Working for a private deep-space rescue company, can Thom keep his job… and his mind?
This is a story built out of moments. Read them in any order you like.
Pick the latest moment, get another one at random, or explore the archive.
It’s a growing library of moments in the life of Thom, a low-level employee of REZQ, one of countless gigantic capital-hungry corporate entities that dominate Earth’s future in space.
Formerly a deep-space courier, Thom became a rescue operative by default when his employers were bought out and dissolved by REZQ, a spacecraft recovery company formed hurriedly as a tax shelter for its parent corporation.
Working alone and untrained aboard the barely-repurposed cargo ship Angel Fish, and mired in untreated mental illness, he must use an array of dangerous, ill-suited tools to help people in some of the most dangerous situations the galaxy has to offer — assuming their payment information is up-to-date.
Of course, Thom is not alone in this world. Billions live similar lives, and many of them worse. While Thom and his experience with REZQ anchor the setting, you’ll meet other characters and witness the ways in which they cope–or don’t–with the brutal reality of Capital freed from the few bounds that were still holding it back.
Why does Thom look different in different pictures?
I have changed my mind a lot about how Thom should look. I figured it doesn’t really matter. He’s still Thom. And different styles suit different drawings. I go through phases of drawing him with a circular face, with a more dimensionalised-face, being tall and cartoony, being more human-like in proportion, etc. It’s all just for fun.
Even outside the deliberate stylistic differences, it probably won’t escape your notice that the fundamental quality of the content here–and especially of the drawings–does vary to some degree. That’s because this is a collection ideas built up over years, during which I have improved as a visual artist. But, as I’ve presented these moments in no particular sequence, there’s no steady curve of improvement.
The disordered nature is deliberate, to avoid imposing an artificial order and so that the form of the narrative reflects the content: a psychotic pinballing between different moments in a world that seems to offer no progression towards an ending.
In any case, I hope you can forgive this bumpy consistency and still enjoy the moments as they’re presented.
About the author/artist
I have used the artist pseudonym mongreldog for some years online, so I’ll stick with that for now. There’s not much worth knowing about me other than that, as of 2019, I am 36 years old, and working a full-time job unrelated to art.
I will say that I have no career objective in compiling these moments. They are more a way of dealing with my own experience with mental health issues (and to respond, as weakly as I am able, to the bewildering, spiralling excesses of utterly unleashed late capitalism).
If you want to get in touch, you can email me at mongreldog@rezq.space. Thanks for dropping by.