W.i.p feel Free-man for requesting editorship

About

The Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman, or just simply called Concerned, is a webcomic-parody of the Valve's second installment of the Half-Life series.

Origin

The webcomic was created by Christopher C. Livingston in the sandbox program called Garry's Mod. Concerned is called to be a Gamic (Game + Comics = Gamics).The gamic ended in November 5, one year after the first issue's release. Currently it contains 206 issues, including Issue 0 and the acknowledgments.

Plot

The comic centered around a citizen called Gordon Frohman, a Combine enthusiast who in fact is the complete opposite of Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of the Half-Life's main series (HL1, HL2, Ep 1, Ep 2, et al). The story starts not long before the arrival of Gordon Freeman, and after the arrival of Gordon Frohman. Frohman is obssesed with the Combine^[1] and he tries to became one of their soldiers. Through the story he makes some accidents which leads, for example, to the destruction of Ravenholm. Also he survives normally deadly hazards for a normal citizen (i. e. A headcrab attaches to his head but he manages to take it off from his head or falling down from high places like the Dark Fusion Reactor in the Citadel^[2].), however in the end it was revealed, he forgot to turn off the 'Buddha Mode', a cheat prevents the user's health points to fall below 1 point. Through his journey, Frohman halfly destroys the Black Mesa East with the Gravity gun, crosses several Counter-Strike:Source servers, starting off the uprising by accidentally killing a Metrocop with one of the Antlions controlled by him, survives a Dark Energy explosion after he spent too much time to come up with a one-liner, and kills Dr.Breen--who in fact survived the blast too--by falling on him. And at the end, he commit "suicide" by turning the 'Buddha Mode' off.

Sequel

The Concerned also has an unofficial sequel, the Concerned 2. This wasn't created by Livingstone or by anyone associated with him. It was cancelled due to the lack of interest. And it has only just 61 issues.

Reception

The webcomic get good reviews by both the critics^[3] and the community of the Half-Life series. Also the Valve's developer Marc Laidlaw was a big fan of this comic series. The Valve also planned to make a printed version of the Concerned, but this plan was scraped later due to the low resultion of the comic, made it impossible to print it out^[4].

External references

^[1] Combine – Combine Overwiki

^[2] Citadel – Combine Overwiki

^[3] Gamics – Web Archives

^[4] 1Fort, interview with Christopher Livingstone – Web Archives