[Header photo by Gage Skidmore]
Photo by Luigi Novi
Per The Hollywood Reporter, legendary American comic book artist and writer Neal Adams has passed away. His widow, Marilyn Adams, informed the Reporter that Neal died on Thursday, April 28, in New York after complications from sepsis. He was 80 years old. Best known for his work on “Batman,” “Green Lantern/Green Arrow,” “X-Men,” and many more in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Adams was also a vocal creators’ rights activist, an educator, and a filmmaker/storyboard artist.
Adams was born in Governors Island, New York City, on June 15, 1941. Raised in a military family, he grew up on various army bases, ranging from Brooklyn to Germany. He attended the School of Industrial Art high school in Manhattan, where he graduated in 1959. He applied unsuccessfully to draw for DC Comics, and instead began his professional career drawing gag panels for Archie Comics. He turned to illustrating advertisements, and his strong artwork landed him the job of illustrating the “Ben Casey” comic strip — based on the TV medical drama of the same name — in 1962.
“Ben Casey” ended a few months after the TV show did in 1966, and Adams worked as a ghost artist on various other strips until landing assignments at Warren Publishing and DC itself the following year. He specialized in horror and war stories, but what he really wanted to draw were superhero comics, and after a couple of Superman covers, he began collaborating with writer Gardner Fox on an Elongated Man back-up feature in the pages of “Detective Comics.”
By the end of the year, Adams was drawing the Deadman strip in “Strange Adventures,” and began scripting it in 1968 too; the comic was a hit, earning him several awards, including an induction into the Alley Award Hall of Fame. He also began working for DC’s rival, Marvel, on the “X-Men” series, where he first collaborated with writer Dennis O’Neil. The two teamed up again at DC for a run on both “Detective Comics” and “Batman,” which brought the Caped Crusader back to his darker roots with stories like ‘The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge,’ and ‘Daughter of the Demon’ (which marked the first appearance of the supervillain Ra’s al Ghul.)
During this time, Adams and O’Neill simultaneously collaborated on a run of topical, socially conscious stories in “Green Lantern/Green Arrow,” where they introduced John Stewart, the first African American Green Lantern. Adams also continued to freelance for Marvel, depicting the ‘Kree-Skrull War’ in the pages of “The Avengers.” His interior work became less frequent as the decade went on, as he became preoccupied with the issue of creators’ rights: however, he would contribute to two more iconic titles before the ’70s were over, namely the first DC/Marvel crossover, “Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man” (where he redrew much of Ross Andru’s art with John Romita Sr.), and (in another O’Neil collaboration), “Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.”
In 1971, Adams and Dick Giordano founded the studio Continuity Associates, which provides storyboard art and animatics for production and advertising companies. In 1984, he started a publishing company, Continuity Comics, which is now likely best known as the birthplace of Larry Hama and Michael Golden’s “Bucky O’Hare.” Continuity Comics went bankrupt by 1994, but Continuity Associates (now known as Neal Adams Continuity Studios) remains active. In 2005, he began to return sporadically to Marvel and DC with miniseries like “Batman: Odyssey,” and “The First X-Men,” which he would write and draw; none of these new series were particularly well received.
As a creators’ rights advocate, Adams notably helped Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster receive credit and compensation for creating Superman in 1975. He served as president of the Academy of Comic Book Arts, which eventually dissolved because Adams wanted it to behave like a labor union. In 1978, he founded a union known as the Comics Creators Guild. In 2008, Adams (who was Jewish) worked with the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies to put pressure on the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, to return the paintings of Dina Babbitt, an artist and Holocaust survivor who had been forced to work for the Nazi physician Josef Mengele. (Babbitt sadly died in 2009 without having her paintings returned.) Adams and Rafael Medoff, the director of the Wyman Institute, would continue to work together on several educational motion comics.
During his lifetime, Adams was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame, the Harvey Awards’ Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, and the Inkwell Awards’ Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame. He was married twice: his first wife was comics colorist Cory Adams, with whom he had a daughter, Zeea Adams, also a colorist. He and Marilyn had three sons, Jason, Joel and Josh Adams, the latter two of whom are also comic book artists. In a statement to the Reporter, Josh said of his father’s legacy, “[When] I sat at tables at conventions next to the same people I would watch treat my father with such reverence, [it was then] I understood: he was their father, too. Neal Adams’s most undeniable quality was the one I had known about him my entire life: he was a father. Not just my father, but a father to all that would get to know him.”
