

Adams was soon drawing fillers for Archie's Joke Book Magazine and was recommended to Howard Nostrand, who needed an assistant on "Bat Masterson", a syndicated newspaper strip based on the TV series.Īdams gained some much needed experience on the strip and turned to advertising, working for Johnstone & Cushing for a year. A sample of The Fly earned him his first professional appearance when a panel from his sample was used in Adventures of The Fly #4 (Jan 1960). Graduating in 1959, and turned down by DC Comics, he submitted samples to Archie Comics where Joe Simon was creating a superhero line. His father deserted the family when Adams was only 13 and, with college financially out of reach, he attended the School of Industrial Art, a vocational school in Manhattan. Neal Edward Adams was born on Governors Island, a 172-acre island a half mile from the southern tip of Manhattan in New York Harbor used by the US Army, on 15 June 1941. Adams was also an outspoken advocate of creators rights and was central to the attempts to help Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster earn pensions from their creation of Superman and in the setting up of the Comics Creators' Guild.Īdams has won the Shazam Award in 19, the Inkpot Award in 1976, Eagle Awards in 19 and has been inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Books Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1999. Neal Adams was one of the innovators in comic strip art to hit American comic books in the late 1960s and 1970s, revitalizing and redefining the looks of the X-Men and Batman.
