The Naked and the Dead

The Naked and the Dead
Comic Strip Info
Released:	January 10th, 2017
Number of pages:	274
Artist:	Heather "makani" Campbell
Writer:	Jay Pinkerton & Erik Wolpaw
Colorist:	Maren Marmulla

The Naked and the Dead (also known as Team Fortress Comics #6) is a comic released on January 10th, 2017. It is the penultimate issue of a seven-part comic series, picking up where Old Wounds left off.

Synopsis

The comic begins with Miss Pauling's hallucination, while she is bleeding out and unconscious after the attack of the Classic Team's leech robots. She wakes up in a desert with a disembodied door before her, which she enters. Behind this door is the Administrator's control room. After a brief exchange, Miss Pauling admits her failure to obtain the final stash of Australium to the Administrator, and questions the Administrator about what she truly wants; however, Miss Pauling is revived abruptly by the Medic, who saves her by placing the blood drained from the robots back in her body, and then proceeds to revive Soldier in a similar manner. When Miss Pauling questions Medic on how he managed it, Demoman is seen fighting and destroying the rest of the robots, and the Medic responds that the robots have been poisoned and weakened by the high alcoholic-content of Demoman's blood. In Demoman's own hallucination, his liver is revealed to be functional again, while the rest of the body tries to distill its own alcohol.

Meanwhile, the Classic Mercenaries confront TFC Heavy about how they will receive their payment after he killed Gray Mann. TFC Heavy angrily persuades them that the Life-Extender device was worth going without pay, but the TFC Engineer is reluctant to agree. Frustrated, TFC Heavy commands the TFC Engineer to reactivate the rest of Gray's Robots to kill the current mercenaries, and he complies.

The comic cuts back to the original group, with Scout and Heavy parachuting down to Miss Pauling. As Scout hugs Pauling, Medic reveals that she should no longer be hugged as the action squeezes some of the replaced blood out of her eyes. Heavy greets his sister Zhanna, but is surprised that she had lost a hand, and then gets annoyed at the realization that she had become engaged with Soldier, and they plan to have children. Scout reveals to Pauling about the discovery of the Australium being stolen, and that Saxton Hale and his partner Maggie were on the island as well, presumably having jumped off the plane at the same time as him and Heavy. However, they are rudely interrupted upon turning around, a hoard of reactivated Gray Mann robots approaching and Saxton Hale and Maggie nowhere to be seen.

The comic cuts to Saxton Hale and Maggie in Hale's plane, who were too engrossed with talking to follow Scout and Heavy, who had jumped off an hour ago. After their pilot Jerry notifies them that they were out of fuel, Hale and Mags drop Mann Co. ammunition and weapon crates to the mercenaries below, before jumping from the plane (along with Jerry) to aid them in fighting the robots. Unfortunately, TFC Sniper is watching the battle and preparing to shoot Heavy, before a knock at the door from Spy disguised as TFC Engineer distracts him, in an attempt to bait him into being ambushed by Sniper, who was standing outside the door. Due to TFC Sniper's mechanical eyes, Spy's disguise fails to trick him, and TFC Sniper shoots Spy in the knee. Sniper runs to another room, breaks the window and tries to climb round the building to surprise TFC Sniper. The Spy distracts TFC Sniper by asking him for a cigarette as a final request, which buys enough time for Sniper to enter a window, take TFC Sniper's rifle, and kill TFC Sniper with a headshot without any hesitance.

Back at the battleground, Demoman takes cover while Medic stitches up a wound in his leg. It is revealed that Demoman has a cursed eye socket which causes any replacement eye the Medic gives him to mutate on Halloween night, attacking the team in various ways. To prevent Demoman from questioning him, Medic also reveals that he had removed part of Demoman's brain which remembers the events. After promptly forgetting the recent events, Demoman walks away, giving TFC heavy an opportunity to threaten Medic into placing the Life-Extender device into him. Medic instead attacks him with his Ubersaw, but fails to kill him. Heavy attempts to save Medic, but TFC Heavy shoots Medic fatally with a Pistol. Enraged, Heavy attacks him.

The comic moves to TFC Soldier and TFC Scout in a weapons storage room, who are presumably killed by Pyro as seen by the giant fire in the background.

Then the comic moves to Scout moving to a "less naked fighting place" while Pauline just gawks in awe as Zhanna and Soldier fight while nude and covered in Honey. Saxton and Maggie follow suit, just with clothes on and only using fists.

The comic turns to the more violent side as Heavy, in a burst of outrage starts brutally beating TFC Heavy, despite TFC heavy's efforts to negotiate his way through. As Heavy starts to finish the job and states that he doesn't care if he has an immortality machine, TFC heavy killed his friend and pal Medic. TFC Heavy then inserts the Australium machine into his body giving him some power, enough to start brutally beating Heavy to the ground.

The comic takes a shift as Sniper and Spy come across some dead spy-bots. Sniper asks about Spy's suit, and both come across a drastic discovery: Scout is close to death. Not knowing what to do, Spy disguises himself as Tom Jones and gives Scout his dream passing. Spy reveals that he is in fact Scout's father, and he tried to avoid Scout for 27 years, and he regrets that entirely. He is finally overall proud of what he believes scout had become as he passed.

The comic cuts to black and comes back to Scout, who is now in heaven. God (or at least Scout's interpretation of him) says that he didn't create scout to live just so he would blow off all the time and not bang a girl, in which Scout comes back to reality and Spy gets scout off his feet and over to Medic so that he can heal scout. Begrudgingly. 

Transcript

Due to the length of this comic, a transcript is necessary. The transcript has been sectioned into smaller story events for convenience.