FILE 2: MURDER ON HOLD

This File was originally made in the middle of what was supposed to be File 2, now Plan no Plan.

A little context: the original plan for COOPER BULLET was to make a dozen or so short comics, and every once in a while I'd release a longer >30 page comic for important story beats or whatnot. Murder on Hold is born from that plan. It's a short, 7-page comic about Arthur being interrupted by Jenny and losing his target in the process.

But then it released, and there was little to no fanfare. Plan No Plan came out later and it usurped any relevance File 2 wanted to have. Then came Robbery Gunchild. And then came my current magnum opus (as of January 2026) Kinder than Man. And as more comics came out, and to borrow a quote from Lemony Snicket (who had influenced the comic during its early stages down to Jennifer Austere's name), File 2 didn't just fall by the wayside, it fell off it. Completely irrelevant.

And why should it? There was nothing special about it. No cool pages because it didn't need any, no animated teasers because there was nothing to tease. I'd occasionally forget it was a thing that existed. And a friend noted how this felt like a speedbump, going from the 17-page affair of Casual Casualty to the whopping 30-something paged File 3. It was awful.

So I made a decision to go back, touch up on some weird shit and extend it. And maybe hopefully it would be a more readable comic by then.

You can read more about my thoughts on File 2 in this blog post. I hope my audience is as autistically inclined as I am to read more text.