I’m a very patient person normally. I’ll wait my turn. It’s part of my British heritage that I’m otherwise not very proud of. But now I’m starting to think that I’ve waited enough. I’m talking about the damn TF2 comic series.

Quick note. I know there’s people who haven’t read all the comics yet, so spoiler alert. Seriously though this whole thing started in 2013.

2013, I TELL YOU!

Deep breath, Medic. Deep breath.

The original plan was 6 comics, published bi-monthly. One every two months, not one every two weeks, like some of us had hoped. After reading through the first comic and whining that there wasn’t enough Medic in it (there’s never enough Medic!), we were all eager to read the next one. I wondered, knowing Valve quite well, whether they’d be close to this two month schedule of theirs.

Two months came and went and we saw nothing comic-related. After three months, the second issue appeared and we all rejoiced. It all went downhill from there, with four months before issue 3 came out, 6 months before issue 4 came out and and astonishing 10 months before the 5th issue came out, with a promise that issues 6 and 7 would come out a bit faster. That was back on August 31st 2015. It’s now February 2016. Maybe they weren’t joking when they said every issue would now take 6 months to finish.

Now, I appreciate that these things require a lot of time to do. They’re not exactly short comic strips or anything. 100 ‘pages’ each. I say pages because they’re done in this weird ‘interactive’ format that people seem to like these days. And I understand that the comic team has been busy with all the Dota 2 stuff that was started after but needed to be finished before the TF2 comics. But as always, all we’ve received is radio silence and the odd word from the team saying “maybe” with nothing happening. Is it that hard to say “sorry, delayed again because of Y?” even if Y is a secret thing they can’t mention? If I did this, I would have been fired from my job a long time ago.

And the weird thing is, the comics are good and all, but they have their faults. The art is neat but I swear it keeps on skipping out on the action. In A Cold Day In Hell, you’ve got a fight between mercenaries and bears and it skips out on Pyro smashing a bear’s skull in with an axe and the entirety of how Heavy defeated a fucking huge bear with his *cough* bare hands. In the court room in Unhappy Returns, rather than a giant court room battle featuring Spy being awesome and Spy-y, Soldier intervenes and suddenly they’re all hanging from gallows. Blood in the Water does the same thing, Soldier’s itching to fight things and everyone just sort of gives up without a fight, simply handing the keys to Spy. The comic concludes with Sniper being shot and the next issue starts with everyone being captured.

That though I can forgive. Not everyone can draw awesome action scenes. Or action scenes in general. What bothers me is how the comic series appears to be separate from the rest of TF2 lore. There’s only ever been one team of mercenaries apparently and they switch sides as needed (or at least Engineer does), which means that Loose Cannon is now no longer canon or something? The big bad guy got booted out of the story in part 5 despite always having an army of robots. Miss Pauling seems to do everything. She’s also a lesbian for some reason. Medic was genuinely a crazy bad guy for a few seconds until we were told that he just needed money, and isn’t the slightly-insane person depicted in other media. A wasted opportunity in my opinion. None of them seem to have the stamina that they have in other media and comics either.

But you know what? I can forgive the messing around with the lore as long as it doesn’t fuck around too much (I can just assume that BLU are different mercenaries or something). I honestly just want to find out what happens next. I’m tired of waiting.

Also, my bet is still on about Demoman defeating the robots with his alcoholic blood. If I’m wrong, then I’ll give a hat to a random SPUFer.

Hang on, maybe that’s why they’re taking so long, rewriting the comic to not match my predictions?

I hope not. Come on already, TF2 comic.