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
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.
To me, it's the outstanding people, people like Jack Kirby that really make a difference, that are very, very important.
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.
I have always felt that effect covers are very good covers. They bring you into the story if you pay attention to them.
I believe in advancing the story with the cover so that the audience gets taken in immediately with that cover.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of all the mutants on Earth, Professor X could easily pass as a human.
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.
The fights that I had with DC and Marvel, I won. And guess what? They profited by it.
People are different from one another. That's what makes the world good. That's what makes the world great.
Most of what we know or assume to know is wrong one way or another.
'Avengers' was a great comic-book movie. 'The Dark Knight Rises' is a great epic.
People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.
Some people don't realize that I did most of the 'Deadmans.' People don't know that I wrote two 'Spectres.'
Everybody's 'odyssey' is a little bit different. Batman's is his own and unique to him.
I don't get involved in criticizing or extolling really good artists who do their job. That's for other people.
I used to work on a carousel on a boardwalk in Coney Island.
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.
My view is that comic books are meant to be long-form stories. They're meant to be novels.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
Times have changed. And as the audience changes, so do the superheroes.
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.
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.
Not too many people draw black people as well as I do.
You don't get dead and there not be consequences.
'The Dark Knight Rises,' it turns out, is a classic Batman epic.
I like Captain America because I liked Captain America when I was younger.
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.
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.
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.
I know Coney Island more than I know Queens and Brooklyn! And I understand everything about it - Coney Island is my home.
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.
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.
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.
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 has a good time all the time. It's really nice to be Neal Adams.
I'm not someone who complains in any way about how things move forward, unless somebody actually does a really crappy job.
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.
Every business makes big mistakes along the way.
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.
Nobody has ever disproved Sam Carey's work.
'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.
Nobody is looking for work who doesn't need work. That's why we look for work.
