Chadwick, Paul – Complete Concrete Short Stories 1986-1989

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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 environmentalism 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.