Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Tag: DC

Neal Adams — Chonk!

Original Art and The Artists

Deadman in Strange Adventures #210

Art pages from the short-lived (but amazingly wonderful) Deadman series in Strange Adventures are often at odds with more traditional superhero series. Deadman — aka Boston Brand — is given the power to possess any living being in order to track down his killer. Which means Adams (and others) needed to draw many pages of Deadman “inhabiting” the body of an unwitting civilian. Therefore the character is often at the heart of the action sans costume.

This is one of those pages, and it’s a great one. Four dynamic panels —each a slightly different size — of a straight out slugfest. (Deadman is typically identified with a little aura around his civilian host —he’s the short-haired fellow without the moustache, getting his face smashed the first panel. And wow, when Deadman exits, that fellow is going to wake up very confused…)

Neal Adams — Break it up!

Original Art and The Artists

Lois Lane #87

I love looking at comic book covers — I can easily head down the rabbit hole on-line or at a convention scanning through them.  To my mind, no one shook up the comic book cover world more than Neal Adams.

I was a kid when Neal’s realistically dynamic DC covers transformed the line, modernizing and freshening many titles pretty much overnight. 1968 rolled in, and suddenly Lois Lane wore contemporary clothing and had fashionable haircuts, Superboy’s foes looked genuinely menacing, and… Batman and Green Arrow?” The rest as they say, is history.

This is the unpublished cover for Lois Lane 87. Neal told me that any unpublished DC covers are “self-rejected,” meaning that he decided he didn’t like them himself, as opposed to any editorial dictate.  Either way, you can see the switch makes sense. The “rejected” cover has Superman breaking up a scuffle. The published cover, where the characters are flying, rather than on the ground, makes it much clearer that two super-powered women are trying to kill each other. (Although Superman never had to actually break up the fight in the story itself. Lois handled it herself, thank you very much.)

That said, I like the overall appearance of the unpublished cover much better and the  “Fortress of Solitude” interior, with chair and control center, is especially cool.