Concrete (graphic novel)

AUTHOR: Chadwick, Paul

ARTIST: Paul Chadwick (illustrator); Bill Spicer (letterer)

PUBLISHER: Dark Horse Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1986-1995

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1994

Publication History

Concrete is an award-winning black-and-white series created, written, and drawn by Paul Chadwick. The eponymous character first appeared in the inaugural issue of the anthology series Dark Horse Presents (July, 1986) and was eventually featured in twenty-three stories published in Dark Horse Presents between 1986 and 1995. Dark Horse also published ten issues of Concrete, the comic book, between 1986 and 1990, as well as several self-contained miniseries that were subsequently reissued as trade paperbacks: Concrete: Fragile Creatures (1991), Concrete: Killer Smile (1994), Concrete: Think Like a Mountain (1996), Concrete: Strange Armor (1997), and Concrete: The Human Dilemma (2005).

The environmentally conscious, all-ages-friendly character has additionally appeared in one-off titles such as Concrete: Odd Jobs (1990), Concrete: Eclectica (1993), and San Diego Comic Con Comics (1993). Dark Horse later collected every Concrete short story and comic book in a seven-volume series (2005-2006), with the exception of a few pages from the short story “Moving a Big Rock” (1995).

Plot

The protagonist of Concrete, Ron Lithgow, was working as a political speechwriter for Senator Mark Douglas when he went on a wilderness vacation with his closest friend, Michael Maynard. Seeing a strange light near their camp, they go exploring, only to find themselves in a cave filled with extraterrestrial artifacts. When they awake they are trapped in massive concrete bodies. The aliens run numerous tests on the two friends, who eventually manage to escape by overpowering their alien guards. While Ron leaves the cave and heads for civilization, Michael remains behind, in hopes that the aliens might restore him to his original condition. Only a short time later, Ron watches with a sense of helplessness as the alien starship emerges out of the mountainside and heads for the stars. With help from Senator Douglas and other influential players in Washington, D.C., Ron Lithgow is reborn as Concrete, the supposed one-off product of an experimental cyborg program. To distract the public from the sheer strangeness of his cover story, Concrete goes on numerous talk shows, where he pretends to be an amiable dummy without a care in the world. The strategy to turn Concrete into a banal cultural novelty works, and with the exception of a couple of journalists and artists, nobody pays much attention to the Thing-like superhuman.

Rather than using his powers to combat crime or solve mysteries, Concrete decides to pursue a life of adventure, along the lines of his hero, the nineteenth century explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. Dismissed as a publicity seeker by the media, Concrete embarks on a series of stunts that effectively test the limits of his new body. Thus, he attempts to swim across the Atlantic Ocean and to scale Mount Everest. He works on a family farm and becomes a bodyguard for a manic pop star. He explores the California coastline, spends a night in the desert, and even attends a star-studded Hollywood party. He gets to see and do things that Ron Lithgow could not. Rather than feeling sorry for himself, he makes the best of his new circumstances. He also finds that he has become a lightning rod for greasy freeloaders and unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Navigating the social world poses special challenges for a man encased in a mobile concrete slab.

The ten-issue comic book series focuses on Concrete’s origins, his travel adventures, and his friendship with Larry Munro and Dr. Maureen Vonnegut. The subsequent miniseries feature the regular cast of characters but place Concrete in unusual contexts. In the first miniseries, Fragile Creatures, Concrete works on a generic Hollywood film as a one-man special-effects team. His usual good humor is tested by the clash of egos on the set and by the absurdity of genre-based Hollywood storytelling.

In the second miniseries, Killer Smile, cultural satire gives way to unrelenting horror, as Larry Munro tries to find a way of escaping the clutches of a murderous sociopath. Chadwick’s implicit pessimism about human nature, which is usually checked by the main character’s sweet-natured humor, is given full expression in this series. In the follow-up miniseries, Think Like a Mountain, Concrete joins forces with a small group of radical environmental activists to help save an old-growth forest. More than any other set of Concrete stories, this series explicitly confronts difficult issues of political strategy and social-movement morality. While the author warns against the dangers of antihumanist environmental rhetoric, he also makes it clear that he largely agrees with Earth First!-style activism.

With the fourth Concrete miniseries, Strange Armor, Chadwick revisits Concrete’s origins and fleshes out the steps by which Ron Lithgow became a real-world superhero. The miniseries is derived from a screenplay that Chadwick prepared for a film adaptation that was never filmed. The subsequent Dark Horse collection includes the script as well as several short stories that touch on Concrete’s relationship to his body and to his makers. The most recent Concrete miniseries, The Human Dilemma, returns to environmental themes and foregrounds the controversies over population growth and population control. This series also set the stage for major changes in Concrete’s relationship with Maureen Vonnegut as well as in Larry Munro’s personal life.

Volumes

•Concrete: Complete Short Stories, 1986-1989 (1990). The short-story format allowed Chadwick to explore various aspects of Concrete’s daily life and his interactions with both his close friends and random strangers. Several of the stories are humorous in nature but hint at the character’s growing involvement with environmental politics.

•The Complete Concrete (1994). Collects the original ten-issue comic book series. The book includes intelligent, award-winning stories that helped expand the boundaries of superhero and fantasy storytelling in American comics. The artwork became increasingly confident as the series continued.

•Concrete: Fragile Creature (1995). Trade paperback of the 1991 four-issue limited series. This full-color miniseries sharply contrasts Concrete’s humanism with the mercenary ethics of B-film Hollywood. The story draws on the author’s own experiences in the movie industry.

•Concrete: Killer Smile (1996). Trade paperback of the 1994 four-issue limited series. Arguably the pulpiest story in the Concrete corpus, and also the fastest paced, it provides yet another example of Chadwick’s ability to work within, and combine, well-established fictional genres.

•Concrete: Think Like a Mountain (1996). Trade paperback of the 1996 six-issue limited series. A pivotal contribution to the Concrete mythos that foregrounds the creator’s interest in issues of political strategy and efficacy in the context of radical environmental activism.

•Concrete: Complete Short Stories, 1990-1995 (1996). As with the 1986-1989 short-story collection, this volume features tightly constructed ministories that are fueled by both humor and political consciousness. These pages feature some of the most ambitious graphic compositions that Chadwick has committed to print.

•Concrete: Strange Armor (1998). Trade paperback of the 1997 five-issue limited series. Revisiting the character’s science-fiction-like origins, this limited series provides the template for a movie that might have been.

•Concrete, Volume One: Depths (2005). Reproduces the first five issues of the original Concrete series. The stories offer an affectionate portrait of a likable, well-meaning individual who finds himself in an alien body.

•Concrete, Volume Two: Heights (2006). This companion volume reproduces issues 6-10 of the original Concrete series. The storytelling and artwork are more evolved, and the environmental awareness comes into sharper focus, laying the basis for the miniseries that followed.

•Concrete, Volume Three: Fragile Creature (2006). This is a glossy reprint of the 1991 four-issue limited series that placed an earnest, hard-working, and financially strapped superhuman in the seedy world of low-budget Hollywood.

•Concrete, Volume Four: Killer Smile (2006). A useful reprinting and repackaging of the 1994 four-issue limited series that pits Concrete’s close friend Larry Munro against a vicious serial killer.

•Concrete, Volume Five: Think Like a Mountain (2006). This is a nicely produced reprint of the 1996 six-issue limited series that explores the politics of extralegal activism and the urgency of environmental change.

•Concrete, Volume Six: Strange Armor (2006). This is a significantly expanded version of Concrete’s origin story as well as a reprint of the 1997 five-issue limited series.

•Concrete, Volume Seven: The Human Dilemma (2006). As with Think Like a Mountain, this collection highlights Concrete’s fervent commitment to environmental change by exploring the tangled politics of population control.

Characters

•Ron Lithgow, a.k.a. Concrete, is a kindhearted, good-natured everyman, albeit trapped inside an imposing alien body. Throughout the series he tries to make sense of his unique condition and strange new powers. He develops close friendships with Larry Munro and Maureen Vonnegut and gains an ever-greater appreciation for the wonders of nature. Meanwhile, the general public is told that Concrete’s unique condition is the result of a “discontinued cyborg development program, conducted by the NSA with terminally ill volunteers,” of whom Concrete is the only survivor.

•Larry Munro is a would-be novelist, a bon vivant, and Concrete’s personal assistant. While Larry is a well-meaning and loyal friend, he tends to cut ethical corners. His relaxed, situational ethics stand in sharp contrast to the carefully considered social and environmental moral code that Concrete self-consciously embraces.

•Dr. Maureen Vonnegut is a biologist at the National Science Agency who works with Concrete in order to understand how his body functions. She has a cerebral, somewhat aloof personality and is oblivious to the fact that Concrete is in love with her. She nevertheless shares Concrete’s passion for the environment as well as his upright ethics.

•Senator Mark Douglas is Ron Lithgow’s former employer. He is an honorable politician who helps facilitate Concrete’s return to something resembling ordinary life. The senator is one of only a small number of people who knows the truth behind the official cover story.

•Michael Maynard was one of Ron Lithgow’s closest friends. On a camping trip, they explored a cave where aliens were conducting brain transplantation experiments. Both his and Ron’s brains were placed in alien, concrete bodies, but he decided to remain behind in hopes that the aliens would return his brain to his human body. His present whereabouts are unknown.

Artistic Style

Chadwick works mostly in black and white and favors a clean, uncluttered line that serves the interest of the story. With the exception of the main protagonist, his characters are ordinary human beings who live and work in the real world. Concrete often ventures from his home in Los Angeles to the countryside, in both the Western United States and abroad, and Chadwick uses these travels to capture the teeming biological diversity hidden in deserts, oceans, and mountains. He has a special talent for rendering the tunnels, holes, and burrows of animals that do not want to be observed. His pages have become more complex and ambitious over time, and the latter-day Dark Horse collections offer tangible evidence of Chadwick’s artistic progress from the mid-1980’s to the early 2000’s.

While Chadwick generally sticks to a more or less realistic style, he occasionally experiments with the comics form and puts the story on hold. In Concrete, issue 2, for example, he crams 150 panels into a single page to show in striking detail the repetitive motions of Concrete’s transatlantic swim. In the following issue, which tells the story of how Ron Lithgow became Concrete, several surreal pages are devoted to showing the Jack Kirby-inspired interior of the alien spacecraft. These pages are the exception, however. If major Silver Age artists such as Kirby, Alex Toth, and Steve Ditko are obvious sources of inspiration, so is the nineteenth century painter John James Audubon. With Concrete, Chadwick found a way to combine his passion for the great outdoors and his interest in the so-called big questions with his love of mainstream American comics.

Themes

From its inception, Concrete has featured substantial interior monologues on large, open-ended philosophical questions that give it an unusually ruminative, contemplative aspect. Chadwick has used the series as a platform to express and help flesh out his views on a range of issues. The series has arguably become more politically engaged over time, particularly with reference to environmental and feminist concerns. The inherent seriousness of these issues has been balanced by the science-fiction and fantasy elements of the story, as well as by the main protagonist’s gentle, self-deprecating humor.

Three themes in particular stand out. The first has to do with the question of human connectedness and people’s need for contact and intimacy. Encased in a massive stone body, Concrete has to work extra hard to forge meaningful relationships and maintain ties to the social world. Strangers treat him with disdain or fear, or they find him comical. Only his closest friends appreciate Concrete’s humanity. His condition poses the issue of alienation and loneliness with unusual clarity. To some extent, all humans are mini-Concretes trapped inside their bodies, trying to express their innermost thoughts and feelings even as people respond in predictable ways to exterior appearance.

The second theme concerns the role of women in society and the ways in which obnoxious male behavior constrains their autonomy and freedom. Concrete’s gentle nature is in sharp contrast to most of the other male characters, who aggressively pursue multiple sex partners and view gender relations as a battlefield. The paradox is obvious: While Concrete’s form embodies raw masculinity, his outlook is broadly feminist. At the same time, lacking any sort of conventional release for his natural urges, he collects fine-art paintings of nude women and spends much of his time pining over Dr. Vonnegut.

The third theme, that of environmental awareness, was only hinted at in the early stories but eventually became a defining feature of the comic books as well as the several miniseries that followed. Concrete’s superpowered senses allow him to experience the natural world as no human being can. He can remain underwater for more than an hour and can lift thousands of pounds. More important, he can see things that no ordinary eye can perceive—the number of stitches, for example, in a flag flying a mile away. As Concrete travels the planet, he is struck by the variety and vibrancy of natural settings but disturbed by the undeniable impact of population growth, industrial development, and residential sprawl. Concrete is a superhero, a feminist, an eco-warrior, and a political liberal. His stories hold a special appeal for readers who are already sympathetic to the author’s worldview.

Impact

Concrete was one of a number of consequential titles to emerge out of the explosion of independent, creator-owned, black-and-white comics during the 1980’s. Its creator showed that it was possible to tell emotionally meaningful, human-scale stories that centered on a superpowered individual with alien technology at his disposal. Chadwick created believable, recognizable characters with three-dimensional flaws and limits and placed them in densely constructed, real-world settings. At the end of the 1980’s, writing in Playboy magazine, American writer Harlan Ellison said that Concrete was “probably the best comic being published today by anyone, anywhere. Trying to describe the down-to-earth humanity and sheer dearness of Paul Chadwick’s creation requires more than words or pictures.” While not all writers on comics would have agreed with Ellison’s critical assessment, even at the time, it is undoubtedly the case that quirky, nonmainstream titles such as Concrete, Eightball (1989-2004), Neat Stuff (1985-1989), and Love and Rockets (1982-1996) helped set the stage for the alternative comics bonanza of the 1990’s and 2000’s.

Further Reading

Gonick, Larry, and Alice Outwater. The Cartoon Guide to the Environment (1996).

Morrison, Grant. Animal Man (1988-1990).

Murphy, Steven, and Michael Zulli. The Puma Blues (1986-1989).

Schultz, Mark. Xenozoic Tales (1987-1996).

Bibliography

Baisden, Greg, and Dale Crain. “Man of Stone: Paul Chadwick.” The Comics Journal 132 (November, 1989): 76-102.

Chadwick, Paul. “Paul Chadwick Interview.” Interview by Darren Hick. The Comics Journal 221 (March, 2000): 38-70.

De Laplante, Kevin. “Making the Abstract Concrete: How a Comic Can Bring to Life the Central Problems of Environmental Philosophy.” In Comics as Philosophy, edited by Jeff McLaughlin. University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Gravel, Gary. “A Life Cast in Stone: Seven Short Essays in Contemplation of Paul Chadwick’s Concrete.” In The Complete Concrete. Dark Horse, 1994.