Second Overwatch Ana comic comes with unintended surprise

Blizzard has released another comic in its Overwatch series, and the second about new character Ana. (Here’s the first part, if you’re just getting caught up now.) This installment, the eighth in the series, features Ana and Soldier 76 reuniting again. There are guns and interpersonal conflicts, the works. But this issue came with an unexpected surprise.

Blizzard has been so effective at training its fans to be ever vigilant, always on the hunt for clues, that it accidentally pointed internet Sherlocks towards an email address of another user.

Someone extracted images from the comic’s PDF download and discovered that the background static on the cover seen below (this is the updated version!) was created using a garbled login screen from an old version of World of Warcraft. From there, an email address was extracted and matched to a blog using reverse image search and, by this point, it seemed certain this was all related to the ongoing Sombra ARG until ...

Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan replied in the forums:

We had nothing to do with that. That whole development is a surprise to us and we would never direct people at a player's account. Please do not email that address or try to log into that account. It's not related to any of the Sombra hints.

"Sombra hints you say?" the next poster immediately responded. "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)"

As soon as it was clear that the email address in question had nothing to do with the game’s marketing, the unscrambled images were removed from their various homes and that user — who undoubtedly got some emails from curious fans — hopefully found some privacy once again.

You can read the PDF, embedded below, or go straight to Blizzard’s site for the entire series.