Dadspy

Fast Facts
Year	2018 (afterword in 2024)
Pages	8
Medium:	Pencil and watercolor with digital editing
Rating:	🍊 PG-13. Crude language, comic violence
Summary	Y'know how every Christmas they always got movies about a horrible no good deadbeat dad making up with his wife n' kids and they reconcile into one big happy family? This is a comic about denying that dad."
Tagged:	one-shot • sad!

Da Comic!

8 jpg images

Page one. 5 panel comic. 1. Scout is going home and smiling. He has one prosthetic leg. 'Chrimus is gonna be so dope. After 10 years out workin' for a living, sendin' money back to my ma, I've become a MAN! It's nice comin' back home to a familiar place. 2. Scout begins opening the door. 'Where it's nice n' warm and comfy and...' 3. He walks into the door and puts his hat up. 'Ma! I'm home!' Ma? 4. Close up on horrified Scout. 'M-ma...' 5. Scout cries and runs up the stairs. There is a christmas tree and wreath in the background.

6 panel comic. 1. Scout is crying on the bottom of his bunk bed. 2. The door creaks. A voice calls, 'dinner's ready. '. 3. Spy is in a apron in the open doorway. He says 'Your mother told me to come up and fetch you. Come down before it gets cold. '. 4. Close up of angry crying Scout. 5. Close up of grimacing spy. 6. Spy closes the door.

6 panel comic. 1. Scout walks down the stairs. 2. He goes to the dinner table, where his mom is cartoonishly drunk and Spy is serving food. Mom says 'Honey! I didn't know you was home! '. 3. Scout drools at the giant turkey. Mom says 'Isn't it AMAZING? He cooked EVERYTHING! '. 4. Top down view of dinner table with the family. Scout says 'Uh, yeah. Hey ma, where's our family? Y'know. My brudders? '. 5. Scout's mom is pensive, under a framed photo of many scouts of different sizes. 'They're with their own wife and children right now. ' 6. Scout's mom pinches Scout's cheek. 'Good thing my BABY BOY is here! ' Scout says 'Ma, I'm 30. '

6 panel comic. 1. Scout's mom holds up a wine glass, while Scout rubs his pinched cheek. Mom says 'You are, aren't ya? My baby's all grown up, ready to find a gal and settle down too. '. 2. Close up on Scout's mom, slight smile with closed eyes. 'I'm almost 50, I thought it was too late for me but well... ' 3. Scout's mom hugs Spy close to her cheek. 'He could be like a FATHER to ya! He'd be such a good dad, he was askin' when you'd come home all day! He cares SO much about ya already! '. 4. Mom clutches the nervous Spy to her cheek. 'And lemme tell ya, he REALLY cares 'bout me... 5. Scout runs away from the dinner table, eyes bugging out, sweating and red. He yells, Aw JEez! 6. He runs out the door and puts his coat on, bounding down the steps.

5 panel comic. 1. Scout is walking in the snow outside a white building with a statue of a lady in front. His face is shadowed. 2. Scout sits on the stairs under the lady statue. 3. A red hand hands a cap to scout. 'it'll be alright. '. 4. Looking up, we see Scout's snotty upset face, and Spy wearing a trenchcoat, handing Scout his hat. 5. Scout paps the hat out of Spy's hand, and looks away angrily. He says 'How long you been followin' me, man?! I get one vacation n' I still got ya ugly mug stalkin' me? '

4 panel comic. 1. Spy takes out his lighter and lights up his cigarette, standing next to scout. In the background is a faded flashback to the Meet The Spy SFM - the panel where Scout sees the photos of Scout's mom that Blu Spy took. Spy says 'My apologies. I thought you knew about your mother and I? We've been seeing each other for.. at least nine years now. 2. Scout screams angrily. 'Man! That don't mean NUTHIN'! Thought it was a joke! A one-time thing. ' 3. We look down at Scout, and focus on Spy's glove with a wedding band. Scout looks up. 'that ring parta you guys's ran-de-vooses? ' 4. Spy looks at his hand. '...I did not anticipate this either. If this goes through, it will be something new for both you and I. ' 5. Scout looks away again, another booger dripping from his nose. 'I don't want nothin' new. It was good before '.

2 panel comic. 1. Scout counts on his cartoon fingers, and imagines scenes of Spy hitting him on the face, creeping on Ms. Pauling, and stabbing Scout in the back. He says 'For the last, what, 11 years? Things made since between you n' me. Ya humiliate me, hit on my girl...n' kill me! ' 2. Spy peeres at Scout who is crying again, with his hands in his hoodie pocket. 'You bein' an ass made sense. What don't make no sense is you tryna pretend it's all 'pure family ' crap with me right now. '

2 panel comic. 1. We zoom out, the characters of Spy and Scout tiny in the snow. Scout walks away from spy. Scout's hat is on the ground next to Spy. The text reads 'You make my ma happy at least. But I don't want you tryna be my pop or givin' me life lessons. 2. Sad watercolor Scout in blue hoody leaving foot prints in the snow. He is crying and drooling and snotty. The text reads: It's different. It's not the same as when I was a kid. So it sucks, and I hate it.

Da End! New year, new dad! Ya can't pick ya family, but ya sure can get da heck out! Take yer ball n' go home!

Conclusion

written December 2024:

Hey! The 7th TF2 comic finally came out this month. And some aspects are follow the beats of those deadbeat dad Christmas specials I complain about in this comic.

I know what patterns writers follow to pull certain heartstrings, ESPECIALLY in this cursed month of December in the English language. They call it cheap pops in wrasslin y'know :P Say the name of the city you're in, get the crowd to cheer. Say happy Holidays and happy turkey dinner, get the crowd to go awww. It's a Charlie Brown Christmas Special~!

I'm glad that the comic's decade-long cliffhanger is done! I'm glad there's closure for those who need it in their ~canon~. And I'm glad that I still prefer the old open-ended game/sfm world to play with my characters in 😛 I personally prefer less explaination and lore. Even if the new ~official~ lore won't satisfy me as a disgusting gen wunner, I'm really glad the fanart and fanfiction era of 2007 was so creative and led to so many different interpetations of the enviroment and characters!

And I'm glad that the wild west wasteland of the 2007 era fed into my own creative process 😼 Both the fans and the Valve stuff! I have Ollie/Liv and Basile as my own characters outside of the TF2 universe. I love the absurdist violent humor of the game and I think that's fairly apparent in my non-fanart. And I love that other people have also been influenced by TF2 in the past, and make characters and stories in-and-out of the universe where I can see that same string of influence that I've had.

Cape comics are written by many different people, drawn by many different artists over many different eras. Batman in the 1940's is different that the 80's or 2020's. There are different timelines and universes for all those different creative versions, and I think that's really cool. That's probably the most inspriring creative thing for me -- a cast of characters (characters being a vague collection of personality traits) that reappear in different stories in different shapes and forms for different themes!

I think TF2 does that SO well with the games, SFMs, and the fan creations it inspired. The silly Spy in ElTorroRus64's "Spynapple Pizza" animation serves a different purpose than the sad Spy in KrasniyB's "Left Inside" animation. Everyone has their own version of Tentaspy. I don't have a strong connection to the TF2 comics characters of Jeremy or Ludwig, but I'll still love the core concept of the Scout or Medic to manipulate for our own purposes 💖

Extras!

Designs and thumbnails!

Wanted to keep the characters simple and cute, and wearing appropriate winter outfits based on game cosmetics! And make sure the color coding is as blunt as possible! RED Spy is the glaring intrusion in an all-BLU winter wonderland.

The first draft had Spy n' Scout's mom doing something more explicit. That's not suited for a family friendly Charlie Brown TV special though! I find thumbnailing the pages/panels helps me finish an entire comic MUCH easier, so I have guidelines and don't lose attention.

Thotful Spot

written December 2019:

Closing off 2018 with a TF2 comic, it was nice to get back into one of my oldest fandoms this year!

The biggest surprise to me back in April was reading that Spy was pretty much confirmed to be Scout's dad in the latest comic issue from 2017. BACK IN MY DAY (pre-tumblr 2007-2010), we didn't have many comics to draw lore from. All we had was the Jarate comic, the WAR! DemoSolly comic, and the iPod comic to supplement the SFMs! And lookit how much that has expanded!

So, here's my take on a Dad Spy comic. RED Spy and BLU Scout is the classic 2009 daddy dynamic. No reconciliation, no morals, no happy ending. Cuz lemme tellya, deadbeat dads ain't much fun n' games. I reject the Christmas movie narrative of "Dad reconciles with family"!!

One of my priorities in this lil' comic was giving a voice to Scout's mom. She doesn't get much agency or exploration in her role to Scout n' Spy. While the comics imply that Spy is Scout's biological father, I imagine her as a lonely older lady that somehow got into a tryst with a globe-hopping Spy just like the movies. An exciting rendevous right out of her romance novels that she's not willing to give up, even if she knows that Spy's unfaithful, unreliable, and untrustworthy (you think James Bond has just one Bond Girl?).

All her kids have grown up and flown the coop, and they send her money so she doesn't have to work. She has a lot of idle time but nothing to take care of with no husband or kids, and she was unfortunately raised in an era when women weren't taught to value themselves outside of their relationship to men or children. Having a forbidden romance adds excitement to her life, it's self-indulgent in a way she was never used to. She's not a completely bad mother, but she's caught up in her idle housewife fantasy and won't take the best care of her grown-up children as a result.

Spy's role in this is a plot device. He doesn't have much character involvement, much as he doesn't have much emotional involvement in this. He kinda cares about Scout in a guilty sorta "sorry you were roped into this" kinda way, and he can put on all the romantic affects for Scout's mom. But he can just as easily abandon this family just as he's abandoned many others before. Begone, THOT.

Scout's a filthy gen wunner, he doesn't understand or accept the new pokeyman games cuz they're not as cool as the RBY cartridges he had as a kid :) Completely blindsided, while everyone else is tutting that he shoulda seen this coming. Hey, the guy was at war for a decade! He lost a limb n' he's got post-traumatic stress n' he might be overreacting and being a crybaby cuz of that, give the dude a break! The core of Scout's issue is that he doesn't want to accept a mom and family that's different from his childhood memories. And he def doesn't want to accept a mom that's sexually active (with a dude he hates!) when he thought she wouldn't ever move on to someone else after her husband died. He's upset at his worldview being shattered, and he's upset cuz he constantly walks into his mom having sexual congress. That'll break a man.

What can Scout do after this? Distract himself with work, try to make his own family to forget about his old one? Well, it's not like you can just go find a wife and pop out babies. Scout's destined to be a bachelor for life anyways. He doesn't hate his mom or anything, he just doesn't want to participate in this family anymore. It's an open-ended confusing situation for him. Do what's best for yourself, you're a grown man now Charlie Brown!

Watercoloring this was a fun idea that was more bothersome in action. Hard to keep consistent from page-to-page, hard to scan, and I don't really have the patience or time to wait for colors to dry. I think next time I might just do digital colors, or B/W tones if I must go traditional. Well, ya know I always prefer the look and feel of working traditionally than digitally.

Now that I'm finally done with this comic...time to work on the 78 other comic WIPs. Have a nice rest of ya winter!

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