is there really no thread about Concrete?

I've only read the first fat trade. It's sweet and very well drawn, but didn't get me clamouring for more.

what he said though I would have gotten more if any of them were still in print at the time. ditto flaming carrot :(((

The best episode was the one were he went through puberty - he seems to be pretty good at sitcomish dynamics.

I tried the first collection and it just didn't grab me. I suspect it's like the Hernandez brothers stuff--I know there'd be cool stuff coming later on, but it's such a chore to wade through the early stuff that I can't be arsed.
Nice art, though.

flaming carrot (if it's what I am thinking of) is available as a collected volume now.

I dunno it is cute and I like it, but then I spent half of that trip to the comic shop wading through a comic about a lesbian cult that summons the ghost of elizabeth bathory. :/

the latest Carrot trade (wot you are probably thinking of) is the very sub-par recent Image series, not mental '80s classicness

The few Concrete collections I've read I've liked quite a lot. I love the slow, peaceful, positive tone of the series, plus I think it's wonderful how much variation Chadwick gets from the simple premise of having a protagonist with an inhuman body. I sorta see Concrete as a more optimistic flipside to all those dark, cynical "what if superheroes existed in the real world?" stories of the 80s and early 90s.

The only one I've read was dreadful -- I think it involved a holdup at a gas station or something. Does anyone know the one? Are there better stories? I remember Alan Moore used to namedrop Concrete (and Hate) all the time in the early nineties, so it can't be that bad, shurely?

a comic about a lesbian cult that summons the ghost of elizabeth bathory

This sounds hilarious. Why did Hammer not make a film with this plot?

I love Concrete, for exactly the reasons Tuomas mentioned.

He had a baby!

a comic about a lesbian cult that summons the ghost of elizabeth bathory

I've never read Concrete, but it sounds good.

It's like if The Thing were the only superhero in the world, only he couldn't overcome his essentially bookish, nebbishy personality. It's tough to come up with a literary equivalent of Concrete's interior self - Ron something, his name is. He's a genuinely smart but kind of naive guy, left leaning, highly environmentalist, but also very shy and somewhat withdrawn by nature, and his transplant into a powerful, indestructible body is almost more of a crippling disability than an invitation for superheroics. He does have some rollicking adventures, but he fails more than he succeeds at just about everything. I forget the name of the miniseries mentioned above where his personal assistant is carjacked and Concrete rescues him, but it is certainly one of the least interesting points of the series. I'd get the complete short stories vol. 1 for a start, but honestly the last few years worth of minis have been some of the best stuff yet - especially his dabbling in ecoterrorism (Think Like a Mountain) and population control (The Human Dilemma.) I know this makes it sound like a pedantic 'issue' comic, and I guess it is a little bit, but it's also really excellent.

I remember the original series and the shorts that were in Dark Horse Presents all being excellent.

the latest Carrot trade (wot you are probably thinking of) is the very sub-par recent Image series, not mental '80s classicness

-- energy flash gordon, Thursday, January 10, 2008 12:52 AM (Thursday, January 10, 2008 12:52 AM)

actually the one I saw was put out by dark horse??

This sounds awesome, tell me more.

-- Leee, Thursday, January 10, 2008 12:26 PM (Thursday, January 10, 2008 12:26 PM)

there's a part where the old nurse at the all-girls school the cult is based out of talks about how the girls are having "kinky sex"

actually the one I saw was put out by dark horse??

OK yes then! DH did maybe as many as four collections of the good good early issues

(they work a lot less well in collected form though - the dosage is too high, there's no covers or other general-Burden-ness to give you another angle on his head, etc)

All well and good jessie but what's the name of the title??

Hack (knife) Slash I think.

So, I finally read The Human Dilemma, and it was quite good. Chadwick's story-telling methods (the third person narrative, thought bubbles, explaining things in wordy panels, etc.) are kinda old-school, but actually the comic's quite endearing because of that. The ending could've been a bit less melodramatic, but in I liked the slow-paced, ponderous tone of the story, which has always suited Concrete the best. (This is one reason why I didn't like Killer Smile that much.) One minor grief, though, is that I didn't really find the character of Astra is three-dimensional at all. She seemed to to function mostly as a kind of a male fantasy of a perfect woman. In fact I think Chadwick might be a bit of an old perv the same way he's made Conrete to be; even though the comic goes against the grain of American mainstream comics in most ways, it seems he still can't help making all the female characters pretty and sexy. That said, I did like the way Chadwick finally resolved the issue of Concrete's feelings towards Maureen. It was so simple and sweet, and not at all dramatic in the way one might've expected it to be after all these years.

And speaking of years, since the ending of the story was left quite open, I wonder when the next Concrete series will come out? Seems like Chadwick really isn't hurrying things with it, even though Concrete's quite obviously his magnum opus. In fact I can't find much evidence of him doing any comic work these days. How does he spend his days?

Back when he was doing Concrete, his day job was storyboarding and production design for movies - as of a few years ago, it was running the Matrix online game, but I don't know if that's still going; if not, I imagine he's working on some other MMORPG.

"In fact I can't find much evidence of him doing any comic work these days."

Depending on how far back you view 'these days', but I noticed in reading the third 'Y the Last Man' Trade that Paul Chadwick did artwork on the two part story dealing with the theater troupe.

On a scarcely related topic:

Does anyone know where I can find scans of those "A Sky Of Heads" backup stories? I used to have a few of them in some trades but I can't find them anymore. One in particular involved a vast robotic dungeon full of perils - I think Chadwick recycled the idea for "The World Below" (I'd love to have gotten more of that series, too.)

I think most if not all of the "Sky of Heads" stories are collected in the new, smaller-sized Concrete TPBs. The one with the robotic dungeon is definitely in one of those, though I can't remember which one.

"In fact I can't find much evidence of him doing any comic work these days."

He wrote a couple of the Star Wars comics in 2003 or so. He still posts to his blog on occasion.

I super love the natural world intruding on the foreground and background of his panels and pages, usually as symbolism/commentary.

MOAR CONKREET, PLZ, MR CHAWDICK!