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Neal Adams: Doctor of Comics

[Author's note: This column contains corrections of an earlier column in which I misinterpreted out-of-context quotes from interviews to suggest a Adam suffered a long-term problem with deadlines. Additional information from the horse's mouth clarified these points for me; and I have therefore revised this column in light of better information. My apologies to Mr. Adams.]

Shoes No One Can Fill

The question "who is the most missed luminary of the Silver Age artists" is a question that evokes from me one answer, without need of contemplation: that figure is a gentleman named Neal Adams.

If you know anything about the Silver Age of Comics, the odds are high that you've heard of Neal Adams, the virtuoso penciler best known for the legendary run of Green Lantern / Green Arrow that may, in the long run, be considered one of the key formative events of the medium in its entirety.

If you don't know anything about Neal Adams, please scroll through this document and examine the samples of his work that appear here. His work radiates a kind of excellence that was foreign to a medium that, although sometimes indifferent to quality, had at least anecdotally demonstrated inconsistent bodies of excellent work.

Adams' penciling (and, when he did it himself, his inks) were and are carefully crafted pieces that justify the claim that comics can be art. The beauty of his detail, the subtlety of expression he infuses into faces (or, conversely, the absurd exaggerations of expression he can wring from a face when in a more humorous mood), and the overall excellence of his feeling for layout and the cinematographic aspect of a comics panel or story all qualify Adams as a giant of his medium. Unlike his peers, however, he managed to remain a consummate realist in a form dominated by abstract and surreal works.

So why is it that the major comics companies aren't giving this man all the work they could pay for? And why aren't we seeing his work constantly, even in a medium that has, in the last ten years, only begun to push its standards to a point near his plateau?

Where He Came From

Neal Adams received his formal training at the School of Industrial Art, (these days, called the School of Art and Design) after growing spending some early years on army bases (he describes himself as an "army brat". Like his contemporary and fellow Silver Age icon Jim Steranko, Neal Adams spent some time working in the world of advertising and commercial art.

After distinguishing himself as one of the youngest cartoonists to create a successful newspaper strip based on the Ben Casey television show, Adams suffered an early setback in his advertising work when a commercial portfolio he created disappeared in the hands of an agency to whom he had applied (such thefts of art plague cartoonists, and, evidently, also occur in advertising). Discouraged by such ill-treatment, Adams pursued, instead, his passion for comics and rapidly rose to star status in the heady days of the high Silver Age.

Demonstrating the ability to start from raw materials and produce matter ready for the printer in an age where such chores tended to reside in specialists who regularly penciled, ink, lettered, colored, or wrote, Adams impressed a new audience with his cartoonish work in Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis titles. From there, he soon put his talents to superhero titles, including memorable runs in Strange Adventures (where he would launch the Deadman concept); The Spectre; Batman, which his work saved from cancellation in the plummeting interest following the Batmania of 1966-1967; and the legendary Green Lantern/Green Arrow series that failed to save the series owing to executive mismanagement, problems in distribution, and controversy about adult themes in the content (in spite of the overwhelmingly positive reactions from critics and readers).

During this period, DC would also assign him as many covers as the laws of physics and a twenty-four-hour day would permit him to complete. Some customers and industry critics accused DC of employing bait-and-switch in DC's use of so many Adams covers for books that did not contain credited Adams work; many readers purchased otherwise unremarkable creations for the lure of an Adams cover alone.

Rescue Artist

In his work on Batman, X-Men, and Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Adams established himself as a proven performer able to rescue anything that had a chance of survival. Though executive decisions based on erroneous circulation data (further corrupted by distribution systems with structural incentives to fraudulent sales counts that favored falsifying sales numbers downwards), DC and Marvel cancelled the Green Lantern/Green Arrow and X-Men titles just as each enjoyed a massive upsurge in popularity.

Marvel decided that Neal Adams was the man to rescue its title Avengers, which, after a generally excellent period typified by strong stories by Roy Thomas and solid artwork by John Buscema, had begun to drift. In an age of flagging interest in superhero comics, Marvel issued dense press releases of the purest hype about a new age for the title and centered these claims around assigning Adams to the title.

Marvel didn't let Adams finish what they hired him for. After doing cover art for Avengers #93 and interior/exterior art for #94, #95 and #96, Marvel had brought in a rotating series of interim artists again.

Deadlines and Scapegoats

If you blinked, you might have missed the Neal Adams Avengers, which enjoyed a shorter run even than the rare Dave Cockrum Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes.

Avengers #97 contains art by veteran penciler John Buscema, with inking and coloring touches that strongly suggest Adams' work, although the book credits him as "consultant."

Marvel, unlike DC, did not stand above taking snipes at its talent within its bullpen columns, or, sadly, even its splash pages. In the X-Men story that introduced the character Sunfire, one such jab credited Don Heck with "fill-in" art chores in a story that obviously contains Adams work. Why, one must wonder, couldn't Marvel have said, tersely: Art by Adams and Heck?

By issue #97, Marvel had issued an official statement unkindly stating that "the procrastinatin' [sic] Mr. Adams" had become "...so enmeshed in deadline problems that there was naught to do but have valiant John Buscema come to our rescue by penciling this final Skrull/Kree issue virtually overnight." The column went on to explain that, even if Adams had been able to make the deadline for issue #97, he had already decided to leave for an improbable reason that seems contrived to cover some other cause or protect someone's face, and not necessarily Adams'. This statement claimed Adams found that he didn't want to deal with the awkwardness of manipulating too many characters contained within too many places. Considering that these stories held only a subset of Marvel's already growing superhero stable (many fewer characters and places than would see the pages of titles like Secret Wars, the product of talents indisputably of a lesser grade than Adams), we should view this claim with some skepticism.

Anecdotal evidence and the sniping statements of corporate mouthpieces may support claims about missed deadlines; and the cancellation of X-Men and Green Lantern/Green Arrow may suggest other problems; but the era in which he worked and standard industry practices suggest that a bad rap invests his name. The absence of fill-in books to break the continuity of his runs argues for the timeliness of his work, just to cite one argument of fact proposed in his defense. Furthermore, certain editorial abuses of talent prevailed in his day, including the familiar adding of projects without adjusting deadlines accordingly, then fixing blame on the last stages in the process (something pandemic in newspapers, where editorial decisions may delay runs, but the blame descends upon pasteup or pressroom staff).

All traces of whatever conflagration brought about the end of Adams' role on the Avengers remain fairly well concealed behind official statements, euphemism, and years of public silence, possibly fed by insider sniping. I can offer no conclusions about a specific event bringing about Adams' departure from mainstream comics; known facts may make such an event an unnecessary complication to a process about which facts remain well known. The big guns ill-used some of their brighter lights and chased away some of their best talent, particularly in a series of purgelike defections around the turn of the seventies. Some of these people became overloaded with work until their enthusiasm died and their output suffered in quality. Some people faced dubious decisions requiring them to accept cuts in page rates and lack of acknowledgment for their role in creating key characters and concepts. Others found creative control wrested away from them to no evident purpose.

Whatever happened -- and something surely must have -- Adams left Marvel, and eventually left working for bosses. Today, he works for customers.

Adams would do some subsequent work for DC, particularly with the characters Batman and Green Arrow, both targets of his earlier revisions; and he would produce occasional Marvel pieces, including his work on the Conan comic and black and white magazine. His work would soon cease to appear for DC or Marvel, as Adams gravitated towards other projects, including cover designs (following up Frazetta's work with his own series of covers for Edgar Rice Burroughs novels), toy design, advertising, storyboarding, and, eventually, animation.

Today, he and his work can be found at his commercial web site for Continuity Studios at http://www.nealadams.com.

The Way He Works

It shouldn't surprise readers to note that Neal Adams has, over the decades, worked in unconventional ways. He claims that he does layouts on 4.25" by 5.5" originals--yes, that's a quarter of a piece of typing paper--then blows these up with an overhead projector, where he fills in detail and fixes any problems with the breakdowns. There's something both bizarre and elegant about this approach.

He has mentioned in an interview about Jack Kirby that Kirby had been known for a high rate of output (a rate so high that Marvel decided they could no longer afford to pay him the page rate he had been earning for as many pages as he produced). In the prime of his vigor, Kirby could sometimes produce 10 complete pages of art in a day, and was known to work at a regular pace of six or more pages a day during later stages; such output, however, never represented the norm for the medium. Adams, by comparison, typically produced two, maybe three pages, which, by today's standards, remains voluminous, particularly considering his start-to-finish role in many of these works; a completed Adams page might include everything from pencils and inks to colors and scripting, involving production from blank page to camera-ready copy.

He has never feared bringing new technology to the media in which he works; for instance, he brought information about color processes developed in the 1950s for EC Comics to DC, a company that had, before his work there, barely progressed in some particulars since the 1940s.

Nor, in the short or long run, would Adams sacrifice quality to other concerns. In interviews, Adams has made reference to comic art in which quality gets sacrificed for deadlines. This doubtless reflects a sore spot brought on by ill-use within the big guns of the industry; an uncharacteristic annoyance appears in his tone when he discusses this. Considering the great amount of discomfort necessary to induce him to complain, even in an age in which catty prima donnas casually snipe at one another (and ill-founded rumors harmful to reputations may proliferate indiscriminately on the Internet), an observer might well conclude that he has seen this in his many years of watching, and performing in, the industry.

Adams' Subsequent Work

When we look to things like Neal Adams anthologies, we have the X-Men run (which currently is available in a breathtaking trade paperback), the reprinted Deadman and Green Lantern / Green Arrow stories, and the reprinted (and excerpted) Kree-Skrull war edition Marvel issued in the early 1980s. In general, where a work contained more than two consecutive issues of his work, the publisher would milk it for as many reprints as the market would bear. Therefore the aforementioned reprint pieces, plus items like the X-Men trade paperback bearing his work.

He would pass through a period not yet adequately anthologized, due to the shortness of runs or the nature of the content; rights become problematic when an artist's work appears across many different publishers.

Some examples of his diverse portfolio:

• He would contribute a number of pieces to National Lampoon, said pieces tending to depict subjects not within the constraints of the Comics Code Authority. These pieces included "Son-o-God" comics, a short piece parodying a VD awareness film (in stomach-turning graphic detail), another piece for a Boy's Life parody showing blow-by-blow accounts of a Native American torture ritual (evidently a take on an illustrated James Fenimore Cooper theme), and other numerous pieces worth collecting.
• His work appears in the odd concept piece "Superman versus Muhammad Ali," now a collector's piece both for the strangeness of its concept and the quality of its graphic execution.
• A series of Tarzan paperbacks from the seventies bore Neal Adams covers. Adams' work, although tinted line art, rather than full oil paints, nonetheless compared favorably with the painted works of fellow comics veteran Frank Frazetta which adorned an earlier series of editions of Robert E. Howard Conan anthologies.
• Having connections from the now-defunct Charlton comics (including DC Art Director Dick Giordano, whom Adams had drafted from Charlton to DC to become perhaps the best of his inkers), Adams did some work for their Six Million Dollar Man comic in the mid-to-late seventies.
• As mentioned previously, Adams worked on Marvel's black-and-white magazines on both interior and exterior content.
• In 1980, he involved himself in storyboarding and design for the movie "Funhouse," which, in spite of Adams' efforts, did not enjoy comparable talent in other stages of production.
• In the early eighties, he began releasing new superhero material, such as Skate Man and Ms. Mystic, which he would eventually distribute through his Continuity Studios.

After this, and probably not long afterwards, we can note the appearance of Adams' work under his Continuity Studios label.

Adams Today

And, finally, Adams established Continuity Comics, the product of the studio he still (?) runs with a stable of artists who do a combination of graphic arts material (the stuff that actually pays for the studio) and the occasional comics project like Megalith. The penetration of his Continuity Studios outputs remains difficult to evaluate, since comics shops carry it only irregularly; short-lived faddish material tends to predominate where such businesses deviate from the major lines of comics.

Much of his current work may involve material that does not enter the hands of comics consumers; while advertising work, always successful where Adams has contributed to it, appears as widely as the magazine that carries it, things like storyboarding do not tend to reach audiences outside of production crews for movies, except through artists' anthology portfolios and occasional pieces released to fanzines.

Until someone starts a magazine entitled The Neal Adams Collector, however, the great body of his work after the 1970s may remain out of the hands of the greater body of his admirers. Granted, he should do something that lets him work the way he wants to, and pay the bills, and escape the predations of rapacious management that characterize the freelancer system dominating comics these days.

It remains difficult not to regret that so much of his work must go to places where only a handful of people will ever get to see it, though; maybe because it's hard to shake the feeling that movie directors don't deserve to keep Neal Adams all to themselves.