Super Heroes Are Useless. Read Paul Chadwick's 'Concrete' Instead.

What would you do if you had super powers? This is a pretty common question bandied about between stoned friends in bars, comic book stores, and during road trips. It's mostly an exercise in humor ("I'd transform all the guitars in the world into pointy guitars."), but what would you really do? Would you act in your own interest or attempt to solve a global crisis? If you chose to help others, how would you do it? Would you even be able to help? Will your powers of flight cure cancer? Will your super strength put an end to rape threats on the internet?

For all the good they do, super heroes are, at their core, woefully misguided. They're delusional obsessives for whom the universe tailors itself to accommodate a range of personal quests and vengeful motives. Gotham is a crime-ridden hell hole and remains that way despite Batman's best efforts. Why? Because he needs it to be that way in order to exist. Superman's Metropolis is the favored target of meteors, alien ships, and other massive objects falling from space. Spider-Man lives in a forest of conveniently placed anchor points. The world morphs to accommodate their powers, and in doing so creates a need for them.

Paul Chadwick's now-defunct series, Concrete, is the antidote to this paradigm.

The series follows the adventures Ron Lithgow, a former speech writer for a U.S. senator whose brain is transplanted by aliens into a body of living rock. Now seven feet tall and weighing roughly 1,200 pounds, he attempts to navigate a world that is, his fantastic condition aside, no different from our own.

Concrete himself, with his craggy features (yay rock puns!), looks like a classic Jack Kirby creation. Likewise, the alien scenery and equipment in his origin story (the comic's one, brief step into unreality) could have come straight from The Fourth World, but the rest of concrete's world is drawn with a detailed and fragile realism. That realism is more than an aesthetic choice. It's a matter of functionality and narrative. Cut off from feeling either pain or pleasure and denied human love (his lack of genitals is frequently referenced), Concrete's emotional isolation is made literal as toes and sidewalks break at his touch. The world simply isn't built for him.

Even more troublesome, there's nothing for him to do. One of Concrete's early stories follows Lithgow's attempt at to rescue a group of trapped miners. While he is able to dig two men out of a cave, Lithgow gets trapped while searching for the remaining men. After a long wait he is rescued and resumes the search only to find the men dead. Ordinarily, this would be a motivational narrative, a story about how he just needs to learn to use his powers better and how he'll never let it happen again. But it's eventually revealed that the men were killed instantly. There was nothing Concrete could have done.

In another episode, Concrete, sitting in his stone cinder block arm chair, and his bookish assistant Larry answer fan mail. Many of the letters are outlandish suggestions for how he can best help the world, which Concrete dismisses. Eventually, he opens a letter from a woman seeking advice on how to escape her abusive husband. He considers sending her the number for a woman's shelter. "From all I've heard it's tough to reform a wife-beater," he says. "All you can do is escape them." After an uncomfortable moment they move on, but his powerlessness hangs in the air, stinging.

The contrast between Concrete and his super-powered peers is a valuable lesson in just how awkward and misshapen a super-powered being would actually be in a world as complex and fragile as our own. The world does not tilt, despite his hefty frame, to accommodate him. The world isn't a prop here. It's what really matters. 

Instead, Concrete uses his body not to change the world, but to gain a new perspective on it. He walks the ocean floor, using his ultra-vision to observe and contemplate bio-luminescent plankton. He swims with giant mantas. He plants his stone body at the edge of a great waterfall and experiences life as a rock in a stream. All of this is beautifully rendered by Chadwick with an attention to detail that brings out the beauty and power of the real world. He experiences new human lives as well, briefly becoming a bodyguard for an unstable rock star and even joining forces with a radical environmental group. Slowly but surely, he finds his place. He doesn't change the world. He simply strives to be a better part of it.

Encased in his rock body, he is like an astronaut exploring a new planet, and in doing so exposes to the reader how fantastic and unexplored our world remains for the average human. The star of the series isn't really Concrete himself. It's the people, places, and things that surround him. They joy is in knowing that those very same things exist right here in our world as well.

Buy the first collected volume, Depths, right here.