“Nothing is gained by not being kind and courteous.”
― Neal Adams
“Nobody is looking for work who doesn’t need work. That’s why we look for work.”
― Neal Adams
“There’s a bad thing that we have in America, and that is a slow, sticky way that we get out of prejudice. We get out of it very, very slowly. It’s like walking through tar. But we’re getting out; things are changing.”
― Neal Adams
“Sometimes you’re forced to do the cover before the story is done.”
― Neal Adams
“The thing about covers that’s relatively important to remember is that it doesn’t matter how good an artist you are: if you don’t have good ideas, the covers don’t stand out.”
― Neal Adams
“I’m a fan of Superman as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Remember that Jerry and Joe created a character that was the biggest superhero of all.”
― Neal Adams
“I think that we want to believe in Superman.”
― Neal Adams
“I live in New York and California, and I get to travel.”
― Neal Adams
“For me, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s character was Superman.”
― Neal Adams
“When I was asked by Pacific Comics for an original creator-owned series, my first choice of those several characters was Ms. Mystic. Since I always try to advance the work of other younger creators, I asked the young Mike Nasser if he’d like to join me in this project. He said yes. Mike created nothing!”
― Neal Adams
“People lie when they get upset.”
― Neal Adams
“Back in the olden days when we were rubbing sticks together, everybody wanted to have a comic strip, to live in Westport Connecticut, to have a Jaguar and to have a wife and two and a half kids and to have a girl in town in their studio in Manhattan that they’d romance, and then they’d have people ghost their strip. It was like this big dream.”
― Neal Adams
“It used to be that comic strips were the big thing, and comic books were toilet paper.”
― Neal Adams
“When I did get into comic books, it was after a whole other career, and when I got into comic books, they didn’t even know who I was.”
― Neal Adams
“The thing about advertising is that you make more money. You can put kids through college so they don’t come out with loans. My kids don’t, and my grandkids don’t, and advertising paid for that.”
― Neal Adams
“I love Captain Marvel. I’d love to see a Captain Marvel movie.”
― Neal Adams
“I like Captain America because I liked Captain America when I was younger.”
― Neal Adams
“People tend not to want to question dogma. But I’m afraid of dogma.”
― Neal Adams
“’The Dark Knight Rises,’ it turns out, is a classic Batman epic.”
― Neal Adams
“’Avengers’ was a great comic-book movie. ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is a great epic.”
― Neal Adams
“’The Dark Knight Rises’ does not beat ‘The Avengers. ‘ The reason? It is a totally different kind of movie – to compare them is an empty exercise.”
― Neal Adams
“You don’t get dead and there not be consequences.”
― Neal Adams
“Most of what we know or assume to know is wrong one way or another.”
― Neal Adams
“Nobody has ever disproved Sam Carey’s work.”
― Neal Adams
“Not too many people draw black people as well as I do.”
― Neal Adams
“People are different from one another. That’s what makes the world good. That’s what makes the world great.”
― Neal Adams
“As far as I know, no kid ever bought a children’s book himself with his own money, but they’ll buy comic books. So we better make them good.”
― Neal Adams
“What populates a comic-book convention? Well there’s actors, and there’s dealers, and there’s comic-book artists and writers, and there’s cosplay people, toy sales people, people who are selling trading cards, and people selling swords. It’s not a flea market.”
― Neal Adams
“The fights that I had with DC and Marvel, I won. And guess what? They profited by it.”
― Neal Adams
“Every business makes big mistakes along the way.”
― Neal Adams
“It may be that a majority of superheroes are white males. But that’s because they used to all be white males, except for Wonder Woman and Black Canary and maybe one or two others. Now there are Spanish, Puerto Rican comic book superheroes, black superheroes, and women superheroes.”
― Neal Adams
“I created the first black superhero who was not a gangbanger or an African chief but was rather a college graduate and a professional, which I think is a big accomplishment.”
― Neal Adams
“Times have changed. And as the audience changes, so do the superheroes.”
― Neal Adams
“Of all the mutants on Earth, Professor X could easily pass as a human.”
― Neal Adams
“I’m not someone who complains in any way about how things move forward, unless somebody actually does a really crappy job.”
― Neal Adams
“Motion comics are a medium all their own. It is certainly not animation, in which a large number of artists do tens and even hundreds of thousands of drawings. The animation, or ‘the reality,’ is created in a computer, and the work of the original artist is the work. Nor is it a comic book. You can’t turn the pages. You can’t read the dialogue.”
― Neal Adams
“The first work I ever did in comics was for Archie Comics, and I didn’t do that very long because I did other stuff.”
― Neal Adams
“Neal has a good time all the time. It’s really nice to be Neal Adams.”
― Neal Adams
“I changed the layout of comic books in general. When I came in, layout design wasn’t really part of what you did. It was all just panels, panels, panels. So when I came in, I thought, ‘Nah, let’s change that,’ and I designed the page.”
― Neal Adams
“I did work more realistically: I used real anatomy, faces with expressions – not Dick Tracy with his one slip of the mouth and that’s it, but actual expressions on the faces that made the characters look like they were saying what was in the balloons.”
― Neal Adams
“Believe me, when I do a story – if you read ‘Batman: Odyssey,’ I never do something without there being a reason. There’s always a reason, and you will find out in the story. I’m looking to entertain you.”
― Neal Adams
“As it turned out, if you look at the history, everything in superhero comic books pretty much lies between Superman and Batman: Superman being the greatest superhero there is, and Batman being the one of the few superheroes who has no superpowers and is, in fact, not a superhero.”
― Neal Adams
“I really kind of always wondered, if I did Superman, what I would do, and what I would be able to do, because it’s a little harder for me, being kind of a realistic guy, to imagine doing a character who almost has no limits to his powers.”
― Neal Adams
“I want a Superman that men will look up to – that somehow he manages to go out and work out and add muscles to his body that he wasn’t born with necessarily, but that developed – as a person who takes care of himself and takes care of his health.”
― Neal Adams
“What’s happened is that every time I go to a convention or go into a comic book shop is that people drag me off into a corner and beat me up and go, ‘When are you going to do Batman again?’”
― Neal Adams
“I did the X-Men, and I plotted the stories, and Roy Thomas dialogued them. And that first set of comic books that I did are the plot that the first X-Men movie was taken from, where Magneto invents a machine that turns regular humans into mutants. That’s my idea.”
― Neal Adams
“I think of myself as a storytelling, and one of the reasons why people have held my stuff close to them is because it’s one thing to draw pretty pictures, and it’s another thing to create a story. That’s what I’ve always done, whether it be for advertising clients or commercial clients or comic books. My hand is in there, and I am the storyteller.”
― Neal Adams
“My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They’re meant to be novels.”
― Neal Adams
“I believe in advancing the story with the cover so that the audience gets taken in immediately with that cover.”
― Neal Adams
“One of the reasons that DC, Marvel, and other comic book companies have always asked me to do covers and variant covers is because they know that when they tell me ‘icon,’ I jump over their words, and I give them an iconic cover – but while I’m doing it, there is going to be an idea there.”
― Neal Adams
“The great opportunity with Deadman was that you had a character that nobody had really done anything with – Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino created the character, which is terrific, but Carmine only did one issue with him – and it gave me a chance to do things that I hadn’t seen done in comics all of my life.”
― Neal Adams
“I have always felt that effect covers are very good covers. They bring you into the story if you pay attention to them.”
― Neal Adams
“I know Coney Island more than I know Queens and Brooklyn! And I understand everything about it – Coney Island is my home.”
― Neal Adams
“I used to work on a carousel on a boardwalk in Coney Island.”
― Neal Adams
“The ‘Superman vs. Muhammad Ali’ book was printed in every free country in the world, OK? Now, it’s so good in its way that we can go in and make fun of it and feel good about it.”
― Neal Adams
“You could say everybody’s a fan of Jack Kirby. I would say I’m a fan of Jack Kirby. I’m a fan of Jack Kirby the man.”
― Neal Adams
“I don’t get involved in criticizing or extolling really good artists who do their job. That’s for other people.”
― Neal Adams
“To me, it’s the outstanding people, people like Jack Kirby that really make a difference, that are very, very important.”
― Neal Adams
“I think that Curt Swan, when he did Superman for the longest time, became the definitive Superman artist, and everybody got it. That made him very, very special in the annals of comic books.”
― Neal Adams
“Everybody’s ‘odyssey’ is a little bit different. Batman’s is his own and unique to him.”
― Neal Adams
“One of the things people think about me is that I don’t do deadlines. But if you look at all the books I’ve ever done, they’re all sequential every month. There might have been glitches along the way. But almost all of my books appeared sequentially.”
― Neal Adams
“I think, sometimes, if you get too much attention, then everybody watches you more closely, and they make these broad generalizations about you that aren’t really true.”
― Neal Adams
“Some people don’t realize that I did most of the ‘Deadmans.’ People don’t know that I wrote two ‘Spectres.’”
― Neal Adams
“What’s interesting about ‘The Brave and Bold #85’ is it’s a book in which I re-created, or created, Green Arrow.”
― Neal Adams
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