Buck Godot

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Buck Godot is a science fiction/comedy comic book series, collected in two graphic novels (Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire and Buck Godot: PSmIth) and assorted comic books, including the eight-issue "Gallimaufry" series, all drawn and written by their creator, Phil Foglio.

Buck Godot is a quick-witted futuristic mercenary; his motto is "Always available, but never free." He lives and works on the planet New Hong Kong, the only one of the human-settled worlds where the Law Machines, interplanetary law enforcement robots, do not operate, due to a planted command that there by "no law in New Hong Kong". He once worked for the great X-Tel Corporation, a corrupt transportation firm, but "retired" from their service after an ethical dispute, damaging their headquarters and stealing a starship as he left, in what Godot later cheekily described as a "lump-sum payment of his accrued wages and pension." His "zap gun," nicknamed Junior, is a classic laser gun which ejects spent cartridges when fired.

Buck mostly hangs around Asteroid Al's bar on New Hong Kong, waiting for work to come to him. He is a heroic drinker and can absorb incredible amounts of booze, mostly due to his heritage as a Hoffmanite -- a variant human race designed for a heavy gravity environment. While he looks like a rotund normal human, most of the extra bulk is muscle; Hoffmanites interact among themselves very roughly by normal human standards. "Courtship," Buck has noted, "usually starts with high explosives."

His best friend is Louisa Dem Five, the asteroid-born madame of the Velvet Fist brothel and owner of franchises on several other worlds, including the great Gallimaufry space station where such interstellar government as exists is headquartered.

Buck's other friend is Asteroid Al, an eyeless alien known for being stingy about money and contracts. His bar serves over 138 varieties of drink, all of which can intoxicate the unwary almost immediately. Buck's drink of choice is the "ion sucker," whose containers also make useful weapons.

1 Origin of Buck Godot's Name
2 Webcomic
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Origin of Buck Godot's Name

Phil Foglio originally named this character "Buck Lee" because he had modeled Buck's visual appearance on his Chicago friend John Buckley. When Phil showed the original uninked pencil pages to Connor Freff Cochran, a Brooklyn neighbor with whom he was collaborating on stories, Connor pointed out that "Buck Lee" would only be funny to the people that knew Phil's friend. Phil asked for suggestions. Connor said the character needed a wilder, stranger last name, and offered "Godot" -- an allusion to Waiting for Godot, the famous existential play by Samuel Beckett. Phil initially rejected the idea, but eventually came around and altered the pages accordingly.

[edit] Webcomic

On 2006-09-13, after their success with moving Girl Genius from a printed comic book series to a webcomic, Studio Foglio announced that they would soon be serializing the existing Buck Godot stories as a webcomic.^[1]