Tree-Killers: The Valve Comic Collection

Over the last few years, Valve have been quietly honing the fine art of viral marketing in an online age, and comics have been a big part of that. A cartel of in-house writers and the excellent pencils of Michael Avon Oeming (and others) have created some rather splendid words'n'pictures. Of course, they were merely digital. HOW DARE YOU INSULT OUR EYEBALLS WITH YOUR CRUMMY JPEGS? Why, that's for philistines and people too damned lazy to turn paper pages. This horrendous oversight and offence to everything that some angry guy somewhere probably holds dear is about to be corrected, thanks to a hardback compilation of Valve's various Portal, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 comics due from august comic publisher Dark Horse later this year.

Headlining this $30 collection is The Sacrifice, the lengthy, funny and moving saga of flashback and tragedy which provided a coda (or at least as much as we're likely to get for some time) to the bloody tale of the original Left 4 Dead survivors.

I'd guess Portal 2's Lab Rat is also in there, along with any number of Team Fortress 2 funnybook vignettes. At last! You too can physically caress the impossible torso of Saxton Hale, albeit in paper form. Still, it's a step up from licking your monitor.

And that's all we know. Though given we've all read (presumably) all of the comics, we know quite a lot really. Oh: also, it's 304 pages long and goes on sale on November 16.