4 out of 5

No one can conflict me like Paul Chadwick can.

‘Concrete’ has always been such a hard comic to pitch to new readers, and I think I was always turned off of it as kind of intelligentsia comic pop psychology until a late Dark Horse Presents series sent me down a rabbit hole of picking up the trades. It’s not not pop psychology – the title is arguably wholly fueled on granola-powered thought experiments – but Chadwick’s exactly the guy you want to get into these But What About…? and What If…? discussions with, because even when he drops some seemingly tunnel-visioned, blinkered word bomb, you sense he’d be fine with a reaction, whether emotional or reasoned, that aims to counter everything he’s proposing. If anything, that often seems to be what we witness in Concrete: a concept or idea that engages Paul, and then he spends four to six issues straw- and steel-manning himself on it. And rarely to come out and tell us what the “right” answer is.

Given the title’s general environmental- and left-leaning bent, I think you can often guess what that answer is, with “right” being defined as however the author truly feels, but the conflict mentioned is because Chadwick does tend to leave room in there for questions and doubt, both for himself, and for the reader. Plotting-wise, this can be frustrating, and also brilliant: in which slowburn elements that another creator would play as the issue #1 cliffhanger are baked in and revealed as part of larger themes, and because the themes aren’t necessarily subtle, that cliffhanger suddenly seems like the most obvious thing to have happened, which is pretty unintuitive storytelling stuff, but damn does it work.

Anyhow, that leads to me telling people that Concrete is about a guy stuffed into a concrete suit by aliens, but the book isn’t about that.

“So what’s it about?”

“Uh…”

In The Human Dilemma, a returning interest of Paul’s – overpopulation – gets an update. This is already a bit cringey, because Paul is of the era of liberals who grew up with some less-nuanced data supporting their takes, but the writer – with all puns intended to his comic creation and the subtitle of this series – is a humanist, and, as usual, wraps his interest up in a bevy of questions and answers that sit on all sides of the political / “moral” spectrum, leaning us toward more potentially rational conclusions, but conflicting the shit out of Concrete / Ron / Maureen / the readers through a whole bunch of plotting footwork. Zoomed out, that is: Concrete getting propped up as a figurehead for a more aggressive stance than he’d prefer on overpopulation by a pizza chain magnate, and in exchange for the physical edition of the painting he’s been after for years; Ron is ready to marry Astra, but questions about the realities after that send him into a bachelor tizzy; a heat wave and heated tensions on a crowded highway lead to a surprising – but 20 years developed – decision from Maureen; and the readers get to witness a truly game-changing evolution in this series, only for it to be shushed into the final, open-ended pages of the book.

There are some oddly confusing layouts / word bubbles, with Paul going for a pretty scratchy, loose look but the way characters interact sometimes not as natural as a result (or it’s purposeful – but I found it distracting at points); but more directly from a storytelling perspective, there’s a lot going on here, and it’s not all successfully woven together, bouncing between some subplots abruptly. Paul kinda calls it out in his opening summaries (or whoever was writing those), and I’m not sure how I would have smoothed it out, it just feels like no one knew where some scenes made sense, so they just got inserted somewhere.

Also, there are some in-universe text pages at the end (an interview with Concrete; some magazine articles) that are excellent, and although I also love seeing reader’s letters and art pages from Paul, it’s a bummer that this concept stopped halfway through the series.