Ester is our colourist and is a huge part of our team whose style and artistry help shape the comic. We love her to bits, which is why it made perfect sense to us to ask if she'd like to produce a variant cover for the comic. We were thrilled when she said yes, and the final result was amazing. Read more »
Valve are very precious about their Half-Life IP. It’s a right they’ve earned by turning nearly every instalment into a candidate for one of the best games ever made. The purpose of a Half-Life instalment, it seemed, was to change the nature of the game - literally. Read more »
In our first encounter with the enemy, we get our asses kicked. Unarmed and vulnerable without the protective layers of the HEV suit, a small gang of metrocops are able to ambush and beat us to the floor. Given our last confrontation Read more »
With Half-Life: Alyx on the horizon, now feels like a good time to talk about canon. Canon – that collection of ideas, characters, and events held to be ‘official’ and existing within the creators’ universe. Which is to say Read more »
My involvement with Half-Life: A Place in the West started with some simple sound design – a cool sci-fi ambience for the original title screen of the app and some basic menu navigation sounds. It was a short but Read more »
If you’re reading this blog post then you probably know we’re remaking Chapters 1 and 2 of Half-Life: A Place in the West – Following Portents and A Very Modern Major-General, respectively. The short reason for this is that they no longer meet our expectations for the comic. But on the off-chance Read more »
I'd been awake only a few minutes when, lying in bed, I began to read former Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw's Episode 3 synopsis, coyly titled “Epistle 3”. At first, I was inclined to doubt. The possibility that it was an authentic document seemed remote, and to think otherwise Read more »
At the end of February 2016, we chose to launch the comic on Steam Greenlight. If you’re unfamiliar with Greenlight, it was a subsection of Valve’s digital distribution platform Steam that allowed content producers to submit their products for Read more »
When Mike and I first decided to produce A Place in the West, we’d been thinking about comics on and off since 2009. We had previously been developing our own sprawling science-fiction saga that we (erroneously) believed Read more »
The way Albert Kempinski tells it, you’d think he was the only victim of the planet-wide catastrophe known to the world of Half-Life as the Black Mesa Incident. Kempinski is so consumed by grief and loss that he has blinded himself to a most pertinent existential truth: in the world Read more »
We first set out to hire artists to make the first issue of Half-Life: A Place in the West back in early 2014. As with most things on this journey, we knew almost nothing about it, flew by the seat of our pants, made it up as we went along, and got incredibly lucky. Read more »