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.