Comic Review: The Art of Concrete Genie (Dark Horse Comics)

Dark Horse Comics releases an artbook which is about bringing your creations to life as in graffiti style in The Art of Concrete Genie.

Before, they were drawings and paintings of cartoons, and then there’s a video game that your drawings are alive, and THEN there’s a game that you can fight along and against these drawings. So from 2D drawings to a 3D graphical world, back to the drawings which are more complex in mind. For those who haven’t heard this before, this is an art book based on a PS4 game in October 2019. Concrete Genie is like going around an adventure about a boy who is wielding a giant magic paintbrush with his magical sketchbook, yeah ‘magic.’ The whole concept of the game is more complex because the story is more like Kingdom Hearts series because of its an adventure filled with imagination where every drawing turned into life around the streets, and when good and evil would triumph. Well, as much as I believe that every imagination of your dreams can be a reality one day.

This art book contains every information and the collective knowledge from the game, so long does the story and the characters are flowing smoothly. The idea of making a game about a fictional world where the protagonist drawings are turning to live, as wall paintings is a swell one. Of course, the creatures that the protagonist draws are called genies, which is much more like Dream Eaters from Kingdom Hearts because I’m actually going to mention a lot from that game. The gameplay follows a boy named Ash who has talent in art and explores its magic along the way. At the times he was bullied by some teenagers who made his life miserable and scattered his drawings around.

There’s something about these games that is much more interesting than any other game you played. The story is that these genies are alive in his drawings and rampages in the ports of Denska. Fun Fact: these genies are mostly reacted as Light and Dark monsters, just like the Dream Eaters or The Unversed, the monsters take form and controls at its own will, but the Heartless is another kind of concept because these monsters came from people’s hearts when they experience anxiety, corruption and despair; and even someone who has a complete control of those creatures of darkness, especially that those hearts returns to the darkness once they came. And the Nobodies is just a common thing when humans lose their hearts, these things exist. The genies are behaving like a wild animal that it’s about to ram its horns, but friendly in the end, it’s more like having your favorite children’s book turned into real life. And about that paintbrush that Ash uses, is similar to the Keyblade that Sora or any other Keyblade wielder is wielding, except the paintbrush can use it’s magic to render and scatter the paint around like Rohan Kishibe’s drawing technique professionally. The way he brushes throughout the walls is an idea to have something to transform in real life. As in abstract or self-expressionism painting, however, there are a lot of ideas that Ash can make something from his sketchbook, he can make the whole landscape background alive in nature, as well as the creatures going around in the Living Paint world. The worlds that he creates like the cherry field, the storm, mushroom, the snow, etc. He actually creates these landscapes for the genies to have a home.

Oh, and we can’t forget about the port town, this whole town is like a dungeon. No matter what you do, while playing the game, you had to get around the town fighting the corrupted dark genies. The civilization is more of a fishing port town where everyone grabs their boats just to go fishing and sell these fishes afterward. The concept of the town used to be a metropolis city, but that’s actually the dark side of the town. And of course, all of Ash’s art is all in one art book that you can ever find around. It’s actually amazing that the game developers made a hypothesis to know that every drawing can come to life like in this game. But this game is like a mixture of Kingdom Hearts except there are no exceptions that the genies are like the shadow creatures but they have their own world to live in. If you rather want to have an artbook where every collection of Ash’s drawings and the world is there, then this is for you.