Originally published at: A tribute to the late, great Neal Adams | Boing Boing
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I think Neal Adams did some of his best work when he set up his own publishing company, Continuity Comics. It may not have had the popularity and influence of his work on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, which was truly ground-breaking, but it was all his.
He did it years before others did and one of the publications served as a test-bed and outlet for other creators.
We need Ms Mystic back to help us solve our climate stupidity.
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I mentioned his passing in another thread, so I am glad this was made.
Neal Adams was both a fantastic artist, but also a big promoter of Creative Rights.
Bill Sienkiewicz has been reminiscing on inking him and how Neal’s pencils had more tone and weight variations that not every inker translated well.
I think me picking up some of his Green Lantern/Green Arrow series was the smartest thing I did as a teen in the 90s. I have GL/GA 76 with the iconic cover in OK shape signed by him. And fortunate to have several prints signed and even a sketch of The Shadow!
I got to meet him I believe 3 times and he was always personable.
He maybe have been a variety of Happy Mutant - one to entertain the fringe theories as fact. He was a proponent of Expanding Earth theory. He had several videos nicely showing that if the earth was smaller, the continents would from into a solid sphere of skin. And when the earth expanded, the skin broke apart and drifted to their locations. Honestly, the videos are convincing… just I could never wrap my head around what mechanism would make the earth expand. But the first time I met him, I brought it up. People like talking about things they are interested in, vs what they do. I told him I wasn’t sure I was sold on the idea, but I like exploring alternative ideas. (Note, this wasn’t HIS idea, it was one of those theories floating around before plate tectonics was accepted.)
So yeah, a legend in the field of comics, and from what I have seen, very well loved and missed in the industry. RIP.
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I had just turned 6 years old, and my family was moving from California to England. During the interminable (to my young self) wait in the airport, I spied a Batman comic book on a spinner rack. I begged my mom for it. Exhausted from travel, she relented. It was the first comic book I ever owned, and one of the few I was allowed as a child. The final three panels of the story, where the two villains age, wither, and turn to skeletons as they fall into graves seared itself on my young brain and stayed with me for decades.
I didn’t get into comics until the 1980s, shortly after which I finally figured out that what I’d read as a kid was Neal Adams and Denny O’Neill’s first collaboration, Detective Comics #395 (The Secret of the Waiting Graves!"). No wonder those images left such a mark – Neal Adams blended the best of the immaculate draftsman branch of comic art exemplified by people like Hal Foster, and the expressionistic, cinematic branch epitomized by Jack Kirby. Neal’s stuff was at once hyper-realistic and unrealistically dynamic. No one told comic book stories like he did. He was an absolute master of the craft who elevated it to the realm of fine art. And his work behind the scenes to champion the rights of the artists who toiled in the fields makes him as heroic as the characters he drew.
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I don’t know that book, but I have ghost memories of old comics that i no longer own that linger in my brain.
I am 99% certain I had a Swamp Thing comics… and not being able to read, just looked at the pictures. I remember Swamp Thing carrying a woman, but while I assume Swamp Thing was a monster, and thus the “bad guy”, it was also clear he wasn’t trying to hurt her, so my little brain was confused.
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