Comic Book
By Russ Burlingame
April 29, 2022
Neal Adams, who helped reshape
characters like Batman, Green Lantern, and Green Arrow, has died. He was 80
years old. Adams fought for creators rights in comics, conducted regular
Q&A sessions with fans on social media, and created or co-created numerous
beloved characters, including John Stewart, Ra's al Ghul, and Man-Bat.
According to Adams's family, he passed away due to complications from sepsis.
Adams, with writer Dennis O'Neil, helped to reshape the public perception of
Batman in the 1970s, establishing the dark, vengeful spirit of the night that
defines the character to this day.
Besides his contributions to Batman,
Adams will be remembered as the artist for Green Lantern/Green Arrow which,
also with O'Neil, reinvigorated both characters and helped redefine them for a
new generation of readers. The Green Lantern/Green Arrow comics
were an examination and critique of contemporary culture, including issues
around racism, poverty, and other topics that rarely made it to the pages of DC
books before O'Neil and Adams.
Neal Adams was born June 15, 1941,
in New York City. He would live and work in and around New York for most of his
life. As a child, he traveled a lot due to his father's military career, living
on bases around the world. Adams attended the School of Industrial Art high
school in Manhattan, graduating in 1959, and within a few years was beginning
to make his mark on comics. Beginning in 1960, Adams started drawing superhero
comics and gag pages for Archie Comics, under editor Joe Simon.
In the early 1960s, after leaving
Archie, Adams would work on comic strips like Bat Masterson and Ben Casey, as well as doing work in the advertising
industry, where his photorealistic style made him a hit. By 1967, Adams was
collaborating with Archie Goodwin on horror comics at Warren Publishing. Having
been rejected by DC in 1960, Adams tried again in 1967 and landed a gig drawing
some war comics. He would also work on The Adventures of Jerry Lewis and The Adventures of Bob Hope. In late 1976, Adams landed
a pair of Superman covers, and drew an Elongated Man backup story for Detective Comics.
From 1967 until 1969, Adams and
writer Arnold Drake would work together on Deadman, the first
major commercial success attributed to Adams. The artist became associated with
the character -- so much so that he would revisit the property in 2017. At the
time, he said that Deadman was the character he had most wanted to return to.
"Deadman is,
in a weird kind of way, number one," Adams told ComicBook.com at the time. "Deadman, I didn't
get to finish the story. When I did Deadman...I didn't
tell anybody the rest of the story. all we did was introduce the character.
Nobody knows who Deadman is and what his relationships are and what's going on
with him and his real story. You just got to see the beginning. So when I
ended, other people picked it up. They started to do 'The Adventures of Deadman,'
like any other comic book superhero…but no, that's not what it's about It's
about Deadman. He's got a story to tell, and he's dead."
O'Neil and Adams were tasked with
reinventing the Dark Knight following the end of the '60s Batman TV show with Adam West and Burt Ward. The
show, having embraced camp and then becoming such a huge success that the
comics tried to emulate it, had left Batman comics
limping along when it ended, since comic book readers did not necessarily
respond to the sillier take in the same way TV audiences had.
The philosophy that guided O'Neil
and Adams on Batman was to return to the formula originated by Bill Finger and
Bob Kane when the character debuted, and that decision -- to lean into the
dark, gothic, violent, and mysterious elements of Batman -- has reverberated
through comics and related media ever since.
Green Lantern/Green Arrow remains relevant decades after it was first published,
with Hal Jordan serving as a police officer (granted, on a cosmic scale) and
Oliver Queen standing in for a protester. Neither man was ever fully
"right," and that was the fun of their dynamic -- but Oliver often
forced Hal to confront a world far less black-and-white than his philosophy of
"I'm going to punish rule-breakers" would have led him to on his own.
Adams is survived by his wife Marilyn and his son Josh, also a comic book artist, as well as include two other sons, Jason and Joel; daughters Kris and Zeea; grandchildren Kelly, Kortney, Jade, Sebastian, Jane and Jaelyn; and great-grandson Maximus.
ADAMS,
Neal
Born:
6/15/1941,
Governor’s Island, Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.
Died:
4/28/2022,
New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Neal
Adams’ westerns – illustrator:
Bat
Masterson - 1959
Weird
Western Tales - 1972
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