Friends, Minnions, Highwaymen, allow me to introduce to you Freelancer! It's a space opera comic by
Martin Kirby-Jackson. Now completed, it ran for three chapters and ended in 2016.
You can find the comic at
freelancerscomic.tumblr.comFair warning: the links at the top of the page for chapters 1, 2, and 3 are hard-coded to the now-expired freelancerscomic.com domain, so they're broken. The page-to-page links still work fine, but unfortunately those don't include the usual link to page 1. The perils of hosting a Webcomic on Tumblr I suppose. Anyway,
here's a link to page 1.The comic stars Elena Daniels, who dreams of being the big hero on her team of swashbuckling space adventurers/artifact hunters. Her actual duties, however, mostly just involve cleaning the spaceship. Said ship belongs to Cass, the stern, driven leader of the group. Rounding out the rest of the team are Jean, a large, bedreadlocked man;Junpo, an even larger anthropomorphic red panda; and Veetu, a tiny robot guy. It's mostly Elena and Cass's story, so the other three don't get fleshed out as much, but they still stand up off the page. Veetu most of all.
Things pick up when a mission goes slightly awry and Elena, assigned to stay with the ship, launches a dubiously necessary rescue mission and ends up permanently(?) bonded to a mysterious ancient artifact that just so happens to resemble a really neato-lookin' pair of fingerless gloves. Except for when they're giant quasi-mechanical gauntlets. Elena knows nothing about them, but Cass has a personal beef with a certain person...entity?...that deals in such artifacts.
At the risk of a spoiler, be forewarned that the story's biggest backstory mystery goes unsolved. The emotional arc, however, does reach a satisfying conclusion and the tale ends on a hopeful note that leaves you confident that the characters
will get their answers eventually, whether we ever get to see them or not.
There's not much in the way of content warnings. Running down the list on page 1:
- No sex at all, unless you count Cass's cleavage in chapter 1.
- No abuse, though there's one count of borderline neglectful parenting of the "dad loves kid but is too busy with work to play with them" variety.
- Some of the characters are anthros and they have violence happen to them. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that counts as animal abuse.
- Only one guy clearly dies, and the actual death happens off-page.
- Another guy gets disappeared in a way that probably didn't kill him. We never find out. This also happens off-page.
- There is typical action violence PG-13 at the worst. We see some bloodied fists and the like.
- There's one scene where a guy is lying on the ground with his face in a pool of blood and we don't know at the time whether he's alive or dead.
Going off-list, I guess those of you with trypophobia or something might be squicked out by a scene where a robot with light bulbs for a mustache rearranges his own face.
You can think of the comic as Kirby-Jackson's A Redtail's Dream, except that he wasn't practicing for another comic--just honing his art skills in general. You can check out his current work on his ArtStation but it's both much improved from what's in Freelancer and (usually) quite different stylistically. That being the case, the art can be a little rough in spots, mainly in chapter 1. Still, overall I'd say it's pretty good, and it especially shines toward the end.
Here are some samples of the artwork:
Holes and labels.
