Servants of the Imperium

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
The SotI cast from left to right; Severus, Bob, Lyle, Aki, Brianna and Krin

Servants of the Imperium is a Warhammer 40,000 comic that follows a team of Inquisitorial agents in their adventures across the Imperium of Mankind. The comic is based around the Warhammer Role-Playing Game Dark Heresy, but also takes inspiration from the tabletop wargame, and the skirmish game Inquisitor.

The artistic style of the comic has often been compared to Order of the Stick, with which it shares many similarities.

The main characters to date:

  • Lord Severus Hunt - The leader of the group and a member of the Imperial Inquisition.
  • Krin O'Kar - A bounty hunter who serves as second-in-command. He has a huge crush on Brianna.
  • Lyle - An Imperial Psyker. Lyle often serves as the straight-man and voice of reason in the group.
  • Brianna - An Imperial Assassin and object of Krin's affections.
  • Bob - A servo skull the party found on a pirate moon and adopted. In life he was a pirate lieutenant.
  • Aki - A teenage ganger who the party picked up in their adventures on Gloaming. Handy with a pistol and seems to have some medical knowledge as well.
Tropes used in Servants of the Imperium include:
  • Ambiguous Gender: Farseer Aerian Alathatar, being an Eldar.
  • Art Evolution
  • Artificial Limbs: apparently Krin has a bionic eye, artificial heart, synthetic shin and a bionic appendix. Brianna has also claimed to be heavily augmented
  • Badass: Pretty much the whole party
  • Bait and Switch Boss: The Chaos Magus Brianna kills then turns out to be inhabited by a daemon which manifests upon his death
  • Bald of Awesome: Krin and Severus
    • And Lyle as well I guess
  • Berserk Button: Don't hurt Brianna when Krin's around
  • Big Damn Heroes: Bob saves Aki from a Genestealer with its tiny buzzsaw.
    • The Eldar do this twice: the first one, when they kill a cultist that was attacking the group while they tried to deactivate the bomb; the second one, when the Eldar Farseer attacks the genestealer patriarch that is about to kill Severus.
    • Lyle has the biggest one: when he kills the Genestealer psychic, all the cultists and Genestealers on the planet suffer a backlash that allows the defenders to win the battle.
  • Bi the Way: Aki, by name even.
  • Blank White Eyes: Lord Severus's default expression, with no eyebrows and his goatee hiding the mouth. So, nobody knows what he thinks.
  • Boobs of Steel: Brianna
  • Calling Your Attacks: Lampshaded and Justified. Aki asks why Lyle yells the names of his powers. He says everyone but him makes a huge racket with their guns; he feels left out.
  • Click. "Hello."
  • Cloudcuckoolander: Krin shows shades of this sometimes
  • Clothing Damage: Following Twink's attempt to kill them Brianna's costume gets a number of strategic rips in it.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience
  • Crapsack World: It's Warhammer 40,000 after all, but the planet of Gloaming springs to mind, where everyone but the noble class live in eternal gloom causing them to suffer from rickets and anemia and as a result are given life-shortening drugs just so they can work unceasingly for the nobles
  • Curb Stomp Battle: Brianna vs Twink
  • Defrosting Ice Queen: Brianna, as shown by the increased frequency of her eyes being round with eyelashes, as opposed to her original slitted 'angry' eyes.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: Bob and Severus' little conversation about his "buzzsaw".
    • I was only one more seminar away from attaining level three.
  • Dungeon Crawling
  • Everything's Better with Bob: Servo-Skull lieutenant of Janus Blackstar.
  • Expy: The quartermaster complains that Krin never gives his stuff back in one piece. Just like Q from Bond.
  • Four-Temperament Ensemble: Severus is Choleric, Krin is Sanguine, Lyle is Melancholic and Brianna is Phlegmatic
  • False Friend: Twink
  • Guns Akimbo: Brianna almost always uses two pistols
  • I Call It Vera: Krin refers to his rifle as 'Betsy'
  • I Have Boobs - You Must Obey!: how Brianna gets Krin to stop looting as the asteroid starts to break down.
  • Lampshade Hanging: In issue 110, Inquisitor Hunt and Lord Judge plan to make a large military operation with Imperial guardsmen and PDF forces to purge the Genestealer threat. They consider mapping out their forces with minatures and then realize it would be an utter waste of time painting them and setting it all up.
  • Lock and Load Montage: Invoked by Krin, as the party goes to arm up to fight the genestealers and their cultists
  • Machine Worship: The tech priests
  • More Dakka: Krin seems fond of this. Lampshaded in one of the first strips when Severus points out Krin carries 5 guns but only has 2 hands
    • Although recently Krin has revealed that, as he never uses his pistols, he now uses the holsters to hold snacks
  • Oh Crap: The daemon gets a brief one of these
    • When the team realize that the guy driving the car is part of the Gene Stealer Cult.
    • When the Tech Priest Gunner when he realizes that his missed shot is going to hit the moon that everyone is on.
    • When the Genestealer psychic realises that Lyle has managed to use an illusion of his body to sneak behind him and kill him with a PSIONIC BLAST!.
  • Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: This is a Warhammer 40,000 comic, so that's pretty much a given
  • Pirate Booty: The hoard that made up the goal of the first story arc
  • Plunder:

Severus: Krin, what is that you're holding?
Krin: Standard-issue looting sack M'lord.
Severus: Of course it is. How silly of me.

  • After the party was cornered by a released Daemon, who reanimated its dead cultists*

Severus: Great, could this get any worse?
Krin: Ah M'lord? There's a huge bomb back here and it's ticking...
Severus: I really should keep my mouth shut.

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