HICK: Getting back to the Earth Firsters, for the benefit of those who haven't read Think Like a Mountain, can you give me an overview of "monkey-wrenching"?

CHADWICK: Well, monkey-wrenching is talked about a great deal more than it's done. But in 1980, some people who were fed up with the professional environmental movement -- as Dave Foreman put it, 'taking Republican congressmen to lunch to try to convince them to pass legislation' -- decided environmentalism needed a radical edge, both to set the agenda, and to make the professional organizations seem the reasonable alternative. Sort of the way Clinton won the last election by triangulation. And one of the things they were inspired by was an Edward Abbey novel called The Monkey-Wrench Gang, where some people living out in the desert decide to take monkey wrenches up against a sea of troubles, and wreck the bulldozers, and cut down the billboards at the side of the highway that are destroying the paradise they live in. And Earth First's first great symbolic act was to put this artificial crack on the Glen Canyon dam, which drowned a whole lot of desert land when it was built. They rolled this piece of black plastic that made it look sort of like a jagged crack. And most of Earth First's actions have been demonstrations and tree-sits and blockades, things like that. But one of its founders, Dave Foreman, co-authored this book called Eco-Defense, which was a guide to wrecking the machines, and prefaced it with a set of ethics, that this stuff shouldn't be done as random vandalism. But if it's really going to save some wilderness in a specific fight, it's one tactic among many. Personally, I think most of it is wouldn't-it-be-great fantasy, but there've been a few occasions where a stand of tree has been spiked and marked saying, "Don't cut these; there're spikes in it." And frequently they've been de-spiked by the Forest Service at great expense, and then cut, but also some timber salesman quietly retired because of it.

HICK: In reading through your Author's Forum, I'm a little hazy on your view on tree-spiking. You seem to skirt around the issue.

CHADWICK: Well, I think you have to approach it in a nuanced way, because random vandalism only antagonizes people and gives a justification for violence against hippie protesters.

On Inter-textual Reference

HICK: In Fragile Creature, you have a Hitchcock reference, with the picture of the banker, standing there askew.

CHADWICK: In profile, of course.

HICK: Do you find you do a lot of intertextual referencing in your work?

CHADWICK: It's really an as-it-comes-up phenomenon. I knew that the banker had to be an imperious figure, because he was passing judgment on whether the film would continue there, and Hitch just fit the part. I'm all for throwing in cheap gags if it's called for.

HICK: Are there particular stories that you look back on and are particularly proud of?

CHADWICK: I think Think Like a Mountain is my best work. There's the most substance there, and I think my artistic skills had finally arrived, and I just put my heart and soul for many years into that one. And there are particular short stories that I'm fond of: "the Harlan Ellison Romoniclef Birdland Secret" is kind of a favorite of mine, and an early one called "Little Pushes," which was actually reprinted in a Fantagraphics collection called The Best Comics of The Decade.

HICK: Remind me of this one; the name is ringing a bell.

CHADWICK: It's a funny story about alienation at a Hollywood party which ends with Concrete doing a cannonball from the second floor into the pool.

HICK: Oh, right. That was a good one. It was short, it was self-contained. It was very structured.

CHADWICK: It begins with a metaphor about people being planets spinning in space, and if they get too close, they'll tear each other apart with gravity. And you start with the image of Concrete curled into a ball against stars, and at the end of the story, you realize that's him doing his cannonball.

HICK: I only have one problem with that story. The pool of flowers really looked like a pool of cauliflowers. [Chadwick laughs]

CHADWICK: Now there's an appetizing thought.

HICK: What was you first mainstream work in comics?

CHADWICK: The first published work was Dazzler with Archie Goodwin and Jackson Guice inking, later Romeo Tengal. But the actual first work I did was a jungle girl strip called Salimba -- first for Pacific Comics, and then it came out under the Blackthorne imprint after Pacific's demise. Bruce Batterson inked most of that and did a wonderful job, but also Tom Palmer did part of it.

HICK: How closely did you work with them?

CHADWICK: I hadn't met them. I communicated through letters, and it was a big thrill having Tom Palmer inking my first comics job because right when comics were the most important thing in my life -- at age 13 of 14, or even earlier than that -- he was inking Steranko and John Buscema and Neal Adams on that great Silver-Age stuff. I don't recall asking them to weigh their style in any particular way, so I guess it wasn't very close at all, to answer you question.

HICK: That's exactly what I was thinking. Did you read or see Stephen King's The Dark Half?

CHADWICK: Are you thinking of Night Shift -- the hand that's being unwrapped with gauze and has all the eyes on it?

HICK: No, that wasn't nearly as disturbing as The Dark Half, where the main character is having fugues, blackout periods in which a fictional character he's been writing about takes over. At one point, there's a flashback to an earlier part of the story, where it's explained that he was a conjoined twin, but that the twin never fully formed. He just had a couple bits of formation that registered as a brain tumor, so they had to go in and take it out. But they go in and find that these little bits had fully formed from this twin: they find a fingernail; they find an eye. [Chadwick laughs] Which opens during brain surgery.

CHADWICK: Oh, what a wonderful idea. Was this turned into a film?

HICK: Yeah.

CHADWICK: How was that realized? Did it have the effect that the story did?

HICK: It was pretty good. I think the story had a number of things that lent towards filmic influences anyway. There were references in there to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, which played out really well in the film.

CHADWICK: He's fond of cinematic metaphors.

HICK: He is, which is why I feel his it works well towards adapting his books to movies. At least some of them. There's one scene right at the end, where the protagonist and antagonist are fighting it out in an attic. It's the final fight scene. It's based on this idea that, when you die, sparrows come to collect your soul to bring it back to the Guff. And all these sparrows start attacking the building that they're in, and they start pecking little holes in the walls, so you see little bits of light streaming through, and a little bit more, and then it's suddenly very bright. And then the birds get in, and it gets darker and darker, and you can't see anything. It was a nice adaptation.

CHADWICK: Very visual thinking.

HICK: He's a guy who should be doing more comic books. He's definitely got an affinity for it. He did Creepshow, and he's comic writing, just not much. He hasn't gotten to the Clive Barker level yet.

CHADWICK: I was quite surprised. It really affected me. I'm always affected by stories of creative people whose careers are cut short, and I really wondered if it was over for him. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be, but he's got a few difficult years ahead.

HICK: I don't think it's slowed down his writing process anyway. He's always struck me as a strangely optimistic character. [Chadwick laughs] I've seen interviews with him, and he's jovial. I suspect the accident's actually going to help him. It's given him material.

CHADWICK: Well, the joke was that he was found by a fan who immediately broke his other leg. [Both laugh]

HICK: Do you have an urge, now, to keep Concrete as a central focus? You spoke earlier about realizing that Concrete is the thing for you at this point, but you obviously still have an urge for side-projects and other explorations of comics and other media. Do you still feel that Concrete is this central element?

CHADWICK: I think Concrete's my one shot to be remembered at this point, and to effect the wider culture, and just get my view of the world into the most minds.

HICK: Is Concrete like a cipher for you now, then?

CHADWICK: How do you mean?

HICK: In the sense of your having a story to tell, and using Concrete to tell it?

CHADWICK: Well, I'd never put it in those terms, but I guess so. It's a pretty flexible vehicle, because I can explore all those life issues that trouble me, and the wider world of politics. Concrete the character isn't stuck to one story. To use the obvious example of Batman, he's not trying to right that wrong that can never be fixed, having his parents killed before his eyes. He can get into all kinds of stuff.

HICK: He moves back and forth between two elements -- he copes with life, and he observes it -- and there's kind of a dual element to the character: there's the personal level, and there's the awe-inspired level. The two meld.

CHADWICK: Yeah, I like having that flexibility. I'd like to tell stories in which Concrete doesn't go through a big personal trauma or change at all, but is present while other characters do.

HICK: One of your quotes from your cards was "One of my aims in this story was to highlight all the truly strange life going on all around us: the aliens already here." I think that's a good line for almost any Concrete story I've read.

CHADWICK: [Long pause] I'm trying the different stories on for size, but I see what you mean. There's always, if nothing else, my digressions into the natural world, which are peripheral to whatever Concrete's doing.

HICK: Are you still planning to work in short series?

CHADWICK: Five to six issues is about my length, I think. It doesn't stretch it out so long that people lose track of it, and...

HICK: And short enough that you're capable of actually dealing with the deadlines.

CHADWICK: Yes.

HICK: You ran into some problems with that early in Concrete.

CHADWICK: I started out with a bi-monthly comic that I took four months to do each issue. And I'm beginning to realize that people will accept less than a 26-page story and two new covers, and I'm going to put sketchbook sections in Concrete, and maybe just a couple of pages of my watercolors, and try appear a little more regularly. I think that's a part of keeping faith with your readers that's important, and I've neglected it in the past.

HICK: What does your original art sell for?

CHADWICK: Y'know, I've never sold a Concrete story page. I decided early on that if I could avoid it, I would. Seeing how it paid off for Will Eisner and for Bill Gaines. I tried, not always successfully, to cultivate a veneration for my own work, and believing that it will be reprinted 50 years from now is part of that. I have sold some covers, and they sell for between $200 and $700 dollars.

HICK: I can see the practical concern. You have reprinted a lot of your work into the Concrete collections and the Complete Short Stories.

CHADWICK: And I was very glad I kept the originals, because they were a different size from the comics. They were 8 x 11 books, which gave much better reproduction for the fine-line work that a lot of that had. So, it's all shrink-wrapped in blocks in this other room. I'm thinking of getting an aluminum garbage can, and putting a thick box inside it, and filling it with clean play-s and all around, as a way of fire-proofing.

HICK: I imagine the answer is yes, but do you find you've picked up a lot of technical elements, things you've adapted along the way?

CHADWICK: Yeah, certainly. Even such a simple thing as keeping a bar of soap by my tabaret, and washing my brush out with soap and water right there, and leaving soap in it when it's twirled to a point. It stiffens and reinforces and makes the hairs last longer in that stiff shape. I have a handout I give to novice artists called "The Basics." Because, still, at every convention I attend, there's some kid who's never really produced comic-book pages, and doesn't know what a see-through ruler is, or what a technical pen is. I've given out dozens of these.

HICK: How much do you rely on observation and life-drawing? I've seen it come up before where you've referenced this in the back of books, where you've hired models and so forth.

CHADWICK: If I had my way, I'd shoot models for everything. It's not always practical, and I admit I cruise by without them a lot. But the value of drawing from life early in your development is you pick up mannerisms that indicate form that you can still use when you're making up the people you're drawing. I think a lot of... just the sorts of shadows that noses cast, and the superoratal ridge above your eye casts. It carries over.

HICK: In one of your books, you had a two-or-three page spread of Concrete showing up in other places.

CHADWICK: Speaking of self-indulgence. Yeah, I called it "I Get Around" after the Beach Boys song. During that early phase, Concrete was big news in the comics business, and a lot of people enjoyed sneaking him into their work.

HICK: He snuck into paperback covers; he snuck into a Justice League story.

CHADWICK: I felt like I'd really arrived when he turned up in Greg Evans' newspaper strip, Luann. "Hey, I'm in the culture!" My mom reported to me that Jay Leno did a superhero skit where he played The Chin, of course, but there was a Concrete look-alike in it who they called Stone. I thought, "Hmm. Maybe people do read this book."

HICK: On the other hand, maybe they were just ripping off The Thing.

CHADWICK: She said it was a pretty dead ringer. And Concrete's been kicking around Hollywood for six or seven years now, so he's been on the trades.

HICK: When you look back through your work -- you've been a comics professional for about 15 years -- how do you think you've progressed?

CHADWICK: I think a lot of things that I only instinctively understood were entertaining I can put names to now. The fact that suspense involves a time limit. The enjoyment of a great reversal of fortune. What the Wheat brother called "laying pipe": something that you introduce early in a story, and it seems to have a reason for being right there, enough to suggest that's its only reason for being there, but it plays a very important role later in the story. I'm more conscious about that bones-and-bristle of storytelling. I look at my work and I see a lot of inconsistency in the artwork. Even to the point of my characters not looking the same from page to page, sometimes. And that wrangles me a little bit. It's one of the reason I did these elaborate model-sheets for The World Below. I know I'm more systematic about working, as well. I have the steps down; I have my funny, little tools. I have this template I draw around before I lay out each page, and it's the proper proportions of a comic page.

HICK: How about your working environment itself? I assume you didn't start into comics with this sort of a set up built-to-order.

CHADWICK: No, in fact, I had a bit of an epiphany three years ago, that I'd always worked in pretty crummy workspaces. And that certainly wasn't venerating my work. So I had this place refurbished: I had insulation and a new ceiling put in, and these bookshelves built, and I redid the floor and got some carpeting, and put in another table so my artist friends can come over sometimes. I spend most of my life in this room, and now I love it. I just love being in this studio.

Trimmed from The Comics Journal #221