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Author: Maximilian
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Preventing Butterbars
3.63 million Americans born each year ÷ ~1,700 new Marine officers = roughly 1 Marine officer for every 2,100 births.
That’s about a 0.047% chance your child grows up to become a 2nd Lieutenant.
Are you comfortable with those odds? I’m not. It’s up to us to prevent 2nd Lieutenants from annoying Lance Corporals. To help, new paid TL Underground members this month receive a FREE condom.
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TL UNDERGROUND FORCE PROTECTION CAMPAIGN
Warriors,
The threat of the Green Weenie remains ever-present in our daily lives. It is incumbent upon us—and all that is chill and legit—to do our part to prevent the spread of future Commissioned Officers.
For the next 30 days, every new paid member of the TL Underground will receive one FREE official Terminal Lance condom, while supplies last.
That’s right. For once, joining Terminal Lance may actually prevent you from making a terrible life decision.
WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?
Terminal Lance has been free to read for more than 16 years, and I want to keep it that way.
The TL Underground is the membership side of Terminal Lance: a way for people who have been reading, sharing, commenting, and generally wasting government time with this comic to directly support its continued existence.
Your membership helps fund the comics, animation, games, weird projects, and everything else I’m trying to build without turning Terminal Lance into an endless parade of sponsored energy drinks and veteran lifestyle products.
WHAT DO MEMBERS GET?
In addition to your government-issued prophylactic device, Underground members get access to the members-only feed where I post things like:
- sketches and unfinished artwork
- behind-the-scenes work
- deleted/rejected material
- old TL stuff from the archives
- early looks at new projects
- polls and development stuff
- whatever else I find on my hard drive
I’m also going to be posting more regularly from the trenches while I work on the various projects currently consuming my life.
HOW IT WORKS
Join the TL Underground as a paid member during the campaign.
Make sure your mailing address is attached to your membership.
I’ll send you one Terminal Lance condom.
That’s it.
No raffles. No sweepstakes. No purchase of fourteen commemorative challenge coins required.
One new paid member. One condom.
While supplies last.
DO YOUR PART
The Corps has enough Second Lieutenants.
Join the TL Underground.
Protect the force.
Prevent future officers.Click here:
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Energy Crisis
Sleep deprivation is one of those things that every Marine becomes intimately familiar with as early as the first few days of boot camp. All across the Corps, Marines are missing sleep for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they’re standing duty, or maybe on a night patrol training op. Perhaps they’re deployed and operating on the bare essentials to stay alive. Perhaps they’ve just been up all night binge drinking and playing Oblivion Remastered. Who knows.
Either way, Marines will adapt and overcome, rising to the occasion of any challenge, whether they’re rested or not.
This comic was a lot of fun to make, because I made it as part of a collaborative live demo workshop I did as the guest speaker of the Combat Art Symposium at the National Museum of the Marine Corps this past week. I walked through my process for finding a joke, beating out a punchline, and laying out the comic visually with the help of a room full of other really talented artists tossing out ideas and gags.
The whiteboard of the Combat Art Studio at the National Museum of the Marine Corps The Combat Art Symposium is a gathering of Combat Artists and other military artists across the spectrum of the military. I’ve been (loosely) affiliated with the Marine Corps Combat Art program ever since my 2009 deployment to Iraq, where I spent most of the trip photographing and sketching Marines across the country. It wasn’t until 2021 or so that I became an official Marine Corps “Combat Artist,” and it’s been really amazing getting to know the other artists in the community.
At the Symposium, we got a great behind-the-scenes look at the Marine Corps art collection and archives. It was a lot of fun and I’m glad I was able to go.
I’ll post more about the trip for subscribers on the official TL Patreon page for a behind-the-scenes look.