Paul Chadwick will return to Concrete, his multiple Eisner, Harvey and Reuben Award-winning series, with Concrete: Stars Over Sand. The five-issue miniseries launches in June from Dark Horse Comics, and marks the first new Concrete material since 2012.
Chadwick described Stars Over Sand as a deeply personal project, roughly a decade in the making. “Covers are wraparound oil paintings; it’s set in places I’ve camped and sketched; I’ve lived, briefly, Concrete’s affliction,” he said. “Everything I know about suspense I’ve tried to do here.”
Concrete made its debut in Dark Horse Presents #1 back in 1986, the first comic published by Dark Horse. The story features a man whose brain was transferred into a large stone body by aliens, who then goes on extraordinary adventures with his personal assistant and a scientist who studies his new body. The strip appeared often in Dark Horse Presents, and also spun off into its own title in 1987. It was published as a series-of-miniseries from the early 1990s until about 2005, with a one-shot, “Three Uneasy Pieces” coming out in 2012 and marking the last time we’ve seen the character.
The new series opens with Concrete having wandered into the desert and failed to return. His friends Larry and Maureen are frantic, and reports are coming in of a stone-covered figure wandering the arid mountains, disoriented and dangerous. Stripped of his memories and unable to make sense of the world around him, Concrete must find his way back to himself while his friends race against a deadline to reach him.
Concrete: Stars Over Sand #1 arrives June 17.