Elsewhere

Two Thursdays ago, the latest installment of "1987 And All That" went up on CSBG, on the first five issues of Concrete. It was a charming-ass comicbook, and I definitely intend to dig into the rest of that initial series and all the Concrete titles that followed. One Thursday ago, PopMatters published a column of mine about events and comics that "matter," which in some ways felt like a retread of old ground, but it had been bobbling around in my brain for a few weeks so I finally wrote it down.

Something I Failed to Mention
I completely left out of my Concrete review the character of Maureen Vonnegut, the biologist who studies Concrete and who is his love interest. I was never all that interested in Maureen, who seemed to have very little personality, yet I was supposed to buy her as the protagonist's romantic focus. She was very matter-of-fact, a truly professional scientist, which is a fine way to go with a character, but didn't make her charming or unusual enough to win me over, which made me unable to connect with the idea that she'd won Concrete over somehow. He seemed to love her mostly because she was the main female presence in his new life, and that's a lame, almost desperate reason to fall for someone. It's not based on who she is as an individual, but merely on her proximity to him, or at least that's the way it reads. Also, I'm never wild about having one character quietly pine over another. If no one is going to make a move, the endless unrequited love story gets old quick, even if I am interested in or rooting for the relationship (which I wasn't in this case). So I ignored Maureen in the CSBG piece because I didn't feel like going off on a whole tangent about the member of the cast I was the most bored by. I didn't dislike her, but the storyline built around her wasn't one I could sink my teeth into, for several reasons. Luckily, it had little bearing on the primary plots of any of the issues.