, after all.
  • Art Evolution: The art in early issues is fairly cartoony and uses lots of round shapes, while later issues use a more angular, expressive style.
  • Bag of Holding: Drywall
  • Benjamin Franklin Is An Occultist Crime Boss
  • Bottomless Magazines: Though one line ("I haven't run out of bullets yet.") implies that Scud's guns have a set ammo capacity. It's apparently just really, really high.
  • Caught Up in the Rapture: The Rapture, apparently, took place right after the release of Ghostbusters 2, and due to Satan never showing up and God refusing to throw the first punch, it never ended.
  • Cerebus Syndrome
  • Chekhov's Gun: The God's Tear.
  • Creator Breakdown: This series was actually the result of one, there's a reason that the ending to the series which is actually quite happy is called Death of the Over-Used Muse.
  • Decoy Protagonist: Issue 3 of Tales of the Vending Machine starts out with a group of children reading a forbidden tome, then it reveals that they are actually demons in Hell and the focus switches to an angel that they inadvertantly stranded there. Then, the angel gets gunned down and the focus stays with Heartless 666 for the rest of the story.
  • Eldritch Abomination
  • Fat Bastard: Voo-Doo Ben certainly qualifies, as does the Mayor of Bobsled.
  • Guns Akimbo: With four guns, in one issue.
  • Hand Cannon: Scud's guns are as long as his forearms.
    • Possibly Lampshaded during a scene we see from Jeff's point of view, in which Scud is depicted with literal cannons for hands.
  • Hand Wave: Lampshaded/Parodied.

SCUD:"Why aren't you dead yet, you fat, evil man?"
Voo-Doo Ben Franklin:"Early to bed, early to rise, blah blah blah, shut the fuck up."

  • Hyperspace Arsenal: This is pretty much Drywall's entire gimmick.
  • Hypothetical Casting: Always listed the voices of actors that the creator of the comic imagined would be voicing the characters in animation.
  • Idiot Ball: Oswald's cause of death is picking up a porn magazine in the middle of a gunfight.
  • Knight of Cerebus: Surprisingly, Drywall, if you stretch the meaning slightly. While the character's immediate introduction doesn't trigger the darker shift, his origin story is one of the first really nightmarish turns.
  • Mismatched Eyes: Scud has one black eye and one white eye. Word of God says he's taking aim.
  • Mooks : Played with in Issues 21 and 22 Voodoo Ben has purchased Scudco, the company that made the main protagonist. As a result, he has a near unending supply of Scud's, some the same model as our hero. The end result is a montage of Scud kicking the crap out of himself.
  • Morality Dial: The Contempt Meter which measures Scud's sadism.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Voodoo Ben revives dinosaur bones at once point, creating Zombie Dinosaurs! Funnily enough, a bite from them will also turn you into a zombie dinosaur, as one don finds out.
    • The comic loves this trope. Not only do we get zombie dinosaurs, but werewolf astronauts, a cyborg mafia, and... well, whatever the hell Jeff is.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: The werewolves in the Scud universe have a Healing Factor turned Up to Eleven; when one's head gets blown open, the brains fly back into his skull to heal him.
  • Rape Is Okay When Its Female On Male: Well, inasmuch as Scud can be considered a male.
  • Rated "M" for Manly: The Grittites, a cult that worships "manliness and unnecessary explosions."
  • Robosexual: Sussudio is apparently unable to be turned on by anything that isn't mechanical.
  • Rogue Drone: Scud was programmed to take down his target and self-destruct, but a glitch in his programming gave him a will to live.
    • It's not so much a glitch in his programming as much as it is awareness that he will self-destruct if his target dies. He's not the only one, either; half of the hospital patients on life support were brought there by Scuds.
  • Schedule Slip: Years went between the last two issues, however Tropes Are Not Bad as this gave the creator a chance to give the series the ending it deserved and suffer a kind of inverse creator breakdown.
  • Shout-Out: In issue 3 of the spinoff series, Tales from the Vending Machine, One-shot character, Heartless 666 has tentacles where his mouth should be. Hmmm...
  • Starfish Aliens
  • Superior Species: Parodied in the form of "Superior Alien Military" military-industrial products and corporation.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Drywall.
  • The Unintelligible: Drywall and his brethren speak a language that can only be understood by creatures without a soul, such as robots and lawyers. Interestingly, the Wing Ding language contains the same number of symbols as the sentence being translated, so with proper context clues one can roughly translate much of their dialogue.
  • Unsound Effect: All the time. Some among the lines of "Finger!", "Grab Head!" and "Haul ASS!".
  • Werewolf Theme Naming: All four of the astronauts on a space shuttle that Scud hijacks. Only one of them is a werewolf, though.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: The giant robot Scud and the mafiosi hijack is never seen again. Neither is the giant gatling gun Scud uses on the Grittites. This tends to happen a lot.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness
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