I’m going to suggest that her bust size may not have reduced, but her previously (and impossibly) small waist might have increased somewhat.
I’ll blame married life, and Theo’s cooking
In fact, I think that Howard’s female art style has evolved somewhat - the same effect can be noted with Elf and Breya. I think that some of the early visual gags have given way to the much more nuanced story and character development of the latest books. But I couldn’t begin to isolate where that change may have started.
And I’m not losing yet another a couple of weeks of my life to an end-to-end archive crawl. Maybe …
I discovered last year that Schlock Mercenary holds together better if you binge on it than when you read it week by week. They started out by saving the universe a couple of times over and then there were a whole bunch of episodes of, let’s say, lesser significance, for example, where they ended up as mall cops. So it seemed as though the comic peaked early and was just wandering aimlessly for more than a few years. But if you read through the archives in one fell swoop, it all seems much more cohesive – there’s an overall arc, some of which just wrapped up in the past month or so.
I think that that’s true of all webcomics-- Everything seems to drag, when you’re only getting one episode per day.
And there are two overall arcs, which occasionally intersect: The War in the Heavens, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Most books deal with one of those two, though Oisri was both (an imprisoned and/or manufactured dark matter entity, and the first large-scale deployment of the weaponized immortality tech). Last book was Gilgamesh (response to the release of the immortality tech), and it looks like this one is likely to be Heavens.
What the heck happened to Cpt. Murtaugh? She was fine as of 3-29-15 and then the next time we see her 4-18-15, “There was a bomb”. I thought maybe they’d segue into a flashback but it hasn’t happened yet.
From what I gather from other sources, Howard has a position … “blowing up is boring - we’ve moved on”
That said, the battleplate sweep could maybe form part of the bonus story when the physical book gets published (in three or four years time) - or maybe not.
As for the art refresh, the face isn’t really that much different (longer lashes, fewer lines, slightly younger looking), but the hair is very different. It remains to be seen whether that stays different.
