By Jason McClain (@JTorreyMcClain)
A friend asked me a question the other day that dovetailed nicely with my latest TPB, Concrete Volume 1: “Depths” by Paul Chadwick. He asked me a simple, yet personal and revealing question, “What is your ideal job?”
Before I get to this question, as I wanted to move on quite quickly in my writing about it, I need to explain how the question connects with “Depths.” In this opening trade paperback, Chadwick slowly reveals the origin of his hero, Concrete. Aliens capture speechwriter Ronald Lithgow and transplant all of his memories into a large, agile, powerful, hardened stone body that does not need the air, water and food that his human body needed. In this body, he can’t be the speechwriter that he trained to be, but the world opens up to him in a different way. Suddenly he can be the adventurer of the serials, novels and non-fiction he read as a child, stories where heroes save the day everywhere from the far corners of the Earth to far away planets and galaxies. He decides to change the course of his life and become his version of those adventurers, digging below ground to save miners, trying to swim the Atlantic Ocean, serving as a bodyguard for a rock star and studying giant rays in the Pacific.
As for my friend’s question, I didn’t have the immediate answer that Concrete had. (Well immediate to the reader, as I kept turning page after page to find out what happened next, and though his time passed slowly going through government tests of his abilities, for me, it was just moments.) I had to stop and think and because of the kind of person I am (varied and detailed) I did not stop at one, but journeyed into my brain to get four different possibilities, each of which would be a good way to spend the work day. That got me to think even further and wonder if concern about the ideal job is even the right question.
