



Being Neal Adams Secret origins of a comics-maker and his characters By Suzette Chan

April 15, 2013

I grew up with the Neal Adams versions of Batman, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Black Canary, and my personal favourite, Deadman.



While that work was in the past, when I saw him at the 2011 Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo , I was most impressed with how Adams continues to push comics forward, both as a storytelling medium and in its practices as an industry.



In late March, I had the opportunity to interview Adams before his appearance at this year's Calgary Expo, which takes place April 26 to 28. He spoke about how he became an artist, some of his most memorable stories, the state of creator rights, and the future of comics. He was in a feisty mood -- as always.





Sequential Tart: I'll start with how you started in the artwork business.



Neal Adams: You called it artwork, and you know, we're very careful about that. We don't want to call it art too much. We're very aware of your association with France and France always likes to call things art before they become art and mess them up. The French are at a point where they say, "Well, they're three forms of art from America; the jazz, the musical comedy, and the comic books." We can already hear them on the doorstep, trying to turn it into art. We try to back away from that as much as possible. We don't want it to be art. I am sorry, art is bad. Comics are fun.



ST: You played a part in that: you did those Jerry Lewis comics for the French, didn't you?



NA: Exactly, I did. But they didn't think of that as art. They thought of that as fun. See as long as you can tickle a Frenchman and make them think it's fun, they really back away.



ST: So, okay maybe I should ask what made you decide to draw things and then make money from them?



NA: My mom. When I was six years old my mom and I used to sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee, and I would draw pictures, and I would draw these Old Maid cards. You know, the game Old Maid?



ST: Oh, yeah.



NA: They always have cartoons on them, so I copied the Old Maid cards, and my mother thought that was great. She said, "Do it again." So I did. I would draw Old Maid cards until the cows came home, as long as my mom liked it. She couldn't believe that her son could just copy those drawings and they would look exactly like the cards, [although] they didn't look exactly like the cards.



At one point she ran rooming houses, and she had a young artist who stayed there. He couldn't pay his rent, so she evicted him, but she kept his art supplies, and gave them to me. I thought, "Hmm? What's this?" He never came back for them and I didn't touch them until a couple of months later.



He had colored pencils and stuff, and I started to play with the colored pencils. He had some drawings that he had left over. I started to copy his drawings to see if I could do it -- I'm like six years old, or maybe seven -- and my drawings came out as good as his. I guess that was a life lesson that he would never become an artist if he was that stinky!



So anyway, I grew up and sometimes we had it good, sometimes we had it really bad in our family, more bad than good [laughs]. I thought, you know, I'd really like to be an artist, but I probably won't make it through high school, and then I found this School of Industrial Art. It was a vocational training school, left over from the Depression. It was the only art vocational art school in the world, for all I know. Now, it's called the School of Art and Design, and it's very professional and cool, but then it was just like down the subway stop from [the School of Industrial Trades].



I could not convince them to teach me cartooning and comic strips and comic books. They told me in no uncertain terms that comic books were going to be gone in a year and you're wasting your time. And I'm thinking "Well, what am I doing? I want to do this. Maybe I can jump over comic books and go to comic strips," which happened to be doing fine. But comic books were nothing. They were just the toilet paper of the Western world.



ST: This was after the contraction in the 50s?



NA: This was after the Congress of the United States decided that they were going to look for something else to attack besides communists but that began with the letter C.



ST: So that's the connection. I never knew!



NA: That's the connection. It's the letter C, that's what it was. This guy named Frederick Wertham wrote a book on how comic books made juvenile delinquency: "Kid hit a cop over the head with a baseball bat, and we found comics in his closet, so therefore." You know, what does it take to make that connection? All kids in America were carrying comic books around in their back pocket and trading comic books, and that's what we did, but somehow Frederick Wertham found some sin in it, and he wrote a book [ Seduction of the Innocent ], and now Congress was attacking comic books.



I was lucky enough to have been sent or brought over to Germany with my father, who was stationed in Germany as part of the occupation forces for a couple of years. I got what you call a classical vacation that lasted two years, and I learned a lot about other cultures and stuff. Back in America, apparently Congress had found the Frederick Wertham book worthwhile to go and attack comic books for us, so they did, and then comic books wrote this self-inflicted comics code.



I came back not to EC Comics , and guts spilling off of somebody's stomach and terrible things going on, but My Greatest Adventure Comics , Strange Adventure Comics , and Pat Boone Comics . So when I went to school it was like, "Yeah, I want to do this except it's Pat Boone Comics , Sugar and Spike , Little Dot and Audrey .



That was what I was going to look forward to, and I still persevered like an idiot. You know, some people are just stubborn: you can't wring it out of them! I realized that if there was no place for me, I better get good so I can find these places that were no good for me and then dig in and see what I could do.



So I got awfully good in school. In fact, I was doing comic book pages when my teacher, Mr. Allen, [told] me he had a comic strip. [Charles Allen, working as Colin Allen, drew What a Family . He was a black guy who had a comic strip and nobody knew who he was because he was black, so one of the things that I've learned about America in those days: "Hmm, hmm, hmmm, people don't like black people. What the hell is going on? I thought Lincoln freed the slaves." So apparently Lincoln had freed them, but then put them in the bushes, and it wasn't good, so Mr. Allen really got no publicity for the work that he did.



At the end of the year after [I put] 10 times as much work in it as anybody else in the class -- and when I say 10 times, I mean that there were supposed to be 10 assignments in there, and I had a hundred of them -- he said, "You know, Neal, most of this stuff you didn't do in class." I said, "Isn't that the idea? I do it when I go home and on weekends." He said, "Yeah, I suppose, but, look, I have been telling you all year that in a year there's not going to be any comic books. You're wasting your time. You shouldn't be doing this. You should do other things because it's going away." I said, "Okay, Mr. Allen. You are black, and you did a syndicated strip [when] nobody would have said that you could have done it, and you're telling me I should give this up? You? I don't think so." So he said, "Okay, fine. B+."



[ "What a Family" ] was done in a Jimmy Hatlo style and it was about a large family of people with red hair. It was like, you know, we're going out to a picnic in the morning and everybody is running around the kitchen all crazy, and in the second panel the car [would be] filled with all these people who would be driving back from the picnic with poison ivy. They're exhausted and the father can barely drive. It's one of those very homey things.



[Mr. Allen] was not the original creator of it. There was another guy that created it, but the guy got too old and couldn't do it anymore. They had a contest to see who could do the strip, and Mr. Allen signed aliases because he didn't want people to know who he was. He was the assistant on the strip, and so [the samples that he showed] to continue the strip were better than anybody's. In spite of the fact that he was black, they let him do the strip, but they never took photos of him, they never printed photos. I never saw anything at the cartoonists' society that talked about a black comic strip guy -- never. So he persevered through shit and everything to succeed and to do what he did, and then he became a teacher.



ST: That's was a great lesson for yourself.



NA: Yes. It was a very, very big lesson for myself in so many ways. I would say that Mr. Allen was responsible for me creating John Stewart, the black Green Lantern. I would have to say there's a direct relationship to that in spite of DC Comics not wanting a black character for any reason that made any sense. It was just that they were part of the paddle boat going down stream, and that it meant nothing to them to either do it or not do it until I fought for it.



The good thing about it was that my editor [Julius Schwartz] was a New York liberal Jew, and there's nothing more liberal than a New York liberal Jew, I am telling you. If you for one second imply that they may not be liberal, and they may not be for this, they just crumble and die, so he had to back away.



Julie said, "What's your point?"



"I don't have a point, Julie. I just think we ought to do it."



"Why does he have to be black? He could be Asian."



"You want to make him Asian, fine, I'm with you. Look Julie, you got this alien comes from outer space, right? And he lands, and the ring goes out and it finds the most worthy, bravest man on Earth. And it doesn't turn out to be Bruce Wayne, or Superman, or any of the comic book characters at either Marvel or DC . It turns out to be a jet pilot, okay? A test pilot." Now, I was a big fan of Chuck Yeager. I think that's probably a good choice. Brave, you know, strong, and going to keep on going in that plane and courting death all the time. I get it. I am with that. "So maybe the ring has to go out and get somebody that's going to replace him."



"We've already done that."



"I'm sorry, Julie, I don't read the comic books."



"What? Wait a second. We got a guy. Guy Gardner." [Guy Gardner first appeared in Green Arrow #59 in 1968.]



He pulls out the comic book, and there's this blonde, Anglo-Saxon gym teacher from the Midwest. I said, "Okay, see, it's sort of my point, Julie."



"What's wrong with this?"



"A blonde Anglo-Saxon white guy from the Midwest. Julie, do you ever watch the Olympics? How often have you seen three white guys, you know, gold, silver, bronze, [standing] together? Usually there's a white guy, a black guy and an Asian guy, or two black guys and a white guy. Three white guys, you don't really see it. Maybe in archery. I'm thinking archery we'd see three white guys."



He says, "What your point?"



I said, "I'm just saying if the ring goes out it's just as likely to find an Asian guy and a black guy, and it is not likely that it's going to find another white Anglo-Saxon protestant guy. That doesn't make any sense."



"You want to draw a black Green Lantern don't you?"



"Well, yeah, that's what I was thinking."



He said, "Will you draw it?"



I said, "Yeah, I'll draw it. No problem."



He said, "Fine, I'll get Denny [O'Neil] to write a script."



"Make him civilized, Julie, you know, not a gangster or anything."



"We'll make him an architect."



"Fine, make him an architect. Out of work. Things aren't so good for out of work black architects."



"Okay, fine, get out of here. Get out of my office. I want it dark in my office again."



So then [Denny] does this script, and I read the first page. Sure enough, he's a black out of work architect, and he's defending a couple of guys on the street from nasty cops. And I read the name of the guy, and the guy's name is Lincoln Washington. Oh, Jesus. So I go to Denny O'Neil, and I go, "Denny, look, I know the answer to this question, but I just have to ask you, Lincoln Washington?"



He says, "Not my name. I didn't do it."



I said, "Who did it?"



He says, "Julie."



"Okay, fine." I go to Julie's room and I close the door.



"What is it? Get out of my office."



"Julie, Lincoln Washington?"



"What's wrong with that name? I know lots of guys with names like that."



"Yes, Julie, there's a reason you know lots of guys with names like that. That's a slave name."



"Oh, what do you mean?"



"You know what a slave name is, Julie. You read the New York Times every morning."



"Well, what do you want him to be called?"



"Anything, not Lincoln Washington. That's insane. You know how many letters you're going to get from black guys across the country and telling you you're a fuckin' bigot?"



"I am not a bigot, Goddammit!"



"Lincoln Washington is a bigoty name. You got to stop it."



"All right, what do you want to call him?"



"A regular name. John Stewart." Now, how would I know that a guy named Jon Stewart would become a comedian on late-night television? I had no idea.



ST: You've created characters and worked your magic on characters who were already created. I'm thinking of Batman and Deadman. What inspired you about those characters?



NA: You got to remember. You got remember that even though I may have gone to an art high school, and I didn't got to an art college, I was self-educated. Even when I got of school I joined an illustration group in an apartment in 51st Street in New York. I was the assistant, but I learned to do everything. I was like a sponge, or a needle that pulled backwards. I sucked everything out of anybody who was talented that I could get a hold of and I would just suck them dry, leave then as a husk in the road and apologize later.



You could say I was not college educated, but I was learned in that sense that I really learned my craft. I worked from photographs. I worked from research. I studied painting. I studied anything I could get my hands on, so I learned an awful lot. When I got into comics, I had already done illustration work. As a teenager, I had done comics for advertising. I had a syndicated strip for three and a half years, based on the Ben Casey TV series. I did illustration work during that for advertising agencies.



So when I came to comics at the ripe old age of 25, I had already had a career. I had done an illustration portfolio that took me six months. I left that in an agency, and when I went back to get it, it was gone, so I had to fall back into comic books. I had just started a little in comic books when I got out of high school doing Archie Comics , but then I went on to do all these other things. So when I fell back into comics, for those people, it was as if I had fallen out of the sky. "Who is this guy? What the hell is going on? Where did he come from?"



When I came back from doing all these other things and learning all this stuff, and I was going to DC Comics , there was Marvel over there suddenly waking up out of a 10-year low with Jack Kirby and Stan Lee doing things to compete with DC Comics , which had continued to remain alive, and this guy [Adams was referring to himself] walked in the door who could essentially do anything. I did Jerry Lewis Comics . I would do The Spectre . I could do Batman. I could actually draw real people with costumes on, rather than cartoons with funny costumes.



ST: What was your process in taking a comicky character and putting them in the real world?



NA: If you are anything like me, you can suspend reality for a period of time. I can suspend it for a long period of time, and I can say, "Well, okay, this isn't real, but let's pretend it's real." I'm okay with that, and it doesn't bother me. I am not going to see a guy walking up the side of a building or walking in the daytime with a stupid costume on and not have kids point at him and say, "Mommy, that man's walking around in his long underwear."



But I can put a costume on a guy that looks real and only have them walk around at night and step out of the shadows and come from behind doors and jump out of windows and do things that only somebody who is a worthy physical specimen could do. That I can believe. I can't believe the cartoon. So I did it like it was really happening, and everybody went, "What's he doing?"



I took the page design, and I designed it like it was one picture instead of, like, six pictures. I took all those things I learned about negative space and positive space and perspective and all those other things and inculcated that into comic books instead of these little panels that everybody had been doing for 50 years.



Suddenly the page is designed, and it's got real anatomy and real perspective and all the rest of this. Everybody is going, "What the hell is this? I don't understand." [I said,] "No, here's all the stuff you learned, you got inside of you. You just have to do it, and if you don't do it, I will just do it and embarrass the shit out of you."



ST: The artwork is amazing and I think one thing that helps it is that you have this feel for the character. I'm going to admit my bias because I love Deadman. That really seemed to grab your imagination. You took that, that became a very different character than we were used to in comics. What was it about that character that inspired you to take it further?



NA: I didn't think anybody could do such a thing. I mean Carmine Infantino did the first one, and I went, "What the hell is this? This guy is dead? He can't even do anything. I mean he's dead!" What a great challenge! What could be more challenging than a guy who is dead? You know, he can't lift a finger. He can't move anything. If he walks, his feet probably go into the ground. You know, he walks through telephone poles. This cannot be a possible thing to do. Yeah, give it to me. I want that. This is going to be great."



Remember I had just done this syndicated strip about a neurosurgeon [ Ben Casey ] and tried to make that interesting. I had some of these three-panel things at the top of the strip and then the Sunday pages with all the rules. Suddenly, boom! Do anything you want. Just blow it out your nose.



Well, I did and it was like, could you give me more freedom? They had no idea what I was doing. When Denny and I did Green Lantern / Green Arrow , and the Chicago Seven trial, and insulted the Vice President of the United States at that time, Spiro Agnew, and the President, Richard Nixon [they gave a little girl character Nixon's face], that was just the beginning. We did all this so we could do drug issues later on. We changed the comics, but when we did these things, they didn't know what the hell was coming. It was like, "What's Denny and Neal doing now? I don't know."



ST: You've been championing some new media creations like motion comics, and they are amazing. The ones you've been doing recently, they are almost animation. I'm wondering if you're headed toward animation or you want to make it something different?



NA: Yes, it's animation, but it's another way of doing animation. You take the work of the artist, and you take the writing of the writer, and you use them to do forms of animation because who wants less animation?



You want more animation, so you do techniques that don't make 50 guys in Czechoslovakia try to draw those things over and over again and take out as many lines as possible. You want to leave the lines in, but animate the lines, so we have techniques in computer animation and in computer programs that can do that.



Then we have motion capture where we can plant the lines that the artist actually drew, say onto the person in the motion capture suit, and make that character move around.



The idea is to take the techniques that are available and not wait until they become God-like. Take them now and do the best you can, and next week do it better, and then a year from now do it better, until at some point it becomes equal to, but not the same, as animation.



If the business guys say it's animation, then they can say whatever they want. They'll do it to sell it, you know, "Ohhh, it's animation." No, it's not really animation, [but] people in the marketplace don't want to hear anything but animation. [They say] if we do motion comics, and call it motion comics, we'll sell 400,000 copies. If we call it animation, then we'll sell seven million copies.



ST: How important is it at this point for comics to present themselves different with all of the different media that's come up?



NA: We're suffering, we're suffering. Everybody is trying to catch up to us. It's like computer games: "This computer game is better than your comic books." Well, you've just had 700 people work on it. I guess that's why. Or "The movie is better than the comic book." Well, you know, you've just spent, I don't know, 50 million dollars to make the movie. "Give us 50 million." "Oh, it's not going to work."



We are a garage type of business. We're a mom-and-pop-store type of business, and we'll never be anything more than that unless somebody discovers some magic formula, and that's good. You got an artist and you got a writer. I can draw a $100 million dollar movie in one month in a comic book. Why would I not do that? And I can do it next month too. I can put all the effects, and all the rest of it, in there. Nobody can catch us. We're running like deer. You cannot catch us. We're stripped down and naked and running like a son of a bitch.



So we will come up with new stuff all the time, and guess what? We will invade the bookstores if there are any bookstores left.



ST: Are you tied to print features?



NA: Am I tied to hard copy? Yeah. As long as it makes me a buck because I am a whore. Try to understand that. Get that in your head nice and solid, I am a whore. If you can make money making hard copy you just go ahead and do it. And I'll do it, but I will not avoid the Internet.



[It's] hard to make money on the Internet. Everybody says, "Oh, you can do it with advertising." Oh really? Not so easy. Sorry, you know, you can bet that it's going to be a rough road to hoe to make money on the Internet, and everybody is trying to do it, and everybody is pretending and everybody is throwing money at it, but you know, you sell about 50,000 copies and you get your money back, so there's nothing wrong with it, and these comic book stores and the comic book conventions are validifying. See, I said validifying.



ST: Validating maybe?



NA: Validated and validify. Validated is a better word. I think validifying is a word.



Anyway, you can't say no to that particular wave because it keeps on rolling. You can say, "Well, you know, the Internet is going to take some customers away," but I think it's like, you know, 6% now. Maybe it will move to 20%, but you know, there's nothing like that hard copy in your hand. You look at it, you turn the bed lamp on, you go to the bathroom and put your elbows on your knees and read a comic book. You can't do that so easy on the Internet. Some people do. But it's you know what I mean? It's better.



ST: You bring up a good point. Just selling your stuff on the Internet may not solve everybody's problems. Creator rights are still very important, and it's something that you spearheaded. Do you find at this point that the industry is where it ought to be in that regard?



NA: No. No, we got a law in the United States and Congress called the "Work Made for Hire" provision in the law, and it basically gives permission to take all your rights away from you by you just signing it. That provision is two sentences long in a book-length law.



One of them is, "if you make a contribution to a larger work." Who is to say what that is? "Oh, excuse me Mr. Publisher I wrote a science fiction novel here I would like you to publish." "Well, we consider that a science fiction novel, since we are going to do 20 science fiction novels this year, we consider that a contribution to a larger work." "Oh, really? How about fuck you? No offence, but no, it's not a contribution to a larger work." "Well, we say it is and if you want to sell it to us, you'll have to sign this contract." The second provision of the law says, "If you're willing to sign a contract that says that it's a contribution to a larger work, that's it."



That's not what you call a lot of conditions. It's sort of like giving one guy a shotgun and another guy a straw with a BB [pellet], then taking the BB out and just giving him the straw. [If] he puts everything on the line and suddenly becomes famous, then they have to give him rights. That's the only way you win against a law like that. Well, law as I understand it is made to be make people equal and then they can negotiate. This is not exactly that way.



ST: There's quite a lot of money at stake now with movies getting into it.



NA: Money is at stake, and you can still write fair contracts. You don't have to cut your own rope. I can write a contract to you, and I can say, "You know what? I am not going to give you a work made for hire contract, but guess what? I am going to give you a contract that takes every goddamn thing from you, and if you want to do it with me you'll sign it, and that's called a freelance contract or contract, and I can write in the contract, but I am at least obligated to write it, and present it to you for you to say, "Yes, no, or I argue with this."



It's a lousy law, and it was presented as I understand it, and maybe it's an apocryphal story, so I'll tell it that way. It was presented by an encyclopedia salesman who said, "I can't give some guy who is writing one paragraph in my encyclopedia a seven-page contract. That's just bullshit."



Now, had I been there -- and unfortunately at that time I was fighting for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and I couldn't do it -- I would have said, "No. Write a half page contract you dumbass prick and make a copy of it and give it to them to sign it and then take his goddamn paragraph, you fuck."



I might have left out the "fuck" part, but I think that's what I would have said. Unfortunately, a senator is being stupid, believed the jerk and went ahead and did it, and then discovered that all the magazine writers on the New York Times were about to get screwed. Then they started to talk about modifying the law just a little bit to make it just a little bit less injurious.



What they didn't do was just take those two sentences out and you know what? Take those two sentences out, and you got a good law.



ST: That's a project for somebody.



NA: You know, that's a project that I've worked on periodically ongoing, you know, when I don't have anything to do. But you never 100% win. You've always got some crap lying around that somebody is screwing somebody with.



ST: Have you been watching this TV show Arrow ? It's not set, they changed the name from Star City, to Starling City, but they have an intersection called Adams and O'Neil.



NA: Yeah, I know. Every fifth person in the world told me. I think that's funny. I just think the guy [Stephen Amell, who plays Oliver Queen] ought to smile more. You know, the charm. C'mon buddy. You know, it's not that bad. You know, a little bit of smile. That's part of the character. And I'll bet that guy's got a good smile. I'm figuring the second or third season, and then suddenly he'll open up and grant it to somebody else. Ahh, you go, ahhhh, cool! You'll be like Green Arrow, man!



ST: I'm interested because they're rolling up a bunch of DC things in there. They mentioned Nanda Parbat.



NA: Yeah, that happens. All I have to do is lay an egg and suddenly it cracks open somewhere else. [A character] in one of my Batman stories is Flipper, it's like he's got flippers for hands. He showed up at the bar scene somewhere, somebody told me. Really. You could just like make up some like schmuck with, you know, flippers? You had to use my character? So it's a little hard being Neal sometimes and not having to laugh really loud.



Neal Adams  Official Website

Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo  Official Website



