Howard Tayler is the award-winning creator of the webcomic Schlock Mercenary. In 1985, he moved to Utah (where he still resides) to attend Brigham Young University. After studying there for two years, he volunteered to be a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before returning to BYU to finish a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition.
He co-founded an independent record label called Sanctus Records, which was aimed primarily at an LDS market. Tayler also worked for Novell as a project manager, where he co-authored with Ross Phillips and Tay Kratzer the guidebook Administering GroupWise 5.5, written to assist system administrators in managing Novell’s GroupWise.
In 2000, he began publishing his webcomic, Schlock Mercenary, a comedic webcomic which follows the tribulations of a star-traveling mercenary company in a satiric, mildly dystopian 31st-century space opera setting. Since its debut on June 12, 2000 the comic has updated daily and has been nominated for four Hugo Awards (2009-2012). Four years after its debut, Tayler left his job as product line manager at Novell in order to work full-time on the webcomic. By 2009, he was able to make enough from the sales of the compilation books and other merchandise to make ends meet and reduce his weekly workload from 80–100 hours down to 40-50.
Tayler also produces Writing Excuses, along with best-selling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, writer and puppeteer Mary Robinette Kowal, and horror author Dan Wells. Running weekly since February 10, 2008, this 15-minute writing tips podcast has featured a number of notable guests including Steve Jackson, Phil Foglio, Brandon Mull, Tracy Hickman, and Patrick Rothfuss.
Along with best-selling fantasy author Tracy Hickman and his son, Curtis, he illustrated and published XDM: X-Treme Dungeon Mastery, a guide for gamemasters who want to focus more on the fun aspects of roleplaying games rather than the mechanics of counting everything.
Tayler won the Web Cartoonists’ Choice Awards Best Cameo Award in 2001, and was also nominated for Best Comic, Best Writing, Best Other Character, and Best Science-Fiction Comic the same year. He won WCCA Outstanding Science Fiction Comic in 2004, and was nominated for the same award in 2005 and 2007.
He was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story for Schlock Mercenary four times: The Body Politic (2009), The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse (2010), Massively Parallel (2011), and Force Multiplication (2012). Along with Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, Jordan Sanderson, and Mary Robinette Kowal, Tayler was also nominated once each for the fourth and sixth seasons of Writing Excuses, a podcast for aspiring authors.
He has been a guest of honor at many genre conventions, including Balticon, CONduit, LepreCon, and Life, the Universe, & Everything. His wife, Sandra, is also a published author.
Photo by Nihonjoe. Text adapted from the Wikipedia article.