RIP Neal Adams

Neal Adams needs no introduction, and many people will write elsewhere lots of good things about him and what he did for the industry over the years. So instead, I'm just going to recap his Legion work.

In the late 1960s, Adams drew a lot of covers for DC, including Adventure Comics, for which he pencilled and/or inked 13 covers towards the end of the Legion's run.

His first cover was #365, introducing Shadow Lass. It’s not that the previous covers by Curt Swan were not good, it’s just that Adams’ covers were that much better. He then did #366 (Validus blasting Superboy in a boxing ring, a precursor to his later Superman vs Muhammad Ali tabloid), #367 (surrounded by shadowy members of the Dark Circle), #368 (the mutiny of the super-heroines), #369 (intro Mordru), #371 (Superboy leaves the Legion), #372 (Superboy is smashed as a glass statue), #373 (the Tornado Twins), #375 (Bouncing Boy is the most powerful Legionnaire), #376 (the execution of Chameleon Boy; inks over Swan pencils), #377 (the Legionnaires are for hire; inks over Swan pencils), #378 (the Legionnaires are dying; inks over Swan pencils), and #379 (the dead Superboy is ejected into space; inks over Infantino pencils).

Jim Shooter recalled working with Adams in this 2008 interview:

JS:  By the way, it was great working with Neal, although I only worked with him on covers.  In the old days with Mort, with every story Mort required a cover sketch or a detailed cover idea if the writer in question could not sketch.  As a matter of fact, he required two cover sketches for each story.  What he would do is he would take the better one and make it the cover and make the other one the splash page because he used to do the symbolic splashes, rather than splash panels that started the story.  He’d call it the second cover.  So, I did two cover sketches. 

When I did the interior stuff I just did it in pencil, but with the cover sketch, I colored it, because they taught me how to color, so I did a whole color comp of this cover.  I put the logo and everything.  And usually they’d pick one of my designs and follow it.  I can’t think of an instance where they didn’t pick one of them.  What was really, really cool was the first time the book comes out and I see the cover and it was Neal Adams.  It was like, “Whoa!”  It was amazing.  Because more than any other guy, Neal would look at my crude little drawing and he would know what I meant.  And he would say, “All right.  I’ve got it.”  And then he would do this brilliant thing that was like he was reading my mind.  (Chuckle.)  And I would look at it and say, “Yeah, I meant that.”  (Mutual laughter.)  “That’s what I meant.  Yeah, good work, man.”

Stroud:  Just knocked it out of the park.

JS:  Oh, unbelievable.  Doing those covers with him…I just couldn’t wait to see what he did.

Stroud:  Sure.  You and the rest of the world.  He’s a formidable talent. 

Adams also did a wraparound cover for Batman #238, which inexplicably contained a Legion reprint story (from Adventure 324, the Legion of Super-Outlaws aka the Heroes of Lallor) and featured on the cover all of the characters inside the book.

Adams pencilled a famous group shot of the Legion for the 1976 DC Calendar, inked by the late great Dick Giordano, and this was later reused (with some cropping and rearranging of characters) as the cover to the 1978 Tempo paperback book with Legion reprints.

Finally, a few decades later, Adams provided what would turn out to be his final Legion cover, a variant for issue #44 of Jim Shooter's Threeboot run (LSH v5) cover-dated Sept. 2008. In the above interview, Shooter continued:

JS:  He’s doing a cover for the new series, by the way. 

Stroud:  Oh, is he?  I hadn’t heard that.

JS:  Yeah for issue #44.  Yeah, he asked to do it.  He actually sent an e-mail to Levitz and Didio saying, “Hey, good move hiring Shooter and I want to do a cover.”  And they asked me, “Would that be okay with you?”  I said, “Oh, sure, let’s give the kid a break.” 

Stroud: (Laughter.)  Yeah, I guess we could do that.

JS: “We could see our way clear.”  So anyway, he insisted I give him a sketch, and so I did, and now I’m sitting here and can’t wait to see it.  I can’t wait to see it.  It’s going to be cool.  I’m not going to get many covers from him, he’s a busy guy, but it’s a very, very cool that he wanted to do one. 

Stroud:  Absolutely.  I can feel the chills down your spine from here. 

JS:  It’s going to be good.