Here's a very good obit/bio of Neal Adams by Alex Grand and Michael Dean.
If you've been reading all the remembrances of Neal from his colleagues, you probably have a pretty good grasp of how important he was to so many careers and to changing the face of comics in the seventies and eighties. I was most impressed by the fact that he was a freelance talent who would not and could not be treated as a peon. This was not just because he drew so well. There were a lot of guys in comics who drew well but, having grown up in The Depression and not knowing any other way to make a somewhat-secure living than filling pages for DC and Marvel, they allowed The System to treat them as expendable and lucky to have any income at all.
On my first visit to the DC offices in 1970, I sat in on a meeting in which an editor berated one of his longtime freelance artists. I won't name names here but the artist was one of those reliable guys who worked hard on every page and who delivered a consistent product and always on time. Until you're put in the position of editing comics, you might not realize how valuable those guys are. There's a certain "assembly line" mentality that's inevitable in the production process even on the best books. One artist has to get his work in before the next one can do what he has to do…and somewhere down that conveyor belt, there are deadlines that simply must be met. If one person hands in work late…or hands in work that needs to be redone…the other people working on the book can suffer and so can their work.
This longtime freelance artist was always on time and the work was always solid — maybe not spectacular but solid…and probably way better than the company deserved for the page rates it paid. Still, this editor felt the need to be a bit of a tyrant.
He'd had the check for the work already made out and as he looked over the pages the artist was handing in, he dangled that check. He was going to give it to the artist, of course. But he had to play out the fantasy that the work was just barely acceptable and the artist had better do a better job next time. He literally waved the paycheck in front of the artist and said, "I don't know if you earned this…that panel should have had more of a background…I don't know if I can give you this check…"
I saw this little ritual played out. And the fact that the editor didn't mind me seeing this…didn't mind me witnessing him humiliating this longtime contributor a little…that should tell you a lot.
The artist, put soundly in his place, mumbled a bit about how he'd try harder next time. And he left with that check and also with the next script he would take home and draw. When I encountered him in the halls later, I told him what a shame it was that he'd been put through that humbling. He shrugged and said, of the editor, "He always does that. But he always has work for me." As if that made it right.
So, uh, what does this have to do with Neal Adams? Just this: No one at DC or anywhere ever dared to do that to Neal Adams. And they became less likely to do that to any freelancer because Neal was around, reminding freelancers of their value, reminding them that they made the product that the company sold. The folks in management listened to him. A lot of them were afraid of him.
And like I said, it wasn't just because he drew so well. A lot of it was because they all knew that Neal made Big Bucks in advertising and could walk away from comics in a nanosecond if you didn't treat him right. The freelancer who had to grovel a bit to get a check he'd clearly earned didn't have that going for him. He also didn't have Neal's ability to stand up for himself or others and Neal was also really good at telling bosses they didn't know what the hell they were doing.
I also saw an example of this on that first visit to the DC offices…
Alex Toth was one of the most-respected artists in the field and he had just written, penciled and inked (but not lettered) an issue of the Hot Wheels comic book DC was publishing. It was #5 and the night before my pal Steve Sherman and I flew from Los Angeles to New York, I went by Alex's house in Hollywood, picked up the original art and I hand-delivered it to the DC offices back there two days later.
For this story, Alex had done something different. He divided every page into eight panels of the same size and shape, and he put black in the gutters between those panels. Here — take a look at a couple of pages from that story. You can click on the image and make it larger…
As you can see, it was a very "talky" story. Alex, who complained about every single thing in every single job, was always bitching about too much dialogue and too many captions in comics. And then almost every time he wrote his own script, he'd put in three times as much copy as the writers he insisted put in too much.
I delivered his pages, which of course were in black-and-white. Alex had left space for someone in New York to put in the lettering and the story was immediately assigned to John Costanza, who did that lettering. Because Alex had in many panels left too much room for copy, there were blank spaces around many of the word balloons and someone in the office had to go in and extend the art to fill in those gaps. The staffer assigned to do this was a gent named Sal Amendola, who later distinguished himself as a pretty good artist on his own.
And Sal was also assigned to do something else to Alex's pages. The Production Department told him to take the black out between the panels. The reason? "We don't do that here at DC."
The real reason? DC's Production Department liked to "fix" things…to change what the freelancers did. It was not all that different from the way that reliable freelancer had to be demeaned a little so The Boss could prove he was The Boss. It was why they insisted on redrawing the way Jack Kirby drew Superman in Jimmy Olsen. It was why they pasted an old Curt Swan Superman head over the Superman head that Alex drew for a Super Friends special comic he did for them. It was why a lot of arbitrary, gratuitous changes were made. They wanted to be able to say, "We saved it!"
Because I was kind of Alex's rep at that moment, Sal came to me — this is a few days after I'd delivered the pages — and told me what he'd been assigned to do. We both knew what damage this would do to Alex's composition…to his placement of blacks within the panels. But Sal had no power to overrule the Production Department and if he'd refused to do it, someone else would have done it. I asked him, "What are you going to do?"
He said, "Wait for Neal."
This conversation took place around 2 PM. Sal filled in the art around the balloons but didn't touch the black between the panels. Around 4 PM, Neal arrived at DC and, as he often did, took over a little office with a drawing table in it. It was directly across the hall from an office shared by editors Dick Giordano and Julius Schwartz. Sal and I went in with the Toth pages and started to explain to Neal about what the Production Department wanted to do to them.
He got it instantly. He said, "Let me take those" and he carried the pages over to the Production Department and closed the door behind him. Ten minutes later, he came out, handed the pages back to Sal and said, "Leave the gutters the way they are." And the comic was printed, as you can see, with the black gutters, just as Alex wanted. A lot of people in the field thought it was an outstanding art job — which it was — but few knew that it might not have been as good had it not been for Neal Adams. And for that matter, Sal Amendola.
No, I don't know what he said to the men behind that closed door. I would imagine he talked about the integrity of Toth's composition, and because he was that guy who had his own syndicated strip at age 21 and was raking in all that dough in advertising work, they listened to him. Neal had this way of making you feel like he knew more than you even when he didn't. The contrast between the way they treated him and the way that longtime freelancer had been treated was startling. Neal had a lot to do with the entire industry putting more value on the freelancers and treating them with more respect.
Everyone writing these days about Neal has their favorite work. I liked his Batman way more than any other existing character on which he worked. I thought the best inker for his work was, far and away, Neal Adams. I loved certain covers he did and certain illustrations…and not always the ones that other people thought were his best.
But I think his greatest contribution was the way in which he helped the comic book industry grow up. I'm not certain it would even exist today if it hadn't.