#76, Fifty Years Later
That question was raised by an unassuming elderly African-American man who, despite the cultural invisibility beaten into him by systemic prejudices, found the courage to face off against the possessor of the most formidable weapon in the universe. Green Lantern, the power-ring-wielding Emerald Crusader who couldn’t even stammer a response to this piercing query, became “woke.” And so did I.
At age 14.
For me, the year was 1972, two years after the story’s original publication in the landmark Green Lantern #76 (Apr. 1970). I first discovered “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” written by Denny O’Neil and illustrated by Neal Adams, when it was reprinted in black and white in the first of two Green Lantern/Green Arrow paperback editions published by Paperback Library.
“This is it! The most daring dialogue that ever appeared in any comic!” boasted a headline on the paperback’s back cover. In the epilogue of “No Evil Shall Escape My Sight,” Green Arrow—previously a durable but square “Batman with a bow” who had recently been reimagined into a hip, streetwise crusader—proved that proclamation when he had the audacity to proselytize not only to his Justice League ally Green Lantern but also to one of GL’s omnipotent bosses, a Guardian of the Universe:
“[America is] a good country… beautiful… fertile… and terribly sick! There are children dying… honest people cowering in fear… disillusioned kids ripping up campuses… “On the streets of Memphis a good black man died… and in Los Angeles, a good white man fell… Something is wrong! Something is killing us all…! Some hideous moral cancer is rotting our very souls!”
A half-century later, the creeping frailties of my aging body remind me that I’m no longer the impressionable boy who was, like GL, shaken to his core by these ethical challenges. But the 2022 passing of Neal Adams has given me pause, as did the 2020 death of Denny O’Neil. Denny’s dialogue may seem heavy-handed to a reader from a later generation, but to the kids and teens of the ’70s, like me, he was a Pied Piper of social relevance. Neal’s photorealistic illustrations initiated my personal comic-book puberty, awakening me from the simple joys of my childhood “funnybooks” into an appreciation of the potential of an art form. His art had a similar effect on countless other readers at the time.
‘S O S GREEN LANTERN!’
DC Comics’ 1970 publication of Green Lantern #76—along with Marvel Comics’ release of Conan the Barbarian #1 and the industry-shaking news of Jack Kirby’s defection from Marvel to DC—were the trigger points of what we now historically deem the Bronze Age of Comics.
“At the time the Green Lantern title was dying,” wrote DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz (with Brian M. Thomsen) in his autobiography, Man of Two Worlds: My Life in Science Fiction and Comics by Julius “Julie” Schwartz (2000, Harper Entertainment). “[A] decision was made to use it as our proving ground to expand the comics medium, examine its boundaries, and explore a new realm—namely, relevance and realism. Businesswise it wasn’t much of a gamble since the title was already on its last legs. And who knew? Perhaps an injection of relevance might save it.”
“Relevance” was the flavor of the month at DC at the time. The publisher, once the Rock of Gibraltar of the superhero comic market, had been jackhammered by the jazzy juggernaut that was Marvel Comics. Mighty Marvel’s quirky, quarrelsome heroes and villains engendered themselves upon readers no longer satisfied by DC’s pantheon of conventional caped crusaders with largely interchangeable personalities.
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I been readin’ about you... how you work for the blue skins... and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins... and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with--! ...the black skins! I want to know... how come?! Answer me that, Mr. Green Lantern!
And so, starting at the end of the 1960s, many of DC’s titles tried to get “with it” by borrowing plots from the nightly news. Flower children made the scene in Joe Simon’s hippie-hero flop, Brother Power, the Geek . Steve Ditko’s The Hawk and the Dove , about ideologically contrasting teenage brothers who moonlighted as superheroes, appropriated Vietnam War protest jargon for its title and character names. Diana Prince relinquished her Amazonian superpowers and became a liberated avenger in Wonder Woman. Dick Grayson graduated from Gotham High to Hudson U, and as Robin the Teen (formerly Boy) Wonder tackled campus unrest and counterculture criminals in the back pages of Batman. Superman ran afoul of Native Americans angry over the possession of their land in Action Comics, and in his Clark Kent guise took to the television airwaves as an anchorman. Pollution was a “villain” in Aquaman and Justice League of America stories. Superman’s girlfriend infamously became Black for one day in Lois Lane. Western and war books used their historical settings for parables about ethnic equality. In DC’s romance comics, the liberated Mary Richards type supplanted the lovesick Gidgets that had previously dominated their pages.
The architect behind some of those DC stories was the newspapermanturned-comic scribe Denny O’Neil, who was tapped by editor Schwartz to plug some new light into the flickering Green Lantern. “I suppose I considered myself as much journalist as I did fiction writer,” O’Neil revealed in 1983’s deluxe reprint Green Lantern/Green Arrow #1, which led him to ponder: “What would happen if we put a superhero in a real-life setting dealing with a real-life problem?”
O’Neil “realized that Green Lantern needed a foil, someone to argue with,” and selected Green Arrow for that role. You’d have to search far and wide to find two less compatible characters, aside from their sartorial jade hues and mutual chairs at the Justice League meeting table. GA’s makeover (in his classic Batman team-up in The Brave and the Bold #85) was still fresh and Denny was charting the bowman’s adventures in the hero’s only home at the time, Justice League of America . In his new interpretation of Green Lantern , Denny’s GL was a rightwing, by-the-book space cop, while GA was a leftwing, bleeding heart Robin Hood. They weren’t quite the rock ’em-sock ’em polar opposites that would emerge on television a year later in the forms of All in the Family ’s house bigot Archie Bunker and house hippie Mike Stivic, but were different enough to afford O’Neil the opportunity to use Green Arrow as a mouthpiece to enlighten Green Lantern (and the comic’s audience) of societal woes (although GL very famously got to tell off know-it-all GA on the alarming cover to Green Lantern #85, the first of the series’ two “drug issues”).
This experimental take on Green Lantern might very well have been illustrated by Gil Kane, the first GL artist of the Silver Age who had recently returned to the title, had Neal Adams not caught wind of the series’ slumping sales. It was Neal whose peerless pencil had produced Green Arrow’s bearded “new look” (to borrow a phrase from the Silver Age’s Batman soft reboot) in the Bob Haney–scripted B&B #85. However, it was the star of the Green Lantern book that attracted Adams’ eye. As he related in a 1996 interview in Comic Book Marketplace #40, “All I wanted to do was draw Gil Kane’s character and live up to his image of it.” Adams asked to draw the book, but Julie Schwartz resisted, hesitant because of Neal’s commitments to Batman, DC covers, and other projects. The tenacious artist persisted, emboldened once he actually read O’Neil’s trailblazing script for Green Lantern #76. Schwartz reluctantly but wisely relented, assigning the book to Adams.
WHAT CAN TWO MEN DO?
And thus with issue #76, Green Lantern was rebranded “Green Lantern costarring Green Arrow”—or Green Lantern/Green Arrow, as it is most commonly called—although the series’ official publication title remained Green Lantern.
No one was expecting a stick of dynamite to explode on the comic racks on February 19, 1970. It was business as usual for the news dealers that snipped the distributors’ string around a bundle of funnybooks to unveil the latest covers and their familiar images: The Web-Slinger was tussling with the Kingpin once again on John Romita, Sr.’s cover to Amazing Spider-Man #84. The forest-firefighting bruin supervised a group of scouts on Gold Key’s Smokey the Bear #2. The little devil twirled his flaming trident like a majorette’s baton on the cover of Harvey’s Hot Stuff #97. Marvel super-people weren’t getting along (as usual) as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes raced to catch the fleet-footed Quicksilver on John Buscema’s frantic cover to Avengers #75. And being the winter, Riverdale’s groovy teens were cloaked in parkas and scarves instead of bikinis and cut-offs on the latest offerings from Archie Comics.
No Evil Shall Escape His Sight
An undated mixed media portrait of Green Lantern by the legendary Neal Adams. From the archives of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha. com).
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The Master
(top) Neal Adams, sketching at a mid-1970s comic-con. Courtesy of Sam Maronie, with special thanks to John Morrow. (bottom) Adams’ original art for the cover of Green Lantern #76 (Apr. 1970), courtesy of Heritage. This extraordinary piece sold for $442,150 in a November 20, 2015 auction.
But then, there it was: Green Lantern #76. The anticipation started with the cover—that iconic Neal Adams masterpiece—with GA’s expertly aimed shaft shattering GL’s power battery. Bathed in Jack Adler’s illuminating shades of green, Adams’ simple, yet powerful, composition screamed for the reader’s attention. It didn’t really require the “Stop! This is the new…” subhead topping the revised logo, yet that declaration sparked an additional level of excitement for a title that needed a shot in the arm.
Sinestro, Doctor Polaris, and the rest of GL’s rogues’ gallery were AWOL, as was the alien-worldof-the-issue subject that filled many a Green Lantern plot’s pages. In issue #76, the villain was an odious slumlord who cared zilch about the downtrodden huddled within the dilapidated tenement he owned. After bringing him to justice, the emerald duo— in their alter egos of Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen (with one of the Guardians of the Universe dubbed “Old-Timer” as a companion)—hopped into a pickup truck (a green one, natch!) and ventured out to explore the “real” America. “There’s a fine country out there someplace,” said Ollie. “Let’s go find it!”
While the well-read Denny O’Neil’s “Hard-Traveling Heroes” concept had Jack Kerouac’s Beat Generation novel On the Road to thank for its inspiration, two recent Hollywood offerings had made such road trips part of the zeitgeist. Dennis Hopper directed and co-starred alongside Peter Fonda in the 1969 counterculture classic Easy Rider, with two “Born to Be Wild” motorcycling hippies getting a firsthand look at the beauty—and underbelly—of America. Meanwhile, NBC-TV’s Then Came Bronson, about a freewheeling journalist combing on the nation’s highways for truth, was winding down its single season on the air at the time Green Lantern #76 debuted.
And thus, the adventures continued. Worker oppression, cults, freedom of speech, corporate control, Native-American land rights, drug addiction, and racial and gender equality were among the torn-from-the-headlines subjects fueling O’Neil and Adams’ stories. Green Lantern’s traditional milieu of science fiction was occasionally shoehorned into a “with it” scenario, with varying results. But even the weaker GL/GAs were miles above the standard comics fare. Three of the later issues are extraordinary: the two-parter in #85 and 86, wherein Green Arrow’s erstwhile sidekick Roy (Speedy) Harper was revealed to be a heroin addict; and #87, which featured two classic stories—a GL tale that introduced Green Lantern John Stewart, one of DC’s rare AfricanAmerican heroes at the time, and a GA tale by writer Elliot S! Maggin where Ollie Queen reevaluated how he might best be a community servant.
After a reprint fill-in in #88, the experiment that was Green Lantern/Green Arrow abruptly came to an end with issue #89 (Apr.–May 1972), although GL/GA briefly limped along as a backup series in The Flash. (For a full reckoning of the GL/GA series, see John Wells’ superb article in BACK ISSUE #45.) Remarked Julius Schwartz in his autobiography, “Older readers went wild over the storylines and praised the books. Both Denny and Neal won numerous awards for their groundbreaking work. It was a critical success, it didn’t lose money, and it gained DC a lot of favorable publicity. But the younger readers (who still made up the majority of the readership) didn’t want relevance, they wanted entertainment—and for them the two did not match up, so eventually we had to let the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series die. It had served its purpose, and new ground had been broken.”
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Tribute Issue
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Neal Adams
Neal Adams changed my life. I mean that literally and sincerely. I know there are many people who can say the exact same thing. That’s how important and enormous Neal Adams’ influence is. He forever changed comicbook art, storytelling, and creators’ rights.
In April 1971, I strolled into my local 7-Eleven convenience store and perused the comic-book spinner rack. I was eight years old, an occasional comics reader, and I enjoyed watching the reruns of the 1966 Batman TV series. As I scanned the covers—and there were some great covers in 1971—one caught my eye, Batman #232. That comic became my demarcation point. It was the first time I noticed the art in a comic book, and it was phenomenal. I’d never seen Batman portrayed so realistically; he was a dynamic force. His cape seemed to take on a life of its own, but it remained grounded in the reality. He was dark and intimidating, this wasn’t just Batman, this was The Batman. In addition to the issue introducing a new villain, Ra’s al Ghul, it also featured Batman and Robin’s origins (something Adams asked writer Denny O’Neil to include). This was my introduction to Batman’s vengeful beginnings, and Adams’ gritty portrayal had a big impact on me. I would go on to seek out anything Neal Adams touched: covers, stories, magazines, fanzines, book covers, everything. I already had an interest in art and according to my teachers I had some talent, but after seeing Neal’s art, I wanted to be an artist like him. I copied his panels, covers, and even whole issues with his art. Neal’s art is what launched my love of comic-book collecting and an appreciation of all comic-book art. Flash forward to 2003: I’m the art director/graphic designer for Comic Book Marketplace magazine. Russ Cochran was the editor, and his expertise was limited to EC Comics and comic strips, so Russ often relied on me to suggest an issue’s content. It was Batman’s 45th year of being published, and I told him that we should do a special issue about the Caped Crusader. Of course, I wanted to interview Neal for the issue, and Russ agreed. I had never met Neal, so I wanted to travel to New York and do this interview in person. I was going to ask Neal everything that I wanted to know about the Batman stories he drew for The Brave and the Bold, Detective Comics, and Batman. I think the interview was more for me than the readers of the magazine. Neal had been interviewed many times, but I don’t believe he’d ever done a Batman interview that was as comprehensive as mine. I met Neal and his wonderful family at Continuity Studios on May 7, 2003 (coincidentally my birthday). I spent two days with Neal discussing his Batman stories and his time at DC. It was a dream come true. They say, don’t meet your heroes or you’ll be disappointed. Nothing could be further from the truth, Neal was an amazing host, honest, and incredibly charitable with his time, even though he was under pressure to finish several advertising deadlines. He worked as we talked in Continuity’s conference room. We took a break at midday and Neal insisted that I join him for lunch. I still distinctly remember having lunch with Neal as we casually conversed about comics, movies, science, and a variety of subjects. I wondered what that eight-year-old kid who saw that Batman comic in 7-Eleven would’ve thought of this scenario? When I told Neal that I became an artist because of him, he just smiled coyly. I knew he’d been told that often.
Neal was a seismic force, and his impact is still being felt in the industry and the movies based on comics. The interview you’re about to read was eventually repurposed for the book The Batcave Companion, which I co-wrote with Michael Eury. My part of the book was about the Bronze Age Batman, Neal’s Batman.
– Michael Kronenberg
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Neal Adams
Tribute
TM & © DC Comics. Courtesy of Heritage.
conducted by Michael Kronenberg on May 7, 2003
transcribed by Laurie Kronenberg
Influences
(left) This iconic cover of Detective Comics #31 (Sept. 1939), attributed to Bob Kane, inspired (bottom) Adams’ unforgettable cover of Batman #227 (Dec. 1970)—which we’ve repurposed for this edition of BACK ISSUE!
[ Editor’s notes: This interview has been edited for BACK ISSUE from its longer Batcave Companion form. Several of the creators mentioned in the present tense by Neal Adams, including Joe Kubert, Denny O’Neil, and Julius Schwartz, have since passed.]
MICHAEL KRONENBERG: It seems that Detective Comics #27–37 (1939–1940), when Batman first appeared, was an influence on you, as if you were going back to the character’s roots. Is that true?
NEAL ADAMS: The truth is that, when I presented Batman to DC Comics, and I didn’t get to present it to the Batman editor [Julius Schwartz], I got to present it to the Brave and the Bold editor [Murray Boltinoff]. I think my attitude as to how the character should be portrayed was exemplified in my conversation with Julie Schwartz. I had asked to work on Batman many times and he turned me down. So I drew Batman for several issues in Boltinoff’s Brave and the Bold . Letters poured into DC Comics saying and asking, “Why is the only ‘good’ Batman the one in Brave and the Bold ?” Under this barrage of fan mail Julie finally offered to let me draw for the regular Batman titles. In our hallway chat as he offered me the Batman work Julie finally said, and with some annoyance, “Why is it, Neal, that you think you know how to do Batman and all the rest of us don’t?” What I said to Julie at the time, and I would repeat it now, is that, “It’s not that I knew what Batman should be, it’s that I and every kid in America knew what Batman should be.” It just didn’t seem like the people at DC Comics knew what Batman ought to be. So I didn’t think of what I did as being anything really spectacular. When I was a little kid, when I was like ten and 11 years old, I started to make a Batman encyclopedia for myself, where I traced drawings and copied drawings. I wrote on the bottoms the various characteristics of the various characters and I wrote about the Batmobile and all the other things. And I guess I did about ten pages before I dropped from kid exhaustion. For a ten- or 11-yearold kid that was already a big deal, and I don’t think anything in those pages doesn’t exemplify what I think Batman is all about. I don’t blame the people at DC. I think the TV show ran roughshod
over the Batman character, and DC Comics followed suit. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody what Batman is about. It’s just sometimes you lose track of things. The movies lost it, and maybe never had it. I think that’s the way it is with people. There are influences that come along that take your mind and switch it around and then make you think things that you never would have thought if you didn’t have all these influences.
KRONENBERG: It seems the people at National [Periodical Publications, DC Comics’ former name] had become incredibly stodgy.
ADAMS: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say that. I think the world had become kind of stodgy. I think we had fought our communists and fought our parents. I mean, you must understand, I come from the time when, I believe it was the governor of New Jersey went on the air and destroyed rock-and-roll records; when people openly talked about the African influence on whites’ music; where quiet bigotry was going on all the time, everywhere, even in New York; where the world was clutching its game ball for fear that something would come and penetrate it or steal it away. Perhaps that’s not the way to put it, but it was a very protective and insular time.
neal adams
For me, it was not my time. If there was a time that I should have been born, perhaps, it was not then. In all other things, I’m a pretty conservative person. As you look at me now, as we’re across the interview table, I look as much like a fireman or a policeman as I look like anything. I’m not a revolutionary. I was never cool. I was never reactionary, even though people insist that [I am]. I just look at things as needing change if they’re wrong, and lots was wrong.
KRONENBERG: Who accused you of being a reactionary?
ADAMS: I think it’s common in my description. If you read enough interviews, I go from “a revolutionary” to “kinda crazy,” somewhere in that mix. Common parlance for me. It’s just people, but among my fans, I’m not that way at all. I’m just somebody who refuses to live in the past, and for no reason except that I don’t like it there, not because I want to make any change, but just because it’s just bad for
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Comics.
© Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons.
it, and Murray had seen that I was basically getting a lot of attention at that point at DC—
KRONENBERG: Because of your covers?
ADAMS: —and Deadman [in Strange Adventures]. Well, you know, if you do stuff that gets attention…
Murray recognized that and I told him I’d love to work on Brave and the Bold. He was only too happy to have me. I think it’s to his credit that he was nice enough to let me take the bull by the horns when I said, “I think, if you just let me do it the way I want to do it, I’ll make up some changes, they really won’t be exhibited in the script, but I’d let all these scenes take place at night. That’s really all I want to do. Because I find it hard to think of Batman walking around in the daytime in his underwear.” And so he said, “Fine, no problem.” That was basically our discussion. So that’s essentially what happened with Batman. He became slightly more mysterious. He hung around at night and didn’t hang around in the daytime. It didn’t really affect the story.
KRONENBERG: No, it didn’t, but the way Batman looked was like nothing else anybody had seen before.
ADAMS: Well, but it’s in your mind’s eye. It’s the way you want to see it. One of the reasons that you’re saying that is because, in your mind’s eye, that’s the way you want to see it. All I did was, in a way, I copied what’s in your mind. And also, remember I had learned. I’m a skilled artist. You know, I’m not the greatest artist in the world, but I’m a skilled artist. I know how cloth moves, and there’s a lot of stuff that if you pick it up along the way and you are a person who is sufficiently interested, you can exhibit many, many skills and they don’t have to be there all at the same time. You can play with them.
Comic books are like shorthand—the art is also in the stuff you leave out. And you leave stuff out for many reasons. You leave stuff out to make a living. You leave stuff out because the story can be told simpler. You leave stuff out because people think you’re doing one thing when you’re doing another. For example, I’ll do a complicated background as an establishing shot, and then for two or three pages I’ll do nearly no background at all. People think that it’s loaded with backgrounds. But they’re not there. The reason that they think they’re there is they retain the image of that first background. They’ve got it in their mind, and I don’t let them see that the rest of the backgrounds aren’t there. I’ll put a fence, a little piece of a fence or a little piece of a step or something else, crack of the street, so they’ll know. They’ve registered that background, they know what it looks like, and any part that I show them relates to it specifically so they think they’re seeing that background through the following pages. I am not fooling them; I’m simply working with their mind to allow them/us to travel the same path. So there are people that say, “Oh, Neal does these great backgrounds. They’re very complicated and have all this stuff in them. There are other people who work much harder on backgrounds than I do. It’s a trick of the mind. It’s the things you leave out as much as the things you put in that make a picture what it is. I’m not just talking about negative space; I’m talking about the things you leave out.
For example, when you’re looking at a drawing, your eye tends to focus on certain parts of the drawing. It will not go to other parts of the drawing. When it goes there, it just sweeps by. They’ve performed experiments where they’ve attached lasers to the eye somehow, and you see the laser track around the painting or a drawing. And you’ll see it will concentrate on certain areas and it will swiftly go by another area. Well, if you know that, then you can focus your attention on that area that you know your eye is going to go to.
You don’t necessarily short the other area, but you don’t have to put as much attention to it.
So, somebody will look at a face that I’ll do, and it will seem as though you’re looking right into that person’s eyes. Because the eyes are done in such a way that you can look at them and see an eye, look into that person’s face. The rest of the face might have stubble on it or whatever, but you’re looking at the eyes. One good example is this drug addict. You don’t actually look into his eyes, and the Green Lantern/Green Arrow face, but when he opens his eyes and looks out, his eyes almost look watery. We almost see water in the eyes. How can there be water in his eyes? It’s line drawing. Scenes like that are not tricks, they’re skills. What is the border between tricks and skills? I don’t know.
KRONENBERG: In the next Brave and the Bold, with the Creeper (#80, Oct.–Nov. 1968), your layouts became even bolder and more imaginative.
ADAMS: Chaotic. I did some of my worst layouts in there.
KRONENBERG: Comic fans had never seen anything like that before. ADAMS: And in a way, everyone soon tried to do it. [laughs]
Rooftop Vigil
The Darknight Detective prowls Gotham in this 1971 sketch by Adams. Courtesy of Heritage.
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The New Batmania Adams’ stark, stunning covers for Detective Comics #395 (Jan. 1970) and 397 (Mar. 1970) defibrillated Batman’s post-TV show popularity.
TM & © DC Comics.
KRONENBERG: You were, of course, copied, but the angles that you chose, the way you drew, the way you laid out the page, I felt it was kind of like watching an Orson Welles film. To many of us, it was shocking, beautiful, and inspiring. Like you said, people started copying it. It was the realization of what the medium could be, it could be almost film-like. How much were you influenced at that point in your career by film?
ADAMS: You have to remember, in some weird kind of way, almost all directors read comic books and comic strips. One person can draw a comic book in a month. The question really is, “How much are films affected by comic books or comic strips?” I would say greatly, because I can do in 30 pages, in a month, what it would now take $40,000,000 to make the same story as a movie. Take $40,000,000—now it’s $100,000,000. It would take $100,000,000 to do the same thing on film. I can do it in a month in my apartment. That’s a big thing. People don’t realize the potential for comic books is greater than the potential of almost any medium ever. There’s nothing better. So, other people had already done the Orson Wellesian quality: Alex Toth and other people like that. This was something beyond that. This was something to inspire new directors to go, “Whoa, there’s something going on here.” If you study the stuff, you actually will find that some directors pick up ideas from these comic books. Certainly Stuart Gordon, when he did Warp, the stage play, admitted that he was reading The Avengers—the few issues of Avengers that I did that inspired the Warp show—and Jack Kirby. There’s a tendency for some of these people not to necessarily give credit. Every once in a while, you get credit. Vittorio De Sica, I am told, apocryphal story, came to America after he had done whatever great film he had done.
KRONENBERG: It was The Bicycle Thief.
ADAMS: Could be. And took the comic-strip artists that worked for King Features Syndicate out to lunch and thanked them for being his inspiration. Federico Fellini, who was a cartoonist himself, was inspirited much by cartoonists and comics.
KRONENBERG: I think Orson Welles also had admitted that.
ADAMS: George Lucas and, I think—
KRONENBERG: Steven Spielberg also.
ADAMS: I don’t see that influence not being there. And I think that, to one extent or another, the legacy of comic books is great only when the creators remember that their position is to be the leader and not the follower. When they think they’re the follower, to be influenced by film, that’s the mistake. The right thing to do is to take the chance, to experiment, to mess with people’s minds. To let people get mad at you, upset by you, or inspired by you or whatever it is, to do those things that nobody else will do, because you have the tools to do it. You can make the whole $80,000,000 movie in one month on paper. What are your marching orders? Mess with them. That’s our marching orders. Make them crazy. Make a man into a bat, not a bat into man.
KRONENBERG: There’s no writing credit in the second Batman/Deadman story in Brave and the Bold (#86, Oct.–Nov. 1969). Did you write that one?
ADAMS: No. I’m amazed that there’s no writing credit in there. I’m quite sure it’s Bob Haney. Bob Haney, by the way, if you read those stories, you’ll find massive storytelling in there. They almost seem twice as long as a regular Batman story. And he gets no damned credit. [Editor’s note: In my 2022 Team-Up Companion book, it is revealed that Adams took considerable liberties with Haney’s B&B #86 script, to the writer’s chagrin.]
KRONENBERG: I am a fan of his. The Batman/Sgt. Rock story that the two of you did (#84, June–July 1969) is my favorite. Batman fighting the Nazis… that was wonderful.
ADAMS: And the stories are so rich and so full. They just go from here to there to there to here. Sometimes he went off the track. One particular time, I think he had a statue smuggled to America and crimes were committed because it was really gold underneath it. I forget which story [#84], but, as far as I know, it’s not illegal to bring gold into America.
But I’ve done other Batman stories, and your readers can make the comparison. Read the Denny O’Neil stories. The Denny O’Neil stories are single ideas dramatically done and very good. You read a Bob Haney story; it’s like you’ve read three Denny O’Neil stories. They intertwine with themselves. And I applaud Denny, but I’d really like to remind people that Bob Haney did a tremendous job. Tremendous job. I loved working on those things.
KRONENBERG: In the last Brave and the Bold story that you did, issue #93 (Dec. 1970–Jan. 1971), “Red Water, Crimson Death,” written by Denny O’Neil, did you draw yourself as the villain?
16 • BACK ISSUE • Neal Adams Tribute Issue
Batman. Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Deadman. Avengers. X-Men. These are the marquee names that top Neal Adams’ prodigious résumé, and this is not their story. What follows instead are a few of the credits and actions that went virtually unheralded at the time but deserve recognition, nonetheless.
When an 18-year-old Neal Adams was trying to break into comics in 1959, most work in the medium was done in anonymity, but there were degrees even then. Virtually every newspaper comic strip had a credit on them, but those might be incomplete— perhaps listing only the artist—or refer to a creator who was using unidentified “ghosts” to complete some or all of the published material.
ADAMS UP AT ‘BAT’
Such was the case with Bat Masterson . Based on the real-life historical figure and the fictional TV series (1958–1961), the comic strip tie-in premiered on September 13, 1959, with writer Ed Herron and artist Howard Nostrand. “It was done in a sort of Noel Sickles-Jack Davis style,” Adams detailed to Jud Hurd in Cartoonist Profiles #12 (1971). “A beautiful one for Westerns especially.”
Nostrand needed an assistant on the backgrounds of the strip, and someone suggested that he contact a kid who was then drawing humor fillers for Archie Comics. “He researched these backgrounds very thoroughly,” Adams told Hurd, “[a]nd I helped him with them, as well as with his other illustration work. We experimented with all kinds of techniques— did charcoal drawings on wrapping paper—another job on sandpaper, and so on.”
Nostrand “was a jazz fan, and he burned his candle at both ends,” Adams recalled to Howard Chaykin in a 2020 interview at neotextcorp.com , “which taught me not to burn my candle at both ends and I never have. He worked originally at a place called Alexander E. Chaite Studios [in New York City] alongside such luminaries as Bob Peak. It was discovered that the reps were ripping off the artists, so they all left. That’s where I learned not to rip off artists. In an apartment on 50th Street, Howard worked with ‘Red’ Sudek, ‘Red’ Wexler, and a Spanish fellow whose name I forget who laughed every time Howard sang, ‘bésame el culo.’ Elmer
Bunker Mentality
“Crusty Bunker” (at times billed as “The Crusty Bunkers”)—a pseudonym for Neal Adams and Continuity Associates artists working under Neal’s direction—inks over Alan Weiss’ pencils for the “Pellucidar” feature in DC’s Weird Worlds #3 (Dec. 1972–Jan. 1973).
Unless otherwise noted, scans accompanying this article are courtesy of John Wells.
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Tribute Issue
© Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.
Neal Adams
by John Wells
Wexler, a line illustrator and ex-Marine, taught me a work ethic that Howard would never learn. From Howard, I got broad experience and learned tons. From Wexler, I learned a work ethic. I paid attention to both, but never confused the two.”
Perhaps as a consequence of his lack of work ethic, Nostrand—and by extension, Adams—was replaced on Bat Masterson after three months. Bob Powell succeeded him in December 1959, remaining until the strip’s end in June 1960.
“I stupidly took a ten-percent part of the strip rather than be paid $50.00 a week, which ended up earning me a whopping $11.50 a week,” Adams ruefully told Chaykin. “So much for clever horse-trading. I did a sample for a commercial strip and begged Elmer Wexler to review it for me. When I did, he told me there was so much wrong with it that it would take him all day to tell me what it was, and he didn’t have the time. Once I recovered, I made another attempt. I showed it to Elmer. He called Johnstone and Cushing and told them that they should hire me on a freelance basis. And they did.”
Johnstone and Cushing was an advertising agency distinguished by its comics-style marketing of a wide variety of products and services. Thanks to the encroachment of television, demand for such ads was fading fast by the time Adams came aboard and the company itself would be bought out in 1962. Nonetheless, the young artist thrived in the environment, learning everything that the older illustrators could teach him and cultivating a network of contacts in the competitive art field.
“When I was 20, they had a birthday party,” Adams told Will Eisner in Will Eisner’s Quarterly #1 (1983). “The older guys did this. I said, ‘This is great. I can’t understand why you guys are making such a big fuss about me being 20.’ They said, ‘Well, we don’t have to tell our wives and our friends that we’re being beaten out by a teenager anymore.”
Before his next birthday rolled around in 1962, Adams was presented with another opportunity. Jerry Caplin, the sibling of Li’l Abner cartoonist Al Capp, had landed the rights to a comic strip based on the medical TV series Ben Casey , but the deal hinged on signing a first-rate artist. Johnstone and Cushing passed along Neal’s name and his samples clinched the deal. Not quite of legal age, Adams avoided the embarrassment of requesting
his mother’s signature when the contract arrived after his 21st birthday. It would have been doubly awkward since he’d told the newspaper syndicate that he was 25.
By the time Adams did turn 25 on June 15, 1966, Ben Casey was coming to an end. The cartoonist cited various reasons for its cancellation, ranging from disagreements with writers Jerry Caplin and Jerry Brondfield to a division of profits that drastically slashed the pay Adams should have been taking home. Ben Casey concluded on July 31.
The editors at NEA, the syndicate that distributed the feature, replaced it with a humor strip called The Willets and had no plans for any new launches in 1966. “They said they’d like to take out an option on me for the next year,” Adams detailed in Cartoonist
Profiles #12, “and would pay me so much a month if I’d promise not to go to another syndicate with a strip. I would be able to do anything else in the art line I wanted—I just had to refrain from submitting another strip elsewhere! I was very flattered but refused the offer.”
By this time, Adams had already produced three weeks of dailies for a drama strip called Tangent that ultimately went nowhere. Meanwhile, the cartoonist had also stepped in to secretly draw the hardboiled detective strip Peter Scratch when its artist Lou Fine was unavailable. Revered for his Golden Age superhero strips like the Black Condor and the Ray, Fine had successfully moved into comics-style advertising in the 1940s and 1950s, and was a Johnstone and Cushing alumnus.
Overlapping with his last weeks on Casey, Adams drew the Scratch dailies for June 13–25 and July 11–23, 1966. “It was hard to get close to Lou at the time I knew him,” Adams remarked in Will Eisner’s Quarterly #1. “He seemed to have a lot of personal family problems and they made him sad. He had a very sad outlook on things and his work had gone from being very alive to very deadly and well drawn. […] He seemed as though somebody had pulled the plug and pulled a lot out of him.
“He had the ability to sit down and draw a picture. He didn’t take references out. He’d just start drawing and a picture would appear. The only other person I’ve seen do that is Russ Heath, who would start at the back hoof of a horse and just draw a silhouette and then come back to the same place and have a horse. Lou Fine didn’t quite do that, but to a young artist, he was incredibly fast.”
Paging Young Doctor Adams
Neal’s flair for photorealism made the young artist a natural for the actor likenesses of the TV tie-in comic strip, Ben Casey. Shown is a daily from May 2, 1966.
Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 33
Ben Casey © NEA, Inc.
Neal Adams
neal adams
Dave Sim.
The Heart of Neal Adams…
…was captivated by the extraordinary Stan Drake, artist of The Heart of Juliet Jones. Neal briefly assisted Drake on the strip. (top) Original art to the August 24, 1967 daily, courtesy of Heritage. (middle) You can spot Adams’ personal style in this Secret Agent Corrigan daily he ghosted for Al Williamson in 1967, but (bottom) he largely becomes invisible “as” John Prentice when filling in for the Rip Kirby artist in 1968.
© King Features Syndicate, Inc.
‘HE GAVE BIRTH TO ME’
No artist had as great an influence on the young Neal Adams as Stan Drake. His artwork on the Heart of Juliet Jones strip stunned fans with its natural, photorealistic rendering of its characters and backgrounds. Drake achieved the look through techniques like the aggressive use of Polaroid photos for reference and the employment of ink lines that varied in thickness to evoke different visual qualities.
“He was more than an innovator; he was an inspirer,” Adams declared in The Comics Journal #194 (1997). “In a sense, he gave birth to me. […] [And] it’s not just people like me in the USA; most people in Europe saw him as a world-class illustrator.” When enlisted to briefly assist Drake on Juliet Jones, Adams described it in TCJ #194 as a “privilege beyond privileges.” Allan Holtz’s authoritative American Newspaper Strips: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide cites Adams’ work as appearing in Juliet Jones on October 17–November 5, 1966 (assistance) and August 21–25 and September 10, 1967 (ghosting). Despite his brief contribution, Adams’ name is routinely attached to Drake original art from throughout the 1960s, even though he had nothing to do with most of the art boards.
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stan drake Dave Sim.
No Black Mark on Neal’s Record (left) Adams’ preliminaries (courtesy of Heritage) for one of the pages (right) he assisted with in Gil Kane’s 1971 Blackmark graphic novel.
guy I’d just met, but I knew what a crazy ask it was. Still, nothing ventured…
“Neal asked, ‘Why not now?’
“‘Because I’m the Army, in Maryland, and I’ll be there a while.’
“‘Well, can you come up every Friday and work with me here, then spend Saturday at my house, then go back Sunday?’
“‘Uh, yes.’
“And so, for the next six months, that’s what I did. Work with Neal at DC till maybe 1 AM, then off to a deli for food. I slept on a couch at Columbia, then went to Neal’s all day Saturday. He, by way of his wife Cory, fed me lunch and dinner. I played with his kids. Otherwise, I worked beside the greatest comic artist alive—who turned out to be, if it wasn’t already evident, a great guy besides. He put me to work on a Denny O’Neil script, a standalone horror story for Vampirella [#10, on sale in late 1970]. I would lay out a page; he would pencil it. He would lay out the next page; I would pencil it—then he’d
show me my mistakes. He insisted to Warren Publications that the art be credited to both of us, so that I’d have a published credit going forward. People did not credit their assistants then, but Neal did.
“Meanwhile, back in the Army, five days a week, I was a journalism specialist, assigned to the post newspaper. I had not been to Vietnam, but everyone I worked with had—and they had nothing good to say about it. The best summation of people’s attitude at that time was my sergeant, who got himself a glass ashtray and put an American flag decal on the bottom so you could see the flag through the glass. Most people saw that as a patriotic gesture, but he told me it was so he could stub out his cigarettes on the flag. I began to get a good picture of why they turned against the war—not the general societal antipathy toward it, but the cluster**** it was, from people who’d seen it firsthand. It was literally a waste of people’s lives, on both sides of the war. But hey, what could I do, since I was already in the Army?
“Well, I applied for a conscientious objector discharge. To start with, Army protocol was, you applied for C.O. status before you went in—but what I was doing was allowed, barely. The process that then applied was, you had to be examined by a psychiatrist, a chaplain, and ‘an officer knowledgeable in matters pertaining to conscientious objection.’ The psychiatrist said I was sane, the chaplain said I was sincere—and then came the interview with what turned out to be a WAC major. To be a WAC, she would have had to have enlisted. To be a major, she would have had to reenlist. So, on paper, she was not going to be sympathetic to my cause.
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© Gil Kane estate.
steve englehart
Alan Light.
2015/07/rip-alan-kupperberg.html), “I guess sick ’cause he was usually sober during that period I was there. I took that week’s Sally Forth and Cannon pages into Neal’s studio and asked for help. Ralph Reese and Larry Hama did most of the heavy lifting that week.”
There were other instances where Adams himself jumped in solo to help a struggling inker. “Neal helped me meet a deadline on one of my very first jobs in 1974,” Bob McLeod tells BACK ISSUE. “I was inking one of George Pérez’s very first jobs in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #7 (1974) featuring the Sons of the Tiger. I was running late and asked Neal to ink whatever he wanted, and he inked some bits on different pages. He also inked a couple things in Ka-Zar #7 (1974) for me.”
Adams also pitched in to assist his partner Dick Giordano on a few pages of 1975’s Wonder Woman #220, a detail that was not overlooked by fan Carol Strickland in issue #222’s letters column. “As for Neal Adams’ unheralded artwork,” Bob Rozakis replied, “he just helped out his pal Dick in a couple of spots
and both agreed to let Mr. Giordano get full credit for the work.”
Also unheralded on that issue was Giordano’s assistant, Terry Austin. The shy young Detroit native had arrived at Continuity a few years earlier at the recommendation of Al Milgrom. A week into his residency, Austin was present when Dick Giordano arrived with news that his assistant Klaus Janson had left and that he needed a replacement.
“I happened to be sitting at the closest desk,” Austin told David Anthony Kraft in Comics Interview #1 (1983), “and Neal said, ‘How about that guy there?’ I was actually in the next room, but I could hear them. Dick said, ‘Where?’ And Neal said, ‘That guy right there.’ And Dick said, ‘Where?’ And Neal said, ‘That guy sitting right there.’ I’m sitting there trying to pretend I can’t hear this.
“Dick came out and asked me if I wanted to do some backgrounds. I worked for him for about two and a half years. Every job he did, I did backgrounds and some secondary figures.”
Austin also contributed to other Continuity projects and relived a traumatic memory in Comic Book Profiles #3 (1998). “I’ve always worked on flat surfaces as opposed to most cartoonists whose drawing tables are tilted at an angle. Back then, I clung to one other unusual trait: I worked with the ink bottle actually sitting on the page I was inking. Everyone would always ask, ‘Haven’t you ever had an accident doing that?’ ‘Never,’ I’d sniff in reply, insulted at this obvious affront to my clearly superior manual dexterity. So naturally, one Saturday the Gods decided to teach me a thing or three about hubris.
“I was inking backgrounds on a Frankenstein/ Dracula/Werewolf job Neal had penciled for Peter Pan Records, and no sooner had Neal departed for the weekend when I dumped the whole bottle of ink over the panel of Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory exploding at the climax of the story. As I recall, I ran up and down the hallway several times at top speed looking for someone to tell, only to discover I was alone in the office. Next, I believe I poured a pot of scalding hot coffee over my head, and when that seemed not to have improved the situation somewhat, proceeded to bash myself in the head with the empty pot until I was unconscious. Unfortunately, I discovered upon awakening that the offending blot was still there.
“If that bit of creative license gives you the impression that I suffered the tortures of the damned for the next two days, then it’s done its job. Monday morning, I tearfully confessed my transgression to Neal, eagerly awaiting the welcome relief that death would bring, only to have Neal nonchalantly say, ‘Give me two minutes—I’ll pop my layout back on the Art-o-graph and do it over.’ And yes, he did that, with about 13 seconds to spare, I believe.”
The Giordano/Adams Team
Normally, those credits would be reversed, with Dick Giordano inking Neal Adams. But on Wonder Woman #220 (Oct.–Nov. 1975), Giordano’s “full” art job included uncredited assists (noticeable here on Diana’s face) by Adams… as well as Terry Austin.
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TM & © DC Comics.
The (Records) of
by Rob Kelly
themselves (featuring, for the most part, their own stable of writers, producers, and actors), they turned to ringers when it came to designing their record sleeves: Neal Adams and Dick Giordano’s Continuity Associates.
While not every “Power” sleeve was produced by Adams, Giordano, and co., the bulk of them were, creating an instantly identifiable visual identity for Power. Adams’ peerless, dramatic staging and dynamic figural work made these sleeves pop, becoming collectors’ items all their own.
Unfortunately, no official list of what Adams did for Peter Pan/ Power exists (Adams’ famous signature doesn’t even appear anywhere on them). Sourcing these sleeves becomes even harder when you realize some of the other people who worked on them had styles that were similar to Adams’ own (like the aforementioned Giordano, as well as Rich Buckler and Mike Nasser), so it’s easy to just assume Adams did them all. But after staring at these beauties for 40 years (and consulting my fellow Fire and Water Podcast Network All-Star and BI contributor, Chris Franklin, whose eagle eye when it comes to this stuff is sharper than mine), I think we can come close to presenting as complete as possible a full list of all the sleeves Neal Adams did for Peter Pan/Power. I guarantee some of them will surprise you!
Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 53
Neal Adams
TM & © DC Comics.
While he rarely drew Superman comics, Neal Adams’ photorealistic interpretation of the Metropolis Marvel was widely seen throughout the 1970s on covers and merchandising. His influence upon the character was deeply felt throughout the decade, perhaps most significantly with his role in advocating for the rights of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. In this interview, conducted by telephone for my 2006 TwoMorrows book, The Krypton Companion, Adams speaks candidly about his Superman experiences. It has been edited for presentation in BACK ISSUE magazine.
– Michael Eury
MICHAEL EURY: When did you first meet [Silver Age Superman editor] Mort Weisinger?
NEAL ADAMS: Oh, I guess, when I went up to DC Comics to try to get work with Bob Kanigher, the war comics editor, which would have been—I guess I was in my late 20s, middle 20s, something like that. And Mort was one of those people that was shuffling around, grumpy, looking mad, that didn’t seem to like anybody.
EURY: I’m guessing he didn’t exactly open his arms to you on your first visit.
ADAMS: I don’t think Mort opened his arms to anybody . [ laughter ] Mort was not an “open-yourarms” type of guy. His best relationships seemed to be with science-fiction writers and letter writers. After they worked their way into his good graces. If they came up to see him, then it was a very different thing because he had already corresponded with them for great lengths of time. But for an actual human being to meet him for the first time, I think he just wanted to crush them.
EURY: You didn’t even make it past the door the first time you tried to show your samples.
ADAMS: No. When I came out of school, my samples were very good—and I’m only saying that as Neal Adams, the adult, grown-up artist. (I still have those samples and I would give that guy work.) I couldn’t get past the door at DC Comics. A guy named Bill Perry came out and sat with me in the lobby and said, “I can’t bring you inside.” I said, “Well, can I just see an editor?” And he said, “They don’t use anybody. You really ought to do something else.” I had a hundred pages of comic-book art.
EURY: This obviously didn’t discourage you, but how long did it take you before you went back again?
ADAMS: Well, I didn’t really go back. I more orbited them. I did everything but work for DC Comics. I did Archie comics, I was an assistant on a comic strip, I did a comic strip, I did advertising comic books, I did everything. I did a syndicated strip [Ben Casey, based upon the TV medical drama] for three-and-a-half years. It was quite successful. It was in 165 papers around the world. I became, in effect, a world-famous syndicated strip cartoonist, and then I voluntarily ended the strip and I was going to become an illustrator. That plan kind of backfired when the portfolio that I had spent six months on, I left it at an advertising agency and when I went back to get it, it had disappeared.
EURY: And it’s never turned up?
ADAMS: It’s never turned up.
EURY: Who’s sitting on that, I wonder?
ADAMS: I don’t know. I’d like to get a hold of them in a dark room.
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Neal Adams
TM & © DC Comics. Courtesy of Heritage.
conducted by Michael Eury on March 3, 2006
transcribed by Brian K. Morris
Early Adams Super-Covers
The first two Adams-drawn Superman covers to see print were (left) Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane #79 and (right) Action Comics #358 (both Nov. 1967). While both covers employed standard Silver Age Super-tropes, Neal’s photorealistic art, from Superman’s relaxed posture on the Lois Lane cover to the raw energy of the Son of the Annihilator’s super-punch on the Action cover, added pizzazz often missing from similar covers from the Weisinger era.
Anyway, I then had to face reality. I had no strip to do—I had some advertising clients, which was fine—and so I went to look for work doing comic books, which I felt was odd because I had a whole career. I had gone on above it and I really had no interest in doing comic books. They were now below me. It was comic strips and then illustration, that’s where my head was at.
I realized [chuckles] that I was stuck for work. So instead of going to DC Comics, I went to Warren Publications and I did work for them. They were nice enough to give me work. I did work, but I discovered that it was very self-indulgent work in that I was looking to impress, by doing different styles and different concepts and different techniques and different things, and it was taking too long to do the work. I realized I could get a 12-pager, or a 24-page comic-book story over at DC Comics and take it home and crank it out. Here at Warren, I was getting six-page stories. I would put my heart and soul into them and be paid just as poorly as I would be paid at DC Comics.
So I thought, “Well, I’ll try, one more time, to break into DC Comics,” and I made an appointment with the war comics editor who had lost Joe Kubert to the comic strip [Tales of] The Green Beret. And he saw me, and I knew that Joe was missing from that position because I had helped Joe get that work [ chuckles ] to do Green Beret—it was offered to me first. So I went to speak to Bob Kanigher and I started doing war stories. And then I guess they just discovered there was a new creature in the zoo.
EURY: You spent a lot of time actually there at the DC offices, didn’t you?
ADAMS: Well, a lot of it was because they wanted me to do covers. And yeah, I kind of liked the idea of being out of the house. I had worked in my house for three-and-a-half, four years, and I was used to going out, doing commercial work, and I kind of liked the idea of finding out about the company, and what’s going on, and hanging out there during the day. So yeah, I did spend quite a bit of time at DC Comics. I took a desk in their staff room, in their production room. They seemed to be happy to have me there until I really started to make trouble. [laughter]
EURY: And we’ll get into some of the trouble in a minute. As far as Superman’s concerned, most people regard you as a Batman artist at DC, but you actually drew Superman covers before you did Batman covers.
ADAMS: In fact, nobody in “them thar” days thought of me as anything. What really happened was that Carmine Infantino realized that here he had some new blood, maybe he could become an art director and art direct covers. And I would be the artist that would do the covers, as well as other people.
But essentially, I got along pretty easy with Carmine, so in many ways that kind of pushed Carmine, who had been doing a lot of covers, into becoming an art director at DC Comics, which was a very fortuitous circumstance for him. He pushed a lot of covers my way because he could easily recognize that the tendency, the sense, was, “This guy’s probably going to do a lot of good covers.” And that got to be something that happened a lot.
EURY: Was Carmine heavily involved in the design of your covers, or were you flying solo?
ADAMS: He was, on and off. Sometimes he was too busy, sometimes he had an idea for a cover and we would sit and either argue it out, or I would propose something different, or I would accept his concept.
I really didn’t have too much trouble with Carmine’s ideas because he is a good designer. My covers are all design. I would rather do situations and storytelling situations, and sometimes, good design actually works against that. And design does tend to get repetitive after a while. You can only do just so many covers with the guy standing in the middle with his legs akimbo and holding a body in his arms, or standing on the side of the page and having panels go down the other side of it. There’s a limit to that. You really do get bored with that. I got to change styles from mystery covers to superhero covers and like that, so I got to play quite a bit.
EURY: What was your first Superman cover?
ADAMS: Well, I don’t know. You probably know.
EURY: Well, I did some research. I’ve got it in front of me. I just want to make sure, because you can’t always trust cover dates. But the two earliest ones that I found both had a Nov. 1967 cover date. One was Lois Lane #79, which was, if this rings a bell, “The Bride of Titan Man”; and another one was Action #356, “The Son of the Annihilator,” which has this James Dean–type delinquent on the cover. I don’t know if you recall if those were the first two you drew.
ADAMS: I really don’t know. But I can tell you the circumstance behind the first cover I did for Mort Weisinger.
60 • BACK ISSUE • Neal Adams Tribute Issue
TM & © DC Comics.
ADAMS: Carmine had decided that, for whatever reason, I was worth something to the company and worth something to him. It seemed as though people were beginning to recognize my work and it made a difference in the sales. Not in the books that I drew, but in the covers that I did. The books that I drew, pretty much, the sales stayed the same. But any time I did a cover, the sales seemed to go up ten percent. So Carmine was very, very interested in having me do covers for Superman to see what would happen. Mort was not. [laughter] In fact, it’s possible that you know there are people in the world whose emotions and feelings you can read on their faces, better than Mort Weisinger, but I don’t know anyone like that. You pretty much know what’s going on in Mort’s head because he’s got the look on his face… or he had the look on his face.
So it was very clear that Mort did not want me to do covers. After all, he had Curt Swan, to which I would agree. Hey, hey, he’s got Curt Swan, that’s cool. I mean, I was a fan of Curt Swan’s since I was a young teenager. Anyway, Carmine seemed to be adamant that Mort would let me into his vault and allow me to do a cover. Mort, at the same time, was grumbling and bumping into doors and snarling. Anyway, knowing that this tension was there and that it was not good, [chuckles] I thought, “Well, we’ll deal with this problem.”
So I went in to see Mort and introduced myself, and apparently, I had said hello to him briefly before that, and he more or less ignored me. I introduced myself and I said, “I’d just like to talk to you for a few minutes.” And he said, “All right.” So we sat down and I said, “Look, Carmine wants me to do covers for you. I don’t care. I have a lot of covers to do and to be perfectly honest, they get in the way of the books I’m working on. But you and he seem to be having a problem. I have a solution, if you want to try it: I’ll do one cover for you. If you like it, maybe you’ll have me do more covers. If you don’t like it, tell Carmine you don’t like it and that’s the last cover I do for you.” He said, “Good, that’s a deal.” And you could tell the way he said it, it was one cover and that’s it.
Well, I don’t know which cover [it was]… I have no idea. I handed it in and a couple of weeks later, Carmine came over to me and said, “Mort wants you to do all his covers.”
EURY: So Carmine actually broke the information to you, not Mort.
ADAMS: Mort did not. But the next time I saw Mort, he had a big grin on his face and he was very happy. Now, that was a very weird beginning to actually what I considered to be a good relationship, because my relationship with Mort after that was very comfortable. I’ve never really had too much problem with the editors up at DC Comics. We all got along. Each one, within their own personality, pretty much, was okay with me.
EURY: Tell me something good about Mort Weisinger. People relate all these horror stories, but that can’t be the whole picture.
ADAMS: I’ll tell you a story that will make you understand every horror story you’ve ever heard about Mort Weisinger and make you realize what was going on.
I went into Mort’s office one day because I was perturbed by sh*t that people said about [him]. I could see that he was a grumpy fellow in general, but he treated me evenly and I was fine. But it bothered me so we were talking about it. We went over a cover and whatever. We finished that conversation and I said, “Mort, I’d just like to ask you why you are so grumpy at people? You know, everybody thinks you hate them and you just seem grumpy.” And I could see his face change in front of me, and he said, “I’ll tell you… I don’t tell people this. Try to imagine that you get up in the morning and you go into the bathroom to shave, and you look into the mirror, and you see this face.”
Now, for everybody out there who thinks he was grumpy, I say to you, the man had a soft side, dealing with his reality as best he could. Underneath he was a good, sensitive man.
The Swan-Adams Team
Upon occasion, Adams inked DC’s main Superman artist, Curt Swan, on covers. Here’s an example: Superman #314 (Aug. 1977), guest-starring the Flash and Green Lantern. This original art, courtesy of Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com), is signed by both artists.
EURY: Was he chummy or friendly with anybody at all, to your knowledge?
ADAMS: He loved Cary Bates. Cary Bates, the sun rose out of Cary Bates’ ass. Because Cary had ideas that were his kind of ideas. I believe that there was a cover that I did—I hope I don’t say that it was Cary’s and it was really somebody else’s, it might be Mike Friedrich’s—but [Mort] was deliriously happy about this cover. I don’t recall if it was for Adventure or World’s Finest, maybe World’s Finest, and what it had was two heads of two superheroes on the left and two heads of two superheroes on the right, I think. And in the middle, was a guy sitting in a chair with some kind of a gun or something and he was in silhouette, and on him was this question mark, “Who is it?” Do you remember that cover?
EURY: I do.
ADAMS: In his mind, that was the greatest cover because it asked a question and made you buy the book. A very intelligent editorial approach. And you know, it was a boring cover to draw. I hated it.
EURY: Please do.
TM & © DC Comics. Neal Adams Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 61
mort weisinger
© DC Comics.
Man of Tomorrow
An undated specialty illustration of the most legendary superhero by one of comics’ most legendary artists. Courtesy of Heritage.
ADAMS: Yeah. I did a cover for ESPN Magazine at the turn of the century. The art director of ESPN Magazine said, “We’re going to have on the Hundred Greatest Athletes of the Century and we have to do a wraparound cover. I’m stuck with doing a hundred photographs, or pictures, of these people just smeared all over the cover with some kind of designs. Or… do you remember that Superman/Muhammad Ali comic book you did?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “You think you can do it again and do Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan boxing and then have the hundred greatest athletes, or the [remaining] 98 greatest athletes as the audience around them?” I said, “You’re kidding.” She said, “No, I think that would be great.” And I thought, “God, that was a horror, doing that cover.” But I thought, “When’s the next time this kind of job is gonna come around? A hundred years from now. I don’t think I’m going to be doing that one.” [Michael laughs]
So I did Ali and Jordan boxing—actually, that’s very interesting, but there’s one more thing that’s interesting. It’s a nifty cover. The thing about the cover is that it went out to three million people, subscribers to ESPN Magazine Among those, I figure about five of them are comic-book fans. It didn’t go to the comic-book fans, so they didn’t get to see it. It went to ESPN subscribers.
At any rate, it was it was sort of a poll, and each one of the sports networks and the sports groups had the same thing, the Hundred Greatest Athletes. The people voted, or the staff voted, or whatever. And ESPN Magazine decided, in their great wisdom, that the number-one athlete was going to be Michael Jordan. I thought, “You know, Michael Jordan is a great athlete, I agree. And Michael Jordan may even be a great man. But Muhammad Ali changed people’s views about black people in America and no greater thing could be done by an athlete. “But to take his athleticism and to channel it for good, and you’re going to vote for Michael Jordan? I don’t get it. It doesn’t make any sense.”
EURY: I guess that Jordan was, from their perspective, more recognizable as a brand name.
ADAMS: Hey, that sounds like that bullsh*t, too.
EURY: [laughs] I’m just parroting it. I don’t believe it.
ADAMS: Right. [chuckles]
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EURY: I do agree, though, about what Ali did as a human being as being very, very important.
ADAMS: He put it on the line. He lost the championship for it. Oh, man. It was tough. I mean, they were threatening to put him away for a long time, a long time.
EURY: Oh, yeah. Yeah, did you see the Will Smith biopic of him?
ADAMS: Yeah.
EURY: What did you think about that?
ADAMS: I thought it was okay, I thought it was okay. I saw it just to see Will Smith doing Ali. You know, they hung around too much about the relationships and stuff, and that’s not the public image that we saw. We saw him going through this process. We didn’t see the process of women. I never saw the women. I didn’t know what the hell was going on with that and I didn’t, to be perfectly honest, give a sh*t. I was interested in his involvement with going through the process with the boxers and going through the political process.
BACK ISSUE #143
A special tribute issue to NEAL ADAMS (1941–2022), celebrating his Bronze Age DC Comics contributions! In-depth Batman and Superman interviews, ‘Green Lantern/Green Arrow’— Fifty Years Later, Neal Adams—Under the Radar, Continuity Associates, a ‘Rough Stuff’ pencil art gallery, Power Records, and more! Re-presenting Adams’ iconic cover art to BATMAN #227. (Plus: See ALTER EGO #181!)
EURY: So, who’s going to play you in the Neal Adams movie? ADAMS: He hasn’t been born yet.
(84-page FULL-COLOR magazine) $10.95 (Digital Edition) $4.99 https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_54&products_id=1697
TM & © DC Comics. 78 • BACK ISSUE • Neal Adams Tribute Issue
