Although I’ve heard about the character before reviewing one of his series a couple months ago, I can’t get away from thinking about Concrete as a character. And the world wants to oblige my thoughts as, the weekend after I had written about Concrete: Think Like a Mountain, I had gone into one my local shops to look for back issues and came upon another collection of issues from 1994—this one the direct prequel to the series I had just written about. With so much serendipity, I couldn’t help but look more at Concrete: Killer Smile by Paul Chadwick, Elizabeth Chadwick, Jed Hotchkiss, and Bill Spicer. 

This four-issue series has Concrete taking a bit of a backseat as his typist and friend, Larry Munro, is kidnapped at a gas station after helping a woman pump her gas. His kidnapper, Rick, has been doing a string of crimes that lead him to this point and between the gun he points at Larry and his cavalier attitude towards the lives of those around him, the tension in their getaway car only gets more tense. But as Rick forces Larry to drive him and his girlfriend, Kyra, out of LA, circumstances cause the police, and Concrete, to take notice. From here we see the slow tightening of space they can drive before the trio are forced into a junkyard with only one exit. It’s here that Rick and Larry have the confrontation that’s been building for four issues as both have guns and the desperation to use them. 

While Killer Smile is exponentially tense story about desperate people told over the course of an afternoon, it’s the vessel of it that’s most fascinating. Concrete as a character literally looms large over this story—we can see it in every cover—but his own presence is relatively minimal outside of nudging some detectives to help and his bullet-proof body coming in at the end to save his friend. Concrete instead becomes the vessel through which the story flows. His own presence in the world is that of a travel writer, someone observing actions as they happen around him. We see that in this story as Concrete is the one who has Larry picking him up to attend a lecture before the kidnapping—without Concrete, Larry isn’t in this situation. But Concrete becomes just as helpless as the audience as he can only observe through police radio and his detective friends as to what’s potentially happening to his friend. He’s there to watch, but he isn’t the one pushing the story forward.

Concrete as a series and character is something worth celebrating as it works so well as a piece of long-running comic storytelling that knows when to stop and knows what kind of stories to tell. Between Think Like a Mountain and Killer Smile, we see two very different kinds of story unfolding, but we still see how they can’t exist without a character like Concrete to pull them both together. 

Get excited. Get driving.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.