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Comics’ Bronze Age and Beyond!

Volume 1, Number 143 June 2023 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Michael Eury PUBLISHER John Morrow DESIGNER Rich Fowlks COVER ARTIST Neal Adams (Originally produced as the cover for Batman #227, Dec. 1970. Special Neal Adams Bat-logo designed by Michael Kronenberg.)

A Tribute to

COVER DESIGNER Michael Kronenberg PROOFREADER David Baldy

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Batman created by Bob Kane, with Bill Finger. Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family.

BACKSEAT DRIVER: Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76, Fifty Years Later . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Editorial by Michael Eury INTERVIEW: Breathing Life into Batman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 An in-depth discussion with Neal Adams about his influential Batman stories PRINCE STREET NEWS: Neal Adams Tribute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Cartoonist Karl Heitmueller, Jr. recalls the many ways Adams impacted his life BACKSTAGE PASS: Neal Adams, Under the Radar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 From ghost gigs to “Crusty Bunkers” inker jams, Adams assisted numerous artists ROUGH STUFF: Adams Unplugged. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46 A few of the master’s covers and illustrations in pencil form THE TOY BOX: The Power (Records) of Neal Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53 The superstar artist’s hit parade of comic and TV tie-in illos for records INTERVIEW: You’ll Believe a Man Can Fly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Adams revisits his Superman artwork in this candid conversation BACK TALK: Reader Reactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 BACK ISSUE™ issue 143, June 2023 (ISSN 1932-6904) is published monthly (except Jan., March, May, and Nov.) by TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614, USA. Phone: (919) 449-0344. Periodicals postage paid at Raleigh, NC. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Back Issue, c/o TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614. Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Office: BACK ISSUE, c/o Michael Eury, Editor-in-Chief, 112 Fairmount Way, New Bern, NC 28562. Email: euryman@gmail.com. Eight-issue subscriptions: $97 Economy US, $147 International, $39 Digital. Please send subscription orders and funds to TwoMorrows, NOT to the editorial office. Cover artwork by Neal Adams. Batman and Superman TM & © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved. All editorial matter © 2023 TwoMorrows and Michael Eury except Prince Street News, TM & © 2023 Karl Heitmueller, Jr. Printed in China. FIRST PRINTING

Neal Adams Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 1

(above) An undated specialty illustration by Neal Adams recreating a scene from Green Lantern #87’s classic Green Arrow story “What Can One Man Do?” TM & © DC Comics.

SPECIAL THANKS The Neal Adams family Terry Austin Robert V. Conte DC Comics Steve Englehart Chris Franklin Karl Heitmueller, Jr. Heritage Comics Auctions Rob Kelly Laurie Kronenberg Michael Kronenberg Bob McLeod Robert Menzies Brian K. Morris Luigi Novi Rose Rummel-Eury John Schwirian Mike Tiefenbacher Alan Weiss John Wells

#76,

by M i c h a e l

Eury

Fifty Years Later

That question was raised by an unassuming elderly African-American man who, I been readin’ about you... despite the cultural invisibility beaten into him by systemic prejudices, found the how you work for the blue skins... courage to face off against the possessor of the most formidable weapon in and how on a planet someplace the universe. Green Lantern, the power-ring-wielding Emerald Crusader who you helped out the orange skins... couldn’t even stammer a response to this piercing query, became “woke.” and you done considerable for the And so did I. purple skins! Only there’s skins you At age 14. never bothered with--! 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 ...the black skins! I want to know... Shall Escape My Sight,” written by Denny O’Neil and illustrated by Neal how come?! Answer me that, Adams, when it was reprinted in black and white in the first of two Green Lantern/Green Arrow paperback editions published by Paperback Library. Mr. Green Lantern! “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.

TM & © DC Comics.

‘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. 2 • BACK ISSUE • Neal Adams Tribute Issue

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). Green Lantern TM & © DC Comics.

Neal Adams Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 3

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M i c h a e l K r o n e n b e r g on May 7, 2003 Laurie Kronenberg

transcribed by

TM & © DC Comics. Courtesy of Heritage.

conducted by

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

Neal Adams Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 9

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! TM & © DC Comics.

[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.]

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.

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 KRONENBERG: It seems the people at National [Periodical Publications, DC Comics’ former name] had become incredibly stodgy. Comics, and I didn’t get to present it to the Batman editor ADAMS: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say that. I think [Julius Schwartz], I got to present it to the Brave and the world had become kind of stodgy. I think we had the Bold editor [Murray Boltinoff]. I think my attitude fought our communists and fought our parents. I mean, as to how the character should be portrayed was you must understand, I come from the time when, exemplified in my conversation with Julie Schwartz. I believe it was the governor of New Jersey went on I had asked to work on Batman many times and the air and destroyed rock-and-roll records; when he turned me down. So I drew Batman for several people openly talked about the African influence on issues in Boltinoff’s Brave and the Bold. Letters whites’ music; where quiet bigotry was going on all poured into DC Comics saying and asking, “Why the time, everywhere, even in New York; where the is the only ‘good’ Batman the one in Brave and the world was clutching its game ball for fear that someBold?” Under this barrage of fan mail Julie finally thing would come and penetrate it or steal it away. offered to let me draw for the regular Batman titles. Perhaps that’s not the way to put it, but it was a In our hallway chat as he offered me the Batman very protective and insular time. work Julie finally said, and with some annoyance, For me, it was not my time. If there was a time “Why is it, Neal, that you think you know how to neal adams that I should have been born, perhaps, it was not do Batman and all the rest of us don’t?” What I © Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons. then. In all other things, I’m a pretty conservative 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 person. As you look at me now, as we’re across the interview table, every kid in America knew what Batman should be.” It just didn’t I look as much like a fireman or a policeman as I look like anything. seem like the people at DC Comics knew what Batman ought to be. 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 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, needing change if they’re wrong, and lots was wrong. I started to make a Batman encyclopedia for myself, where I traced drawings and copied drawings. I wrote on the bottoms the various KRONENBERG: Who accused you of being a reactionary? characteristics of the various characters and I wrote about the ADAMS: I think it’s common in my description. If you read enough Batmobile and all the other things. And I guess I did about ten interviews, I go from “a revolutionary” to “kinda crazy,” somewhere pages before I dropped from kid exhaustion. For a ten- or 11-year- in that mix. Common parlance for me. It’s just people, but among old kid that was already a big deal, and I don’t think anything in my fans, I’m not that way at all. I’m just somebody who refuses to those pages doesn’t exemplify what I think Batman is all about. live in the past, and for no reason except that I don’t like it there, not I don’t blame the people at DC. I think the TV show ran roughshod because I want to make any change, but just because it’s just bad for 10 • BACK ISSUE • Neal Adams Tribute Issue

you. The truth is, there really isn’t anything special about me. I just don’t like old crap, and maybe I’m a little hard to push around. That’s about the most you say: a little hard to push around. I can be pushed around, but it’s hard. KRONENBERG: That’s a pretty big thing, though. You came into a business that was hiding. ADAMS: Exactly. Listen, I met artists who would say to me that they’re line illustrators. They’d had the nerve taken out of them. And remember, an awful lot of them went away. Alex Toth argued with me once that I said he went out to Hollywood and went into cartoons. If Alex Toth wants to argue with me, then anything he says is fine as far as I’m concerned. Al Williamson, one of the greatest comic-book artists ever—there’s just no question, there’s not even a conversation—did ghosting work for other comic-strip artists who, in my opinion, were not as worthy as he was to do the strips that they did. You would see six-page stories in Dell, the most vanilla of comic-book companies, by people like Wally Wood and, my goodness, the best guys, and it was a terrible, terrible time. It’s not to say that the artists of DC were bad, but certainly they were especially blessed to get work. DC didn’t make the effort to find the very best at that time. They let them go. And, if there’s one thing that I won’t forgive on a personal basis, it’s DC’s doing it. Not so much that they hurt the characters, they hurt the business by hiding and being babies, but it was a conscious decision and you have to respect it. I don’t have to respect it. [laughs] KRONENBERG: I’m going to give you a couple of names, and if you could just give me some quick opinions… ADAMS: I generally don’t have opinions, even though people think that I do have opinions. You will find, as you ask. KRONENBERG: Dick Sprang. ADAMS: Loved his work when I was a kid. Love it. Absolutely. If I were doing a Batman series, I would love to do a Dick Sprang story. That would just knock me out. KRONENBERG: Julius Schwartz. ADAMS: You know, really truly, in my heart of hearts, I loved Julius Schwartz. He’s a cantankerous and a difficult man to deal with, but my association with Julius, when I worked with him, was nothing but salutary. He made it hard for me, and that was fine. He was sort of a like the drill sergeant. So, in my heart, I really love the man. KRONENBERG: Have you seen the Batman: The Animated Series adaptations of your stories, and what do you think of them? ADAMS: I see them on and off. You must understand that an awful lot of my career has been spent with companies not paying me royalties for what I do while I fight for other people’s rights. I see an awful lot of my stuff. It’s almost as though people went into a room and said, “If we change it just this much then it won’t be Neal’s anymore.” I think that’s a little odd. What is gained? I saw it happen with the X-Men. The first X-Men movie, pretty much, if you look at it carefully, was culled from my series of X-Men, except for the focus on Wolverine. Of course, it’s hard to argue that the key element of Magneto building a machine that turns everyone into mutants isn’t my creation. A bunch of the Batman stuff was my style. I can’t argue with their source. If we replace royalties with the word “homage,” then I guess they treated me pretty nice.

The Dark Knight Returns (top) After drawing a handful of Batman covers for Detective and The Brave and the Bold (B&B), Adams’ first interior Batman story—the oft-reprinted Deadman team-up in B&B #79 (Aug.–Sept. 1968)—returned the Caped Crusader to his original gothic interpretation. (bottom) Neal’s first Batman/Deadman became so quickly iconic that it squeezed out the brand-new Creeper/Wildcat team-up to score the top spot on the cover of Super-Team Family #2 (Dec. 1975–Jan. 1976). TM & © DC Comics.

Neal Adams Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 11

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. © Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc.

32 • BACK ISSUE • Neal Adams Tribute Issue

by J o

hn Wells

Wexler, a line illustrator and ex-Marine, taught me his mother’s signature when the contract arrived a work ethic that Howard would never learn. From after his 21st birthday. It would have been doubly Howard, I got broad experience and learned tons. awkward since he’d told the newspaper syndicate From Wexler, I learned a work ethic. I paid attention that he was 25. By the time Adams did turn 25 on June 15, 1966, to both, but never confused the two.” Perhaps as a consequence of his lack of work ethic, Ben Casey was coming to an end. The cartoonist cited Nostrand—and by extension, Adams—was replaced various reasons for its cancellation, ranging from on Bat Masterson after three months. Bob Powell disagreements with writers Jerry Caplin and Jerry succeeded him in December 1959, remaining until Brondfield to a division of profits that drastically slashed the pay Adams should have been taking the strip’s end in June 1960. “I stupidly took a ten-percent part of the strip home. Ben Casey concluded on July 31. The editors at NEA, the syndicate that distributed rather than be paid $50.00 a week, which ended up earning me a whopping $11.50 a week,” the feature, replaced it with a humor strip called The Adams ruefully told Chaykin. “So much for clev- Willets and had no plans for any new launches in er horse-trading. I did a sample for a commercial 1966. “They said they’d like to take out an option on strip and begged Elmer Wexler to review it for me. me for the next year,” Adams detailed in Cartoonist Profiles #12, “and would pay me so much a month When I did, he told me there was so much if I’d promise not to go to another syndicate wrong with it that it would take him all with a strip. I would be able to do anyday to tell me what it was, and he didn’t thing else in the art line I wanted—I just have the time. Once I recovered, I had to refrain from submitting another made another attempt. I showed it strip elsewhere! I was very flattered to Elmer. He called Johnstone and but refused the offer.” Cushing and told them that they By this time, Adams had already should hire me on a freelance produced three weeks of dailies for basis. And they did.” a drama strip called Tangent that Johnstone and Cushing was an ultimately went nowhere. Meanwhile, advertising agency distinguished the cartoonist had also stepped in to by its comics-style marketing of secretly draw the hardboiled deteca wide variety of products and tive strip Peter Scratch when its artist services. Thanks to the encroachLou Fine was unavailable. Revered ment of television, demand for such neal adams for his Golden Age superhero strips ads was fading fast by the time Dave Sim. like the Black Condor and the Ray, Adams came aboard and the company itself would be bought out in 1962. None- Fine had successfully moved into comics-style theless, the young artist thrived in the environment, advertising in the 1940s and 1950s, and was a Johnlearning everything that the older illustrators could stone and Cushing alumnus. Overlapping with his last weeks on Casey, Adams teach him and cultivating a network of contacts in drew the Scratch dailies for June 13–25 and July 11– the competitive art field. “When I was 20, they had a birthday party,” 23, 1966. “It was hard to get close to Lou at the Adams told Will Eisner in Will Eisner’s Quarterly #1 time I knew him,” Adams remarked in Will Eisner’s (1983). “The older guys did this. I said, ‘This is great. Quarterly #1. “He seemed to have a lot of personal I can’t understand why you guys are making such a family problems and they made him sad. He had a big fuss about me being 20.’ They said, ‘Well, we very sad outlook on things and his work had gone don’t have to tell our wives and our friends that we’re from being very alive to very deadly and well drawn. […] He seemed as though somebody had pulled the being beaten out by a teenager anymore.” Before his next birthday rolled around in 1962, plug and pulled a lot out of him. “He had the ability to sit down and draw a picture. Adams was presented with another opportunity. Jerry Caplin, the sibling of Li’l Abner cartoonist Al He didn’t take references out. He’d just start drawing Capp, had landed the rights to a comic strip based and a picture would appear. The only other person on the medical TV series Ben Casey, but the deal I’ve seen do that is Russ Heath, who would start at the hinged on signing a first-rate artist. Johnstone back hoof of a horse and just draw a silhouette and and Cushing passed along Neal’s name and his then come back to the same place and have a horse. samples clinched the deal. Not quite of legal age, Lou Fine didn’t quite do that, but to a young artist, Adams avoided the embarrassment of requesting 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. Ben Casey © NEA, Inc.

Neal Adams Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 33

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 stan drake 5, 1966 (assistance) and August 21–25 and September 10, 1967 (ghosting). Despite his brief contribution, Adams’ Dave Sim. 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.

34 • BACK ISSUE • Neal Adams Tribute Issue

Adams’ Drake-influenced style and familiarity with the comic-strip form made him an ideal candidate to assist on other realistically rendered strips when their artists were in a pinch. He ghosted Secret Agent Corrigan for Al Williamson from August 12–19, 1967 and did the same for John Prentice on Rip Kirby. His contributions to the latter were more extensive and comprised a week in 1967 (November 6–11) and four in 1968 (June 9–14; August 5–10, 19–24; and September 9–14). Adams also shaped the look of a newspaper strip for which he never drew a line. In 1965, a year before Ben Casey ended, the artist was contacted by Jerry Caplin’s brother, Elliot, about drawing a new strip based on Robin Moore’s bestseller The Green Berets. “Now of course he was undercutting his brother there,” Adams told Rik Offenberger in a 2005 interview (www.firstcomicsnews.com/neal-adams-renaissanceman), “but he thought maybe it was possible to do two strips. And it was possible because I had worked out certain techniques. I could do it. I had a threehour lunch with the fellow who wrote the book. By the end of the lunch, I was so disgusted with what was going on with Vietnam, I realized I was definitely not the guy. I talked to Elliot and told him in all honesty I am really not for this war, so I don’t think I am the right guy for this spot. He said, ‘I am so out of the comic-book thing, who would you recommend?’ “In my brain I was laughing to myself, and I said, ‘Joe Kubert.’ Kubert was the ultimate war artist. [I told Elliot] ahead of time, ‘You’re used to guys like Stan [Drake] and myself. You are not going to like Joe’s stuff right off the bat. He is going to have to do a couple of weeks of dailies and in three weeks you are suddenly going to get it and understand why Joe Kubert is Joe Kubert. You are going to want Joe Kubert more than anybody else in the world, I promise you this. ‘” “At that time, we had never met,” Kubert remarked in Comic Book Profiles #3 (1998). “Not only was I surprised but I was also very much complimented by the fact that Neal had recommended me. I knew of his work, and I always admired the work that he had done. I was very gratified that he had recommended me.” Kubert ultimately drew Tales of the Green Beret (sometimes Berets) from September 1965 to January 1968, quitting several months before its end. He was now fully engaged at DC again, not only as an artist but also an editor of the publisher’s war comic books. Neal Adams had also found his way to DC and was quickly making an impression in a big way, bringing his realistic style to covers featuring icons Batman and Superman and interiors starring the supernatural Spectre and Deadman.

Joe Kubert At War The legendary battle artist, shown in this 1965 photo with his son (and future comic artist) Andy, was recommended by Adams to be the artist of the syndicated Tales of the Green Beret (also Berets) comic strip. © NEA, Inc.

DC DROP-INS

Consequently, Adams was on site when Kubert found himself on the horns of a dilemma. The World War I–based “Enemy Ace” feature in Star-Spangled War Stories had become a critical favorite, with scripts by Robert Kanigher and art by Kubert himself. Among its fans was idiosyncratic legend Alex Toth, who begged to draw an episode of the feature. Kubert agreed to give him a script, but with a caveat. Toth had achieved some notoriety for drastically changing a given writer’s plot before handing in the finished art. Emphasizing his great admiration for his old friend, Joe insisted that could not happen here. “If you’re going to change anything,” the editor recalled telling Toth (2012’s Genius Illustrated), “let me know beforehand and we can talk about it. But don’t make any changes on this thing just because you feel like it. “Well, I got the story back from him, completed. It’s a totally different story, and I just blew my stack. I packed up the whole damned thing and I sent it back to him. I said, ‘Thank you for this story, but it’s not the one I sent you, and I’m not gonna print this.’ And he never got paid for it.” Legend has it that Toth carried the pages in his car for years and finally tore them up.

al williamson Dave Sim, from a photo by Mike Catron.

john prentice From Rip Kirby vol. 9 (IDW, 2016).

Neal Adams Tribute Issue • BACK ISSUE • 35

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The

(Records)

by R

Neal Adams’ artistic genius wasn’t limited to the world of monthly comics, of course: his work appeared in virtually every medium that might have been even tangentially connected related— newspaper strips, treasuries, digests, merchandising. But there was probably no single side street to the world of comic books that Adams’ dazzling draftsmanship dominated more than the Power Records. Power Records was an imprint of Peter Pan Records, which across several decades dominated the children’s record market. Similar to the legendary Mego Toys, their most remembered decade was the 1970s, when they acquired the licenses to nearly every major comic-book and pop-culture property out there: DC and Marvel, The Six Million Dollar Man, Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and more. Since the audio adventures featuring these properties were aimed at a slightly older audience, Peter Pan sought to distinguish them via their own imprint, the dramatically named Power Records. Power Records featured these world famous characters and concepts in a multitude of audio formats, often accompanied by a custom-made comic book that you read while you listened (like I did, on many a weekend afternoon as a kid). While the Peter Pan staff produced the recorded content on the records

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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!

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two of which bore Adams covers, front and back. Star Trek was a perennial seller for Peter Pan, who dusted off all this audio content in 1980 and reissued all of them with new sleeves, featuring stills from the movie. Yawn! Planet of the Apes was also a big hit for Peter Pan, though for whatever reason Adams was only ever commissioned to do some art for the single 45 adventures “Battle of Two Worlds,” “Dawn of the Tree People,” and “Mountain of the Delphi.” Given Adams’ skill at likenesses, it seems strange he wasn’t called on to the art for Book and Record 45s that adapted four of the five POTA films. I guess he had to sleep sometime. Adams also did a cover for the Space: 1999 Book and Record 45 “Return to the Beginning,” the self-titled Six Million Dollar Man LP, and what to had to be one of Power Records’ biggest flops, an LP for The Gemini Man, a TV series that ran for all 12 episodes (half of which never aired) in 1976. Adams’ cover makes everything look ten times more exciting than the show ever was, which was of course why you hired him in the first place! Speaking of Adams making things look exciting that were not—fins down, the, uh, record for that was the Jaws of the Shark LP. Produced in 1975, JOTS featured three dull-asdishwater “adventures” all centered on sharks. Since they don’t use any of the voice cast (or even sound effects) usually heard on Power Records, my bet is this was pre-existing material that Peter Pan bought on the cheap, hoping they could cash in on Jawsmania. At least they sprang for a new cover, one of Adams’ finest. The massive shark is truly terrifying, the only element of this record that comes close to capturing the flavor of the movie. On the opposite end of the quality spectrum, however, was the ungainly titled A Story of Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein, an all-original Book and Record LP with cover and interior art by Adams. A beautifully pulpy story filled with all the classic monster trappings, Story is a complete blast, perfect for putting on the turntable during the Halloween season. I wish Power Records had commissioned more original material like this; they might have been able to carve out an identity for themselves and not be so dependent on outside licensing. Fun Fact: this album was re-released as House of Terror!, reusing the Adams material but with a second LP filled with goofy “spooky” songs.

CHRISTMAS

As I mentioned earlier, Christmas records were a big seller for Peter Pan. Since a lot of the material was in the public domain, the label didn’t have to pay licensing fees, undoubtedly a factor when deciding what to release. Peter Pan generally kept the Power Records imprint wholly separate, except for Christmas time, when they ran back covers featuring Santa Claus letting you kids out there know there were all sorts of fun holiday records out there, like Superman, Wonder Woman, Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph. Even as a wee kid, I never bothered with any of the “kiddie” records, but one look at the labels for some of these 45s makes it clear that Peter Pan tapped Adams and his Continuity crew to handle the art for these, too. Using the humor-tinged style he perfected on DC books like Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, Adams drew covers for Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph, Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, Bugs Bunny in ’Twas a Sight Before Christmas, Snoopy’s Christmas, and even the Chipmunk Song, a knockoff of the more famous version by Alvin and the Chipmunks. Having Adams do all the sleeves gives them sheen of class and visual consistency that makes them a cut above normal kiddie fare. Adams’ signature is nowhere to be found, but the sure handed ink line is a giveaway these were the work of the master himself. As a label, Power Records shut down in the early 1980s, and soon after Peter Pan Records would essentially close up shop. They tried rereleasing some of their ’70s superhero output on cassette, using sloppily drawn “rack” cards that are light years away from the excitement Adams brought to the originals. I still have a record player, and once in a while I give one of my Power Records The Most Wonderful Time of the Year a spin. But, just as impor(top) You’re forgiven if you don’t recall TV’s short-lived Gemini Man, tantly, I sit and stare at the covers when I do. but you won’t forget this powerful Neal Adams cover for its Power

Records spinoff! Courtesy of Rob Kelly. (bottom) Christmas records were popular for Peter Pan Records, with Neal Adams producing cover art for everything from Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman adventures to new spins on children’s favorites. Frosty and Snoopy scans courtesy of Rob Kelly. Gemini Man © Universal. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman TM & © DC Comics.

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ROB KELLY is a podcaster, writer, artist, and pop-culture historian. He is the host/co-host of several shows on The Fire and Water Podcast Network, including TreasuryCast, Pod Dylan, Fade Out, For All Mankind, The Power Records Podcast, and many others.

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.

conducted by M i c h a e l

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.

E u r y on March 3, 2006 K. Morris

transcribed by B r i a n

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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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. TM & © DC Comics.

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.

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EURY: Please do. 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.” mort weisinger So I went in to see Mort and introduced © DC Comics. 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.” The Swan-Adams Team 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.

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. TM & © DC Comics.

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.

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