Blizz details Overwatch comics and animated shorts

Blizzard builds enduring franchises through colourful characters and tomes of lore, and it looks like Overwatch has been pegged for a permanent place in the hallowed family of Warcraft, Diablo and Starcraft. In the run-up to release we can expect a series of animated shorts and six free digital comics zoning in on different heroes. Maybe we’ll get the origin story on Tracer’s horrible British accent.

The first of the shorts goes live this month, and later in the year they’ll be joined by a graphic novel titled Overwatch: First Strike which digs into the backstory of Soldier: 76, Torbjörn, Reaper, and Reinhardt as they battle the robot uprising decades before the events of the game. Ludo Lullabi will be the artist, and seeing as he handled World of Warcraft: The Comic, I’d say that’s a safe pair of hands. Safer still, it’s being written by Micky Neilson, Blizzard’s lead writer in publishing and story lead for Hearthstone.