Legendary Comic-Book Artist – Neal Adams – Passes Away At 80

It is with a sense of great sadness that I relay the news that the legendary Neal Adams passed away on Thursday April 28 from complications with sepsis. Neal was one of the most highly regarded artists in the comic-book medium, and was a standard bearer to his peers always pushing for creator rights and fair pay.

Neal’s first dalliance in the comic book world was in 1967 with DC Comics, where at the time he mostly drew War comics. In 1968 he was tasked with redesigning the Batman, after over a decade of camp silliness, DC decided they wanted to bring back the dark, brooding detective version of the character more in line to his original 30’s and 40’s variant. Neal’s artistic style was the perfect choice for this assignment, his hyper realistic artwork fit the characters of Batman canon beautifully. Alongside the late, great Denny O’Neil, Neal gave us some of the greatest Batman, Green Lantern and Green Arrow stories ever told, with Neal’s stunning art always in perfect synergy with Denny’s scripting, they were literally the original Dynamic Duo of comics, and the comic book world is a much, much poorer place without them.

It was Neal and Denny who first introduced me, not only to the Caped Crusader, but the wonderful world of comics themselves, as a wide eyed six year old. My many thanks to them both for my enduring love of comic-books and especially The Batman. Our thoughts go out to Neal’s friends and family at this very sad time.