3 crampons out of 5

I stayed away from Concrete in the same way I avoided a lot of classic indie books… just… cause.  It’s not normally mentioned with the artists or writers I’m in to, instead popping up in the same used bins where you might spot Love and Rockets or something.  There’s nothing wrong with LandR, of course, but I still haven’t read it, so who the hell knows.  Ghost World.  Jeffrey Brown.  Ya dig?  Like, the “smart” indie stuff that guys in tight pants might read?

And Concrete does lean toward that a little bit, I suppose, but it has such a wonderful comic book edge to it, with its main character being so, uh, inhuman looking, that now I want to go back through and read the series, because it’s really not lumped with that other stuff so much… in fact, I don’t think it gets lumped with anything, really.  Who knows where I get this lumping stuff from?  You?  But seriously: fuck Ghost World, man.

So again – more props to Dark Horse, because they know their readers.  As happy as I am that Dark Horse Presents started back up, I stopped buying it after a few issues because… it just wasn’t balancing out.  There would be one story every month that I dug, but in the prestigey format with an 8 dollar cover price (or something like that), it just wasn’t worth it.  The Concrete pieces in there were some of the ones I enjoyed (along with the Beasts of Burden, which they collected, and Dog Mendoza, which they collected… smart crew, eh?) and strike an odd balance between building on Concrete’s apparent history and doing unrelated stories, between comedy and commentary, between surreal and straight-forward.  I think this is what ended up making it appealing – not only is Chadwick’s art consistent and has a patient beauty to it, the style giving weight and emotion to Concrete that’s never really existed for The Hulk or The Thing, oddly, despite the artist – but that sort of open structure to it, which leans more on the work of guys like Sammy Harkham or Jordan Crane, indie dudes who I love, vs. the more whiny stuff I somehow previously associated it with.

The three crampons I allot this are a good thing, in a way- it’s sort of how I imagine I’d feel (or will feel?) when reading the Concrete series proper – that it’s incredibly easy to read, that it doesn’t feel like it’s playing any tricks on you or hiding anything, and that you could pick it up and read it forever.  Why isn’t that four or five stars?  Dunno.  In the same way that Concrete seems to lumber about and say what’s on his mind, these three shorts have the same feel.  It’s not overwhelming in any one way, but it’s very enjoyable to experience.