Paul Chadwick's Weblog

Best Wishes Reviews and Interview

This is the original graphic novel I wrote and drew, based on Mike Richardson's story.  I'm back working on more Concrete, but maybe you'd like to check this out.

 ICv2 has some nice things to say, though I wept bitter tears at the line about my "serviceable art."  Alas.

Mike and I did email interviews that were edited together pretty well here at Bleeding Cool.  Nowhere else will you hear my views on Hello Kitty.

Here's a preview at Newsarama.

Online Eccentric Librarian thinks it has " one of the best paced plots I’ve read in a very long time."

And this detailed rave at Broken Frontier buoyed me for days.  It's practically an essay.  If this doesn't convince you to get the book, I'm going to have to come to your house and park on your couch until you buy a copy just to get me out of there.

A reader queries about "a one-page horror story about a woman who achieved immortality, and ended up as a head silently mouthing the words 'burn me' in ancient Greek".

 

It was part of the "100 Horrors" series that ran in some issues of Concrete.

 

Anybody know which one?

 

Update: he found it. "It was 'The Maiden of Crete'.  In the "Killer Smile" TPb.  My memory was off -- not a severed head, but a skeleton with the face preserved.  A chilling story.  After I read it to my wife, she wouldn't speak to me for a while!"

Here's the Comics Canon podcast about Concrete, May 2020.

https://soundcloud.com/the-comics-canon/episode-110-the-concrete

Colored on a whim

The book is actually black and white.  Click to enlarge.

See you in Vancouver?

I'll be at FanExpo this weekend.

I made up an update flyer to have at my table, which I quote here:

This very week my new graphic novel, which I wrote and illustrated based on a story by Mike Richardson, was published.

Best Wishes is a romantic story set in New York City, a tale of ambition, viral fame, suppressed desires, the madness and art of publicity and graphic design, and also municipal water management (only a little, but it’s pivotal!). It is, I hope, funny and engaging.

A Concrete TV Series was briefly greenlit by WGN America (Salem, Manhattan). Thrilling! Then Sinclair bought them and killed all new dramatic programming. Another reason to hate Sinclair. But we have a lovely pilot script by Zak Penn (Ready Player One) and Ira Steven Behr (Outlander) to shop around now. Will it go? Will I be able to replace my roof and septic system? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on Concrete: Stars over Sand, ­a long-gestating story in which Concrete, in wilderness, is hit by lightning and rendered amnesiac. He discovers the world anew, and, somewhat paranoid, becomes a danger to his loved ones and others. I once hit my head on rock in Hawaii and suffered a similar episode, though I don’t think I was ever dangerous.

If you missed it, I did a graphic novel with Harlan Ellison for DC, Seven against Chaos. A NYT Bestseller! – back when they had a “Hardcover Graphic Novels” bestseller list, since discontinued. I’m hoping to qualify for one of their remaining bestseller lists, “Books by Left-handed Hemophiliacs.” 7aC is a pulpy SF adventure (albeit with Ellisonian angst) well worth your trouble.

Gifts of the Night, my Vertigo series with John Bolton, is to be collected twenty years after its original publication by Berger Books at Dark Horse. Bet you never heard of this! Court intrigue, magical realism, and a shy scholar in way over his head. I was proud of this poetic story, and am grateful it may yet be discovered by an audience.

Thank you for your interest in my work.

A Working Cartoonist's Desktop

Photoshop is dreary work.  Drawing, one can get into a flow state.  But toning and lettering, as I'm doing here, involves multistep actions, drop-down menus, lots of left-brain action. At least you can fiddle with things endlessly and correct mistakes.  Maybe I can still make Mary's eyes line up properly.  From my forthcoming non-Concrete graphic novel with Mike Richardson (to be announced).

The Understandable Reason Eisner Bounced Superman

I’m reading Michael Schumacher’s Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics.  One day, Siegal and Schuster’s Superman submission came in to the Eisner-Eiger shop.  It had been making the rounds.  Pretty crude, it was another costumed hero – a genre Eisner felt inherently childish.  Even then he hoped the field could be elevated to adult sensibilities. 

What really put him off was the name.  The Nazis were rising, and throwing the “Aryan Superman” term around a lot.  A Jew, Eisner found it somewhat offensive, or at least a name with unpleasant associations.

I don’t imagine too many publishers would be keen to launch a hero called The Jihadist today, even though it means, literally, “the struggler.”

Juxtaposition

Pictures on the internet fly by.  Resemblance is perceived.  This Ferguson cop’s zip ties look like a heart.  Fellow Parkinsons sufferers Michael J. Fox and Robin Williams pose, and Robin’s black shirt echoes.

Signing with Harlan and Ken Saturday Jan 18 Noon in N. Hollywood

Blastoff Comics at 5118 Lankershim is hosting me, Harlan Ellison, and Ken Steacy for a Seven Against Chaos signing.  Harlan, despite my previous post, is in fine fettle, judging by my dinner with him last night. Like Rick in Casablanca, I was misinformed.

Both Ken and Harlan are electric personalities, so I'll be the quiet guy with them whose hair is standing on end as the banter and jokes fly.  I'll have a pile of art to paw through and probably time for sketches.  

Use the image above (click to enlarge) for a desktop to remind you to come.  Should be some laughs.

 

Harlan Ellison's 7 Against Chaos

I hope everyone is rested and recovered from Comicon.  I, alas, didn't make it again this year.  Next, I hope!

Most galling about that is I have a new book out this month that's actually pretty good.  Promote it at Comicon?  Would've been nice.

A long time in the making (mostly due to me), HE's7AC is a sprawling, slightly pulpy SF epic (with an admixture of Ellisonian rage and angst) epic of modified, misfit humans, time travel, reptilian counter-history, and doomed love. 

Beautifully colored by Ken Steacy, radiant on slick paper, it's a pretty package.  I'll have more to say about it in coming days, but for now, check out the interview I did at Bloody Disgusting (love that name).

Ellison fans know he's been ailing.  He's actually improved a little, recently, but he's an old guy with a bad ticker and a bypass that's years past its shelf date.  In the long stretch it took to do this book, there was a real chance it wouldn't get published in his lifetime, which would've weighed on me.  I feel that, in the most literal sense, we beat a deadline. 

Jack Vance 1916-2013

A great SF writer has passed after a long, full life.   Never cutting-edge, never hot news, he toiled in a curious, aromatic shop on a crooked side street, not the roaring SF boulevard.  But for the literary confections he reliably produced, it was always worth going out of one's way. 

Vance's vocabulary, his droll, circumspect writerly voice, and his endless inventiveness with cultures, oddities and situations were his hallmarks.  Because of these, one tends to think of his works as intricate.  But any analysis of his prose reveals it was actually economical and lean.  Quite a trick.

My first paperback cover was for a Vance book.  It was downhill from there; I'd tell publishers I was especially eager to illustrate any Vance titles they had in the pipeline, and they'd say "get in line." Every artist wanted to paint Vance's pastel, filigreed visions.

His veneration among pros didn't make him a bestseller.  Don Wollheim published his backlist at DAW, but lamented that they never sold too well.  Vance's last books saw hardcover publication (thanks, Tor), so I guess he reached a certain level; but even this 2009 NYT profile (a great primer) laments his underappreciated status.

Where to start with Vance?  The Demon Princes, a delightful tour across the galaxy, 30,000 years hence, with a driving revenge motive pushing Kirth Gersen, our prudent, well-prepared hero.  Or perhaps the Alastor novels, each occurring in a pastoral locale with different protagonists chafing against the strange cultures they find themselves in, while unravelling criminal mysteries.

Vance hugely enriched my life.  I'm grateful for his talent and dedication.  Long may he be read.