Art For Art’s Sake #89: What A Wonderful World This Could Be

by Richard Bruton

Welcome, welcome everybody, it’s time for the weekly trawl through the Internet to find you some gorgeous looking comic art… it’s Art For Art’s Sake!

Let’s begin this week with some Alison Bechdel –

And here’s where we get the ‘Bechdel test’ from…

Tom Fowler

Bob Peake loves Lucy…

Victor Santos doing Idris Elba as Luther –

Mike Kaluta’s cover to Batman #253, 1973…

Mike McKone – Magik

Marguerite Sauvage from Sensation Comics…

Mary Fleener

Dan Panosian – Magneto

Joe Quinones – Lady Blackhawk

Marc Laming – Kitty & Lockheed take on the Sentinels

Michael Golden on Dr Strange – great combination…

And we’ll end this week with a longer look at Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, one of the great sort of forgotten series of the 80s. Created in 1986, Concrete’s origin story could have come straight out of any classic superhero slug-fest – political aide Ron Lithgow abducted by aliens, his brain transplanted into a flexible stone body that makes him super-strong and super-fast. But instead of embracing the superhero story, Chadwick instead went a wonderfully different way, with Concrete’s many adventures embracing a sense of what the world can offer, the character more inclined to explore, to think his way out of a problem, and to give the reader a sense of the wonder of the world about us.

Chadwick’s Concrete gave us wonder on the page, a sequential delight that exuded positivity in all things – think the essence of Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World through the unlikely medium of an alien abductee encased in stone and you’ve got the strange wonder of Concrete.