Compiled comic download?

The whole storyline is just stuff we pick up from bios and flavor text.

...and quotes from GtG.

and compiled on the wiki!

seriously though, the comics are an afterthought, a kickstarter reward. i believe they plan on more in the future, but they are a game design company first and comic studio a distant second

Well ... yes, but ...

they are artists and storytellers before, even, before being game designers, so to some degree the game _and_ the comics are really just avenues to laying out the art and the story. The game does, though, certainly come before the comics.

I still want more comics though...

I'd be 100% supportive of any Sentinels comics entering my life.  Hopefully they'll offer more down the line.

We will!

YAY!!!!!!!

See, you got a big yay from the person who doesn't like comics. 

No. Consider yourself banned - please leave the internet immediately by the nearest exit. 

Yeah Comics!

That is exciting news; I would cry a glorious fountain of tears if they were in physical form.

Of course digital is great too; any amount of extra Sentinels exposure = good.

Forgive me for being the one to say it, but the Freedom Four comic was really not that spectacular.  It gives a little added detail about the backstory, which is nice, but as a work of graphic literature, it was fairly passable; had I actually paid for it, I'd have likely not felt it was worth the price (much as I feel about many bargain-bin comics I've picked up over the years; they have some merit, but I might rather have had the dollar or so I paid for them, and kept a millimeter of space on my shelves free).  If there are to be future SOTM comics, I hope that they will take a bit of an uptick in quality compared to this first effort...even if they're just free incentives, they should be taken seriously and treated as ambassadors for the product, therefore making them as excellent as possible.  (Back when I followed Magic: the Gathering, they had some very high-quality webcomics featuring their "planeswalker" characters; naturally >G doesn't have as much manpower and cash to throw around as Wotco, but we know that Badell and Rebottaro are capable of great storytelling and great art, as evinced in the game's art and flavor text, so my hope is that they'll bring at least their "B Game" when making the new comics, maybe not working quite as hard as they do on the game but at least coming close, whereas the F4A was well short of their potential, I feel certain.)

Has the awesomeness level of the universe just gone up, or down?

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone saying they didn't like the comic. I don't think it's entirely fair to compare the comic to stuff done by Marvel or any other professional company since the art department of Greater than Games is just one guy. For what was presumably a one man project, the comic was very well drawn. My only problem with it is that it tells an incomplete story, and I would really love to see the rest of it. I think they chose to go with the story they did because 1) It was about the formation of the Freedom Four which were characters everyone in the fandom was familiar with and liked, and 2) it didn't reveal or spoil any of the plot of the metanarrative taking place in the card game. The only real new piece of information we got was Bunker's underwater suit. Keep in mind too that for some people they had literally been playing Sentinels for years before the comic came out, it was a stretch goal for the Infernal Relics kickstarter, and so it was just enough to see characters they loved in an actual comic book setting.

I'm not trying to just shoot down your opinion, Envisioner, but I'm trying to give you some context as to why the comic was highly anticipated and generally well received.

Envisioner's post made it go up. But this post made it go right back down.

And due to the billions upon billions of things that happen in the universe every single second, all impacting the universe's level of awesome, isolating the exact perturbation caused by a given forum post is almost impossible.

I'm not even saying the comic is bad, just that it's not incredibly good.  I'm glad that it exists, but we know that we can expect better from these guys, and I'm a little sad that the stars didn't align thus that they could produce a literary tour-de-force, instead of just a little something extra.  If you showed the comic to someone who didn't know anything of the game, I doubt that they'd say "my god this is better than Kurt Busiek and Warren Ellis, I must own everything these creators make".  I believe Badell has the chops to stand among the giants of the comic industry, like Moore and Gaiman and Morrison and Willingham, but this comic isn't what proves it, the game is.  You have to love the game first, then the comic is sort of neat, but in an ideal world, the comic would be good enough that it could make you want to try the game, and I really don't think that'll ever happen.

None of this is a big issue for the F4A, of course, because it only exists on the game's website.  But still, the paranoid part of my mind says that if someone wanted, for whatever reason, to hurt the SOTM franchise a little, they could go to Kinko's and print off 1000 copies of this comic, staple them together and distribute them at conventions, hoping to fool some people who didn't know the game into thinking that THIS was the level of quality involved in everything that the company did.  I remember fondly when I'd go to conventions and find these kinds of advertising mass giveaways; they were seldom very good ambassadors for the product.  While a stunt like this would probably bring in a few people who liked the comic, it would probably also convince several people that Sentinel Comics were just a lame rehash of the Justice League, whose only original ideas were making the Flash analogue a lesbian and giving Lex Luthor a goatee (and the latter is not exactly a step away from cliche, if taken in a vacuum); it would poison the well in any future attempt to win them over to a good opinion of what they had first seen in this underwhelming form.  And, pessimist that I am, I suspect that the net effect would be more negative than positive, that the no-sales would outstrip the new-attractees from such a stunt.  I believe that the only way you can be sure that your product will inevitably win over the fickle masses is if it's absolutely top notch in quality all the time.

The context that you mention is important, Nielzabub.  But we live in an age when people's on-air quotes are frequently recorded and spliced to create a false scandal, and those are the realities of today; it is increasingly dangerous for anyone to ever say or do anything that isn't a shining, Platonically-ideal jewel of irreducible greatness.  Creators today have to be careful of how their audience will react...that's why I question whether this comic ought to have been left in the proverbial oven a little longer, to ensure it was baked to perfection, before anyone was given the chance to sample it.

Why thank you.

I rather liked the annual, personally. But I don't like comics, so I'm not exactly the target audience anyway. 

In a normal comic cycle that story would be much longer and fleshed out.  For what they were doing, it was awesome, mostly because we got to see the F4 in a comic and see them interact.  Also Tachyon getting fleshed out a bit was awesome, that comic changed my enjoyment of her deck a lot, who can read that comic and not think about snacks the next time they play Tachyon.  Running for food after ending your turn is pretty much required.

There is nothing but the annual (and the divider art) that involves her and food.

Lets keep things within some semblance of perspective here. The online comic is a suppliment for the card game and its lore, not the other way around. With that said, measuring its worth against Marvel/DC books is not exactly a fair comparison when their purpose and focus is much different. It gave life and personality to otherwise unknown static character faces printed on card stock. In that regard it was quite a successful suppliment which happened to use the narrative form that the game tries to emulate. 

I did like Tachyon's stream-of-consciousness, that was probably the best part of the whole comic.  It just wasn't enough to make me think the whole thing was a work of genius...we see flickers of goodstuff, but it never really came together to the same degree as the game.

I already pointed out a much more on-the-nose parallel, the Magic: the Gathering webcomics.  Those are also free, existing only to showcase characters from the card game and pander to players' desire for story, and the first couple are not especially good either; it took them a while to hit their stride, but eventually they really took off.  (Unfortunately, I think the era has passed due to fickle management and poor finances, but it was great while it lasted.)  With luck, the same thing may happen here.

The comic was as good as it really needed to be given that it was a free stretch reward done to show appreciation to the fans for donating so much. If they ever did do a serious publication run or a full story arc though, I would probably be much more judgemental and demand more of the content.

How many people were working on the MTG webcomics though?  Keep in mind again, the F4A was the work of one artist whose primary concerns were (and are) to make their card game as great as possible and to help run an entire business. The F4A web comic was, considering how large his work load must have been during the time, a side-project to serve as a little reward for kickstarter backers.  I'm sure the webartists for MTG were not co-founders of the company, doing some art in their limited free time; they were likely hired on to do the comics and only that.

If they do start doing comics more often they may even need to hire another artist or so, ones that could mimic Adam's art style. There's already 1 person on BGG making custom decks that seems similar to his art style.