StarCraft: Kerrigan -- Hope and Vengeance free on Comixology
This week, we had patch 5.2 to contend with, but next week it's all about the launch of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm for plenty of players. Blizzard has been slowly releasing promotional material for the new game, including a new cinematic and a pretty fascinating viral advertising campaign called Project Blackstone, which is still being updated as the time ticks down to Heart of the Swarm's launch. And now we have another piece -- a comic about Kerrigan and a glimpse at what she's been through that takes place at some point after she was rescued at the end of Wings of Liberty.
Kerrigan -- Hope and Vengeance #0 is a relatively short comic, but the art and writing is top-notch. And here's the kicker -- it's absolutely free. You don't have to pay for the comic, you simply plunk it in your cart, checkout and read. The comic is a fairly brisk 8 pages, but with a story by Cameron Dayton and some really stunning art by Zoddd, not to mention the absence of a price tag, this is a nice treat for StarCraft fans.
To my knowledge, this is the first time Blizzard's ever offered a free digital comic of this scope. And it does make one wonder.
Although we've had plenty of free written material in the form of short stories on the official website, we haven't seen any free comic offerings like this. Could this be Blizzard's first steps into the realm of webcomics? More importantly, could we see comics like this for the WoW universe in the future?
The official WoW comic series ended with a one-shot released in 2009. Since then, we haven't heard a peep regarding Warcraft comics, other than the elusive Dark Riders graphic novel slated for released this May. While the comics themselves received mixed reviews, they were a really good way to introduce lore, and an even better method of doing it. Don't get me wrong, I love the short stories, but I'd love to see more comic books, too. And if they were short offerings in the style of the latest StarCraft release, that would be pretty fantastic.
Although the fate of WoW's comics is still shrouded in mystery, the newest release for Heart of the Swarm is a gorgeous offering. Pick up your copy of Kerrigan -- Heart of the Swarm over on Comixology for free and check it out. We'll just have to wait and see if anything will come out of this for Warcraft fans -- but I'm hoping this is a good omen of things to come.
