Neal Adams: Relevance + Realism

Artist Neal Adams was highly influential, because of his obvious skill and because his style resonated within a particular moment. Adams’ combination of realistic anatomy & experimental layouts speak to the ambitions of a comic industry & fandom yearning for respect & relevance. 1/13

When Adams rose to prominence in the late 1960s, superhero comics were experiencing a cultural upheaval. A new crop of younger creators–including Adams’ collaborators Roy Thomas & Dennis O’Neil–were transforming the genre in conversation with youth counterculture & in pursuit of older readers. 2/13

In other words, Adams made his splash in superhero comics at a time when the genre was hungry for change and newly eager to be taken seriously beyond the stereotype of safe stories for children. And Adams’ style was an ideal partner to those goals. 3/13

Adams uses realism, in the form of realistic–albeit idealistic–faces and anatomy to ground superhero stories in a real(ish) world. Realism doesn’t guarantee maturity any more than fantasy guarantees immaturity. But this is an enduring assumption, and Adams’ style capitalizes on it. 4/13

Realism also has a broad appeal. Where it sometimes takes a comics connoisseur to appreciate the exaggerations & abstractions of Jack Kirby or Mike Mignola, it’s relatively easy to appreciate realism; anyone can quickly acknowledge the skill that’s required to accurately reproduce reality. 5/13

To underscore Adams’ realism, let’s contrast with Kirby. When Kirby draws faces circa the mid-1960s, he employs enough detail & specificity to communicate emotion & character but his focus is beauty & dynamism rather than realism, employing the McCloudian “amplification through simplification.” 6/13

Adams’ realism did not occur in a vacuum. Circa the late-60s, when Adams started pencilling X-Men, Marvel’s house style had already shifted from the dynamism of Kirby toward the more naturalistic expressionism of John Buscema, Stan Lee’s collaborator on “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.” 7/13

Yet relative to John Buscema, Adams is more interested in using idiosyncratic detail to occasionally challenge generic idealism. While Adams definitely employs simplification and idealism in his depictions of faces and bodies, he sometimes diverges from universalism in favor of specificity. 8/13

But Adams is still drawing superhero comics. As such, his realism is paired with dynamic exaggerations typical of his milieu, like extreme angles and bold, unnatural colours. His art is also narrative, not static; these individual images are not still lifes but rather moments within a story of a fight. 9/13

Adams’ experimental splash pages also manipulate form in service of narrative content. Here, Hal Jordan’s body becomes a series of panels documenting a journey through outer space to a new planetary atmosphere. And the insets imply the journey is both physically outward & emotionally inward. 10/13

These experimental splash pages combine with the sometimes-challenging content of the Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories to evoke the aforementioned maturity. Some of Adams’ splashes aren’t necessarily easy to read and encourage readers to interrogate the relationship between form & content. 11/13

Here, presenting Hal’s search for Speedy as green-hued inset panels within a silhouette of Hal’s profile could mean we’re seeing Hal’s perspective of Speedy and/or Hal’s (maybe welcome, maybe oppressive) light reflected on Speedy and/or Hal or Speedy seeing themselves reflected in each other. 12/13

We can’t precisely calculate the influence of Neal Adams because comics art is collaborative and everyone borrows techniques from diverse sources. But there are moments when “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” appears almost shockingly modern, evoking the triumphs of future generations of artists. 13/13