Interview: How Half-Life Fans Are Expanding The Universe With Their Comic
“Half-Life is about the triumph and positive use of science, standing against the Combine’s cold and deterministic use,” Half-Life: A Place in the West writer Ross Joseph Gardner tells me. “The revolutionary science team of Half-Life is driven by empathy and even though they’re vastly and hilariously outnumbered, that imaginative ability to use science is what I loved about Half-Life 2.”
Every fan has their hook, something that draws them into the world of Half-Life and keeps them coming back for more—keeps them creating more. That was true even when no games were coming out. For me, it’s the characters and their unspeakably tight bond in the face of insurmountable hardship, something that Gardner and Michael Pelletier honed in on in their officially-licensed comic. It’s set in America, a wasteland abandoned even by the Combine and now ruled by the remnants of the US military. The Citadel never arrived there, appearing only in ghostly flashes, while a large community has formed and fallen into dystopia as they struggle to survive and give their fleeting existence some form of purpose.
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“We knew we needed to get away from Eastern Europe—we needed to leave that continent and go across the world to somewhere else,” Gardner says. “Mike lives in Boston. He’s from a small town called Lowell. Franklin [where the comic is set] is a town south of there and when we were discussing the kind of story we wanted, we had the character of Albert Kempinski and Major General Long, the head of the soldiers who stormed the Black Mesa facility. We knew if we wanted to explore those soldiers and the story with Kempkinski, America offered a thematic grounding
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