I know, I’m veering a little from the “indie” ideal that I’m trying to promote here. I don’t care. This page is dedicated to bringing small press things to the attention of a larger audience, true. However, I’m also here to show what I believe are the best comics currently on the market. And while Concrete hasn’t had anything new in a couple of years, it’s still widely overlooked and one of the better books of the past 15 years. If you passed it up because you think that it’s just some stupid superhero who’s covered in cement, well, you’re in for quite a surprise. If you pick up a volume or two, that is.
I guess you’d have to call this the “origin” story, for lack of a better term. This book wonderfully shows how a regular human being deals with being cut off from certain sensations by being trapped in an alien body, conceivably for the rest of his life.
And to think that I was talking shit about this book not being as polished as his later works. It’s not, I guess, but that doesn’t take away any of its charm. This is the original ten issue series from Dark Horse all in one volume, and it’s big. It tells the tale of Concrete scaling Mount Everest, attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean, helping a troubled farm out, freeing some trapped miners, being the bodyguard for a rock star, and telling his origin story to Larry. If these all seem like fantastic adventures, they really don’t feel that way in the book. That’s the beauty of this work. The main character is so down to earth that nothing fantastic that he ever does seems like something that the average person wouldn’t try, if given the same opportunity. I did mention at some point that he’s not a superhero of any kind, right?
The best parts of this book are the quiet parts. Concrete eyeing Larry when he meets his (unknowing) love interest, or his fear of scaring little children, or even the exact moment when he knows that he has jumped too far while avoiding the cops and he sighs before falling into a swimming pool. It’s the little things that make characters human, and these little things are done to perfection. I said before that this might not be the best starting point for this series because the writing and the art both get so much better in the later series. That’s true, but this is a good starting point. It may get a lot better, but this stuff is pretty damned good in its own right. And this way you get to see his evolution as a being who is trapped in a giant concrete shell, instead of picking it up at a later point and trying to figure out what’s going on. This isn’t the best book I’ve ever seen at dealing with interpersonal relationships, Love and Rockets takes the cake for that. But this series is one that I look forward to coming out more than most, and the lack of anything new for the last couple of years has been tough. This is quite possibly the best “ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances” story ever done in any genre, and that’s saying a lot when you look at all the movies I’ve watched and all the books I’ve read. If there are people out there who hate this book, please, let me know. I want to hear any possible argument against this series as being (all around) one of the best comics series ever.
Concrete – Think Like a Mountain
My personal favorite of the Concrete books. He spends time with a group of radical environmentalists and has to choose between doing what he thinks is morally right and what is legal. Fascinating and compelling.
Concrete is commissioned to do stunts for a low budget sci-fi movie. Naturally, things get more complicated than that.
Complete Concrete Short Stories 1986-1989
It’s usually not a good sign when the author says in his introduction that he never had any intention of doing short stories with his character. It’s a good thing he did though, and he readily admits that later on. It helps a lot to have read the first book of Concrete before you read this, but it’s far from essential. A couple of things are mentioned, like his transatlantic swim and his experience on a movie set (from Fragile Creature, which wasn’t done until three years after the introduction was done) that it helps to know a little bit, but only in passing. And, as with all collections of short stories, the quality varies. Different stories were obviously done for different things. The enviromentalism short Stay Tuned for Pearl Harbor was probably good at the time but seems dated now. Of course, I remember reading science fiction stories from the 60’s and 70’s that had the same message and they were ignored too.
My favorite piece in the book (and I wasn’t expecting this at all, I remembered it as being Little Pushes) was probably the last one in the book, Visible Breath. A simple tale of Maureen and Larry stopping at a hotel for the night with Concrete staying out in the bushes to avoid paying a hefty insurance fee to have him sleep in the room. All of his fears about Maureen falling for Larry come to the surface and there’s also an adventure with a drunken man trying to find his room. Quiet and funny, it’s this kind of story that makes Concrete great. There’s plenty of good stuff in here. The two stories with the sitcom about the talking heads was obviously barely connected to Concrete at all, but they were both OK stories. We get to see Concrete try to fit in at a party and on a beach and fail miserably. We get to see his biggest fan, a Ms. Strangehands, and her thoughts about what kind of a man he really is.
There’s nothing really holding this book together though, and that’s its biggest flaw. I know, books of short stories aren’t supposed to have anything holding them together. True. That’s why I don’t like them as much as graphic novels. That’s my personal preference and I’m sticking to it. It’s not a bad book by any means. If you already have read other Concrete books and love the characters but thought that maybe the short stories sucked, you were wrong. If you’ve never read any of this stuff, don’t buy this. You won’t know who these people are and it isn’t a good starting point. It you want to start reading this series and don’t want to start right in the middle (which is where he’s doing his best work, assuming that right now is “right in the middle” and he still has a lot of stories planned), then buy the first book. If you like that, buy this book as something like a companion to it. The art gets a lot better later and so do the stories, but they start off pretty damned good. And he is not a superhero of any kind, so anybody who thinks that can check that idea at the door. It’s the story of the life of a normal man trying to do good with a pretty amazing situation that he finds himself stuck in, and there’s not really anything else like it in comics.
Complete Concrete Short Stories 1990-1995
More of the same, but his style was definitely becoming tighter and more focused.
