I doubt there’s even one gamer out there unaware of Team Fortress 2‘s enormous Internet presence, whether that be because of the game or the memes. Still, many don’t know about the Team Fortress 2 comic, which is a shame because it’s awesome, is made by top talent like Jay Pinkerton, Eric Wolpaw, Maren Marmulla, Heather Campbell, Bernardo Brice and Tiana Oreglia — and it also, seemingly, just finished its amazing run with a great closer.
It’s also fair that you once knew of the comic’s existence but have since forgotten — or thought Valve had just canned the whole thing after a dormancy period of seven years. But that’s not the case. Issue 7 is finally out. It’s marvelous, and Valve had a few informative, hilarious, and even intriguing words to say about it.
The blog post mentions how the Leaning Tower of Pisa was only completed long after the people who’d set out to make it were long dead. That’s a hilariously not humble way of telling people not to complain about how long it took to culminate the TF2 comic, but it leads to an even more interesting bit of writing:
“And, honestly, we can think of another, much more popular project we’re involved with that you’re STILL waiting on…”
And yeah, that’s by far the most hype-worthy sentence I’ve heard coming out of Valve in over a decade, but it’s actually the setup for a joke:
“…The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which began construction in 1886 and still isn’t done, and which the Spanish government hired us to write a delay-themed blog post about after seeing an early draft of the blog post you’re reading right now.”
Or is it? Only time will tell.
Either way, this is the end of an era, a beautiful time when a game company took to make a comic just because it thought fans would appreciate seeing the world of such a seemingly simple online shooter fleshed out in an original and exciting manner. In many ways, the TF2 comic walked before Arcane could run and do backflips.
This might also spell something grim about the future of TF2, now that Valve is putting effort on Deadlock and hopefully more Half-Life stuff.
You can read the final Team Fortress 2 comic here.
