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There's a new Concrete miniseries coming out this Dec. from Dark Horse. I love Concrete. Discovered it when it first came out in the late 80s, and have loved it ever since. If you like quality, intelligent non-superhero comics which nevertheless deal with a superhero-y type premise taken seriously with great characterization and human drama, excellent art & primo writing, give CONCRETE a try.
Here's an interview taken from All The Rage a few weeks ago over at Silver Bullet Comics:
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Stone Temple Pilot
Paul Chadwick is one of the most respected creators in the comic industry and one of the major contributors to the upcoming Matrix Online game. In addition to that, Concrete, his creator owned title is set to return this December in a new miniseries: Concrete: The Human Dilemma. Earlier this week, Chadwick took the time to talk about both projects:
Blair Marnell: It’s been about four years since your last Concrete story. Why was the interval between Concrete stories so long?
Paul Chadwick: The short answer is: I got myself in a money fix. So, I turned my energies to making money more quickly than I do with Concrete. But all this time I was working on this series and it’s a substantial bit of work. Six issues, 120 pages and they’re fairly dense.
BM: For some of our readers who aren’t familiar with Concrete, can you describe the concept?
PC: Concrete is a fairly small-scale, real world approach to the superhero concept. He lives in our mundane world without super-villains or other fantastic elements running around. Although his origin involves aliens, they have departed forever and he is left with a human brain transplanted into a colossal stone-covered body, facing the question of how to live a worthwhile life in that condition. That’s what the series focuses on. He’s drawn to a youthful dream of being a travel writer and this body certainly facilitates that. Although a lot of the stories evolved from his personal relationships or his environmental politics and the challenges of daily life for somebody trapped in that kind of body.
BM: He’s also a celebrity of sorts…
PC: Yeah, I do get to examine the ramifications of our celebrity culture, which I’ve been able to observe from my work in Hollywood as a storyboard artist. I’ve worked with directors and a lot of actor/directors too. And I’ve seen some very interesting distortions of life being famous causes. People who you don’t know at all get fixated on you, security concerns, the way it opens doors… and I’ve been able to apply some of that to Concrete.
BM: What can Concrete fans expect from The Human Dilemma?
PC: Some things I’ve tried to keep very constant in Concrete. And that is: he lives in a suburb of Los Angeles, in a warehouse that accommodates his proclivity towards breaking things. And his surrogate family unit: Maureen Vonnegut, a biologist who keeps him alive and studies him and his sidekick/assistant/typist Larry Munro, not to mention a two-legged dog he inherited from a company he helped out called Tripod. It starts in that setting and Concrete gets an offer from a Pizza Mogul, who has started a new foundation with a very controversial approach to population control. He wants to start a trend that makes childlessness “fashionable” and more socially acceptable. To do that he’s going to pay people, along with giving them education, career counseling and whatever they need to have success, fulfilled live, but childless. And he wants Concrete to be his spokesman for this. It’s not so much that he’s going to pay off so many people that the population explosion will stop; he wants to air out the issue through this approach. Concrete does not like fighting and he doesn’t like attention. So he’s very hesitant to do this even though he’s a very logical candidate. He’s liable to be childless, of course. He’s gray and race neutral which defuses that aspect of the issue. But he’s also a manic collector of Victorian paintings, and an arrangement is made for a painting Concrete has sought for years, “The Infinite Night.”
Concrete plunges into that publicity campaign, which allows me to explore the overpopulation issue from a lot of different angles. In the meantime, his pal Larry has reached a point in his life when he thinks he’s ready to get married. He proposes to his girlfriend and they get engaged. The problem is, Larry is NOT emotionally ready and starts to unconsciously sabotage the whole thing. The other wrinkle is, Concrete finds himself, a childless guy, about to become a parent. And that allows me to examine the issues of parenthood, which I’ve been dealing with for the last eleven years.
BM: What’s the status of the Concrete movie?
PC: [laughs] Well, in the tradition of development hell, they’re writing a new script. I’ll tell you what hung it up: Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh wrote a script. And it was the producer’s hope that after The Lord of the Rings was finally in the bag, that Peter would feel a parental love of his script and want to make Concrete his “easy” movie after The Lord of The Rings Trilogy. It didn’t happen. Peter decided to do King Kong. So, back to square one. It’s still at Disney but lacking in momentum.
BM: You’re also heavily involved with The Matrix Online, what’s your role in that?
PC: That… is my day job. I’m not a game designer but I’m writing the ongoing story of the game. It’s a massive-multiplayer, which means tens of thousands of people play at the same time. They control characters that wander around a virtual city, which they can explore or go on missions with lots of secrets to discover and factions to fight. All springing from the logic of the Matrix movies. The game itself is a sequel to The Matrix: Revolutions and it takes place during the “messy truce” that was made at the end of that film. It occurs completely in the Matrix, the major city. You never get out to Zion or the surface of the actual world, but that allows our characters to have those cool Matrix superpowers.
BM: If there’s a truce between the humans and the machines, then why are there still rebels from Zion jacking in to the Matrix?
PC: Well, they still have to police things to make sure the whole system doesn’t crash. That is to say, that if enough “blue pills” (the people sleeping in the pods powering the Matrix and experiencing it but not knowing what it really is) lose belief or “disbelief in the Matrix, they can wake up in their pods and drown or go mad. If enough of them do that then the whole system crashes. So the agents are there to coerce “red pills” (the people from Zion) to not do anything too fantastical. To not change the Matrix in an unreal way. And of course, there are humans who want to push those limits. One of the main activities is awakening “blue pills.”
BM: I imagine that wouldn’t be allowed under the terms of the truce.
PC: It is legal but it’s discouraged. That’s what makes it a “messy truce.” Then other complications come. The humans split into factions and artificial intelligence groups, which we call “exiles” in the Matrix (The Merovingian is the most prominent one in the story) who have their own agendas which are pretty disruptive. So there will be times when agents and humans join forces to battle these exiles. And humans and exiles will also team up to thwart agents. As I said, it’s very messy and complicated.
BM: How will players in the game be able to affect the story?
PC: They’ll be able to join one organization or another and advance its goals. You can actually work for The Merovingian, you can work for Zion and you can work for the machines alongside agents to accomplish their goals, a lot of which are secret and underhanded. There are also threats to the Matrix itself, this unreality I’ve been talking about. At one point a group of humans gets their hands on some code which gives them outrageous superpowers and they start making a lot of trouble in the Matrix. That’s when the agents and humans have to come together, hunt them down and eliminate them.
BM: And you have storyline planned out for the entire first year?
PC: Yeah, we’ve got an outline for a year and then I’ll be joining the “live team” that will be lying railroad tracks in front of a speeding express train. We’ll want to respond to what players seem to enjoy. And also, the Wachowskis have been secretive for what they want to do in the second year. I’m wondering myself.
BM: When is The Matrix Online going to be released?
PC: January 18th, 2005.
BM: You’ve also got a project in the works with Harlan Ellison at DC, right?
PC: Yeah, it’ll be a long term project because I’m writing the Matrix game, but I’m almost done with penciling and inking the first of a four issue prestige format miniseries called Seven Against Chaos. Harlan is basing it on a film treatment he wrote years ago, that takes The Seven Samurai plot and reimagines it in a science fictional context. But frankly, I think Harlan is more influenced by the western, The Magnificent Seven. Peter Tomasi is our editor and it’s a standalone book, not a DCU book but not a Vertigo book either. I would expect that it’s about two years away.
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