He passed a few days ago, but I’m only now up to saying something. Part of that is because I’ve got the flu, but part of it is because I’m just fucking sad.
The first Neal Adams comic I purchased was Superman vs. Muhammad Ali in 1978. It was a giant, 10×14 Treasury Edition that consumed 100% of my allowance for a couple weeks, but I —for lack of a better word— treasured it.
First, like every little boy alive at the time, I loved Muhammad Ali… when he beat the shit out of a de-powered Superman, I was quite excited. But what kept me poring over it again and again was Neal Adams’s pencils… from that wrap-around cover with a crowd full of dozens of famous faces —rendered with Adams’ at-the-time unrivaled photorealism—to an interior that seemed to receive far more time and effort than most comics of the era.
There were other artists at the time who were roughly in Adams’ league… Jim Steranko had been doing stunning pop-art designs for years at that point, while Mike Grell felt like a younger, less detailed, semi-psychedelic version of Neal. But they weren’t working at his level, across so many books.
(People love to talk about “Kirby Crackle”, but to me, “Adams Fingers” were as big a stylistic signature… Neal’s characters all had thin, expressive fingers that did as much talking as their faces.)
There were many artists who would follow him, of course. Bill Sienkiewicz is his most obvious disciple… look at some of Sienkiewicz’s early Moon Knight covers and layouts, and the comparison is obvious. (The fact that Bill eventually grew beyond doing a Neal Adams impersonation to becoming a visual innovator in his own right just makes Adams’ influence all the more interesting.) But even Kirby acolytes like John Byrne integrated much of Adams’ rendering style into his work.
In terms of stories told, I’d guess that Adams’ best regarded work involved helping move The Joker from a cartoon goof to a psychopathic murderer, ushering Batman into his Hairy-Chested, Talia-fucking phase, and most famously, taking on poverty, racism, and heroin addiction in Green Lantern/Green Arrow.
The latter can be a tough read today… despite their intentions, Denny O’Neil and Adams often hovered somewhere between tone-deaf and patronizing on that book. But they were trying to directly talk about shit that DC didn’t address back then, and while Marvel might have “gone there”, Stan Lee would have insisted on couching it all in metaphor. They tried to be as real as they could manage within the limits of superhero comics, and they rightly deserve credit for dragging the medium into the 1970s.
His Marvel work wasn’t quite as —ahem— illustrious, but he had a brief run on X-Men right before they pulled the plug on the original book, and it was pretty much the best the classic team ever looked or read.
Anyway… another piece of my childhood has fallen. Goodbye, Mr. Adams.