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I never met Neal Adams. But I’m looking at his signature, scrawled across the front page of Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men volume 6 with an exhausted black Sharpie, one of countless books he signed at a New England comic book convention in the 2010s. It’s simple enough:
FOR KAYLEIGH
Neal Adams
Neal Adams died on April 28, 2022, at 80; the comic industry immediately mourned a legendary artist, a fierce proponent for creators’ rights, and (I can’t forget) an ardent believer in the expanding Earth theory. In a six-decade career that spanned the Silver Age of comics to the Modern Age, he was all those things and more – one could call him, to steal the name of one of the towering supervillains that passed through his X-Men run, a living monolith.
“Realism” is a word that pops up frequently when we talk about what Neal Adams brought to his comic book art (it shows up eight times in his Comics Journal obituary). But did his Batman or Green Lantern ever look realistic? Examining his tight nine-issue tenure penciling X-Men #56-63 and #65 between 1969 and 1970, we see the all-but final gasp of the series before the “All-New, All-Different” X-Men resurrected the title in the swinging seventies.
Read more about how Neal Adams worked to breathe life into the X-Men in this Patreon exclusive essay.
