The Story of Freelance

Dusk got into spriting around 2003, when sprite comics were everywhere. An online friend Dusk had met by commenting on their comic taught Dusk to recolour sprites (at first one pixel at a time) and encouraged them to make a character of their own. A mutual friend then put Dusk in touch with White over MSN Messenger, and the two became friends in real life too.

White had made his character in an art class: asked to design a storefront for a business, he picked a game store and edited a sprite of Tails into its mascot, then kept him as an original character. White was working on his own sprite comic, Freelance: 99% Need Not Apply (named after the SAS recruitment ads), with Dusk as a side character. That comic was the first version of Freelance and meant as its origin story; its story later became the Chaos Load arc. The name was White's idea.

Freelance's big break came from someone else's comic. DarthMechanis, another MFZ member, asked if White and Dusk's characters could appear in Mecha Menace, and that exposure “really catapulted Freelance into popularity.” Around the same time, Bruno held a knockout tournament to cast a character in his own comic; White's character won, and Bruno completely overhauled his sprite sheet.

From there the two floated the idea of a group of their own, "recruiting" people and their characters into Freelance.

In an era where every sprite comic was a green sonic going super saiyan and dual wielding keyblades and lightsabres, we tried to make something more compelling.

White was the story person: plot, storyboards and scripts. Dusk wanted to make comics, and over time became the group's comic artist. Dusk also pushed for the trappings of a "real" group: lore documents, group chats for the members (in the very early days of Skype) and a website. Looking back, Dusk says they were rushing ahead with spin-offs and new lore faster than the two of them had agreed on.

Their best work came once they settled into a clear split: White wrote full scripts panel by panel, and Dusk drew to them. That's how An Assassination Failed was made, and both remember it as the high point.

Very much influenced by our love of badass nonsense with mercenaries and morally grey characters, but also classic British humour.

Freelance was set in a "Sonic-adjacent" world (Mobius, mostly its western continent) with original characters instead of Sonic's cast. Early on it was going to be a prequel to Mecha Menace. Over time the founders phased out the crossovers and even the Sonic setting: their sprites followed the Sonic look, but they never had much attachment to Sonic's lore.

The team: Freelance is a mercenary-for-hire company based just west of Shady Metropolis, founded by two rival gunslingers. White Highwind, a fox, is a perfectionist marksman and gunsmith who ran away from his father's mercenary army. Dusk Requiem, a wolf, is a dual-wielding ex-soldier who fights with a gunblade. They were hired as reluctant partners to assassinate the crime boss Luis Longotti. When their contractor betrayed them, they went into business together. Their motto: “Your money, our pockets.”

The world: Chainlink, an older mercenary army both founders' families came from; Harwell, a sinister corporation; Chaos Fluid, a refined stand-in for the Chaos Emeralds; the Black Scar plague that ruined Echo City; and Lord (Darth) Mechanis and his invading Black Legion, borrowed from Mecha Menace.

The big arcs: Chaos Load (Freelance forms, the war begins), then the events of Mecha Menace (the "One Year War" against Mechanis), aftermath stories such as the Thanatos Incident and New Hope, and Death Penalty (planned, a war between "HyperCorps"). The reboot, An Assassination Failed, retold the founding.

Around the time the website was being planned, many of the original members had already moved on to other things, and the two founders were at odds over the direction of the group. The comic work with full scripts ran out of steam as they started college: “interests wane. Naturally.” The two drifted apart for well over a decade before reconnecting, with Merku's help.

White never really stopped: he still runs tabletop games and worldbuilding roleplays set in the Freelance world, which “has grown way beyond what it started off as.”

It was just a way of expressing ourselves with a low bar of entry. Not everyone can draw. But everyone's got a story in them.

Me and my friends just goofing off creating a world and being creative and cringe together. Embrace the cringe.

Freelance's work lived mostly on the MFZ forums, which were members-only and never captured by the Internet Archive. For years it was close to lost. Dusk's own copies only survived “purge after purge and hard drive crashes” because they lived in Dusk's Dropbox.

On 20 December 2021, Merku (now TetraMocha) shared the entire "Freelance clan dump" on the SGXP Discord: “a lot of custom work there and all the comics the members worked on including every edition of Mecha Menace.” A month later Raz (Dusk) found the server and started posting pages. This archive is built from that folder.