CI: Are there any characters other than Concrete that you would like to handle?

PC: The only pre-existing character I can think of right now is something I’ve already written a story for, and that’s the new Spirit series that Kitchen Sink is doing. I’ve written a new twenty-six page story for them that we’re looking for an artist for right now. I’m also r writing a series for Vertigo: “The Gifts of the Night,” which John Bolton is painting, it just came together last month.

CI: Congratulations, care to fill me in on any of it?

PC: It’s a kind of tragic fable set in an indeterminate European country in an indeterminate time, about a King’s son that seems to be having visions of the future. He’s an eight year old boy. His tutor, who is the protagonist, begins to realize that the boy is somehow processing the lessons he’s getting during the day into visions. Since he’s being taught Military History, he seems to be predicting the course of the war that his father is fighting. People begin to have great faith in these visions because the king acts on them and, in fact, is putting into place some classic military tactics from the ancient world, which the tutor is teaching the boy.

The tutor starts to understand this, and tries to create his dream of a federate scholarship. But others begin to understand what’s going on, start to manipulate things for their own end, and the tutor realizes that he’s created this.

It’s a very powerful tool that other people are using for horrendous ends and he is stuck in a moral dilemma. Should he tell the truth, or how can he stop this? That’s the plot, the treatment is kind of phantasmagorical in that the boy’s visions are all illustrated. Also, as a very deliberate, stylistic choice: all the metaphors that people speak are also illustrated. And in kind of a surreal way. So when the king is getting exaltant over this idea he’s gotten from his son to solve the great stalemate of the war, the tutor says something like “I knew the king did not want his wings of hope clipped by the likes of me.” So we see the king with wings instead of arms. In the opening, where the tutor is talking about the great pleasure of his life, which is hearing the voices of all the historians and commentators of the ancient world, he’s in the middle of the library and there all all these faces inbetween the books speaking to him. This happens every couple of pages.

It’s a story about visions and how we think in images, and how we speak in images, too.

CI: When should that be hitting the stands?

PC: It’s not scheduled yet, and John has just started, and he’s a painter. There’s been talk of it coming maybe next year, but I think that’s highly optimistic (laughter)! I think probably 1999.