To read Part One click HERE. To read Part Two click HERE. To read Part Three click HERE. To read Part Four click HERE To read Part Five click HERE.  OFFENBERGER: With things taking off at DC, why did you leave for Marvel?ADAMS: I didn’t, as far as I know. I don’t think I ever left DC. I worked for DC and Marvel at the same time. There were lots of things in comics that were disheartening and they represented a certain kind of oppression. I have some difficulty with that. The idea that an artist works exclusively for a company and yet he is still a freelancer sort of bothered me. I understand if you are going to pay him a salary and take care of his medical insurance and all these other things you do for an employee. But, if he’s a freelancer, he’s a freelancer and he can work for anyone he wants. [Unfortunately] the companies had managed to crush the proverbial nuts of artists to such an extent that if they did, in fact, go from one company to another they would actually have to change their names - not legally, but they’d sign different names. So, suddenly the name “Adam Austin” would appear and [the art] would look just like Gene Colan’s. You started seeing these weird names show up. That was the tradition, the not-so-brave tradition. So I thought we ought to cut that out. I went to Marvel and spoke to Stan Lee and I said, “I would love to do a book for you.” He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Well, what is your worst selling title?” He said, “X-Men. We are going to cancel it in two issues.” I said, “Okay, I’d like to do that.” “He said, “It’s only going to be for two issues.” I said, “That will be fine.” He said, “I’ll make a deal with you; you do X-Men for two issues, we cancel it and you do an important book, like Avengers.”  Well, the title went on for 11 issues and those turned out to be significant and important issues. They sort of set the tone for the rest of [the series]. Whatever reasons they had for canceling it turned out to be wrong reasons because the sales did go up. Not a whole lot, but every artist who came by said they wanted to do X-Men because of those 10 issues. So, it was a pretty revolutionary thing at Marvel. Those issues have been reprinted and reprinted.OFFENBERGER: Most of your work has been reprinted. I remember back in the 70s they reprinted the Green Lantern stories in black and white paperbacks and sold in bookstores. ADAMS: Funny thing about that. [When I started working for Marvel] Stan said, “What name do you want to be credited?” I said, “How about Neal Adams?” Stan said, “You know, a lot of people who go from one company to another use an alias.” I said, “Well, I don’t think we’re going to be doing that.” He said, “Well that’s fine.” Then I caught a look in Stan’s eye and he said, “Well, you know Neal, if someone is working for Marvel we don’t really like it if they are also working for DC Comics.” Testing the waters, I said, “Okay, Stan. I’ll see you then.” I started to walk out and he said, “NO, no no, I am not saying that. If you want to work for both companies that’s fine with me.” I asked, “So it’s fine?” He said, “No problem. It’s fine.”  So then he said, "How do you want to be known? I am thinking Nefarious Neal.” I said, “That’s ridiculous.” He did it that way a couple of times and then that went away. That conversation broke the back of [the name change] habit. From that point on no one had to change their name. It’s funny how easy it is. Sometimes you march in the streets, carrying signs, sometimes you just do something at the right time, at the right moment, and everyone goes, “Oh it’s that easy? Yeah, that’s exactly how easy it is! If Neal can do it, why can’t we do it?”OFFENBERGER: In the 70s DC used to keep the original art and even give it away to people who visited their offices. How did you get them to return original art to the artists? ADAMS: They would destroy it. OFFENBERGER: How did you convince them to give back your art? ADAMS: Threatened them with physical violence. No, I didn’t. I didn’t know what was happening. I should have known from school. Sol Harrison visited my High School and he gave away a lot of art. I guess I thought he had permission from the artists to do that. I got a bunch of pages that I later returned when I became a professional. But I managed to get the best. I got two Joe Kubert’s. I got a Carmine Infantino. I got a Gil Kane. I got the best stuff. Anyway, I was up at DC one day and there was a guy working at the cutting board, cutting stuff up, and I caught it out of the corner of my eye. I got up because it looked like he was cutting up original page-size art. Sure enough he was. I watched for a short moment - it seemed like an eternity - as he was cutting it in three parts. He probably only cut one set, but it seemed like he was cutting so much in front of me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. Finally, I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I am low man on the totem poll. I get to do the crap jobs around here. I’m cutting the pages up.” I said, “That’s original art.” He said, “Yeah, every three months we have to clear the drawers.” I said, “Stop, don’t do that.” He said, “What are you talking about?”  So I leaned in close and said, “DON’T CUT ONE MORE PAGE!” And I rose up and I got a little big in front of him “I am going to talk to some people. When I come back, I don’t want to see that another page has been cut.” Again he asked, “What are you talking about?” I said, “I am telling you, don’t cut another page. I am not saying I am going to hit you, I am saying don’t cut another page.” He stepped back and said, “Alright” and moved away. I went over to Carmine. Carmine was sitting at his desk and I said, “In the production room they are cutting up original art.” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I don’t know if I am explaining this correctly. They are destroying the original art of an artist who works for DC Comics. They are cutting it up and throwing it in the garbage. They shouldn’t be doing that.” He said, “No, you’re right.” I said, “If that person cuts another page, I am going to be walking out of here and I will never do another page.” Anyway, by the end of that day they had stopped cutting up pages. Seven years later they started to return those pages to the artists. OFFENBERGER: That’s a long time.  ADAMS: It took a while. They did a little experimenting in the meantime. Experimented to see if the pages were valuable, if they could sell them. They took one of my covers to an auction in Chicago and offered it for sale with the stipulation that they didn’t have to sell it but they wanted to get a price on it. The price they got was $200.00 and their little greedy minds went, “We bought this for $60.00. We can sell it for $200.00. We don’t even need to print comic books!” Then they discovered that all the art wasn’t worth that much. “Are we in the art business or in the comic book business? What are we going to do now? Now that we discovered the art is worth money, we have a bigger problem. This bastard Adams has now caused us to think!” They didn’t like that, damn it. “Now we actually have to do something. We have to make a decision.” So in the end there was only one decision to make and that was to return the artwork to the artists.OFFENBERGER: It was nice that they ultimately made that decision. ADAMS: Nice. Yeah, it was nice. OFFENBERGER: It probably wasn’t easy. ADAMS: It wasn’t easy, poor babies. There were some other incentives for them to do that. For example, there was a private conversation in which was said, “It probably wouldn’t be very good for DC Comics if someone called the state of New York and said DC Comics thinks that they own all these pages of original art, some of which they have destroyed, some of which they have kept, as if it were property; and of course they would have had to pay sales tax on it.” img src="images/adams/avengers93.jpg" width="200" height="300" border="1" vspace="4" hspace="4" align="right">So, they would have had to pay sales tax on 50 years worth of original art. That would have been a little expensive. It was better for them to agree that the artwork belonged to the artist, that they never bought it as a piece of property and that the copyright law really didn’t say they owned it. [Better that] it said they are supposed to return it. If somebody had made a phone call, things would have gotten heavy. So, it was all very nice. OFFENBERGER: Very nice. Did you ever have any interest in joining the editorial staffs at either DC or Marvel? ADAMS: No. No, what would I do? OFFENBERGER: You are running your own company in that capacity. ADAMS: I own my own company. I’m not a publisher or editor or an employee. I can’t be fired unless I don’t like me. I never intended to publish myself. I published because Pacific Comics went out of business and I was left holding the bag. There were $60,000 worth of bills that they owed me. I had purchased materials from overseas and from different people for Futurepast, our magazine, and Pacific had gone out of business. So I decided to become a publisher. For that and other reasons. OFFENBERGER: What brought you to Pacific Comics in the first place?  ADAMS: What brought me to Pacific Comics was certain creators - Sergio Aragones and Jack Kirby. I had made a big fuss. I said, “You don’t have to work for Marvel or DC Comics. You can work for an independent publisher if you want to, because chances are they can pay you just as well as DC or Marvel Comics.” They thought, “That can’t be.” I would talk to people who wanted to be publishers and they would actually pay fans to do fan art. I would sit down and talk with them and I would say, “You guys are paying [fans] exactly what [Marvel and DC] are paying, or maybe even more than they are paying Jack Kirby and Gil Kane, to do pages. So why don’t you go to them? Pay them reasonably and let them own their own property. Let them own it and they will work for you.” Then Jack would call me and say, “What’s going on here? I’ve got these publishers calling me and they are offering the same damn kind of money DC is, and I can keep my rights and they’ll pay royalties.” Same thing with Sergio Aragones. He came to me and said, “Look, can I do this? Is there a problem?” He had a thing called Groo the Barbarian. I said, “Sergio, if you want to do it and they are willing to pay you, and they are going to give you royalties, you’ll probably make more money from whoever that is (it turned out to be Pacific Comics) than you would make from DC or Marvel with the same deal. You’ll own Groo the Barbarian. You’ll own it forever.” So he said, “Cool” and he went ahead and did it. After that, with a Jack Kirby book and a Sergio Aragones book, the Pacific Comic guys came to me and said, “How about you?” So, I kind of got behind it as an indication that yes, this was a good idea. For everyone else who wants to know, yes, this is a good idea. Go ahead and do this.  OFFENBERGER: In the mid 70s while working at DC you pitched a Ms. Mystic comic to them, how was this different form the Ms. Mystic published by Pacific Comics?ADAMS: No, I never pitched it to anybody. They heard about it. I never pitched it. OFFENBERGER: In 1979 you published the New Heroes Portfolio, which was the introduction of the Continuity Comics’ universe. Was there a plan to put all these characters together. ADAMS: No, it was just a thing called New Heroes Portfolio. I created these characters and did them. What happened was that Sal Quartuccio said, “If you were going to create new characters, what would they be?” I said “I don’t know.” He said “How about creating a portfolio of new characters? You can get them out there; you can protect your copyright.” So, once a month I did a new character and they did a portfolio. There were these characters that I sort of created off the top of my head and did them in the New Heroes Portfolio, never with the thought in mind of necessarily taking them any further. Things evolve, the process moves forward and the things that you did suddenly becomes something else. OFFENBERGER: Eventually as a publisher, they all ended up with lives of their own.  ADAMS: I tend to create things with lives of their own. I don’t start off saying this is simply this. I create what it’s all about. Even when I did those portfolio pieces, I wrote [little histories], where they came form, what [they’re] all about. I can’t just draw a picture. It has to have a history. So essentially that’s what happened. It is one of those things I do and I don’t necessarily do it all the time. I have a series of characters I am creating for a fast food place right now. One of the reasons they came to me is they know something of this history of creating stuff. It’s something I do very, very well, because it is no different than creating a piece of machinery. You put all the parts together and all of a sudden you have a new piece of machinery. My characters tend to be more solid than other people’s characters, tend to have more history, tend to have a life before and are headed toward a goal. So you tend to remember them. If I say Crazy Man, you sort of have a good idea of what Crazy Man is about. If I said, give me a rundown of Jim Lee’s characters - this is not a criticism of Jim Lee - it’s a little hard to put your finger on them. They seem to have these abilities [but] it’s hard to know where they came from, what their histories are, things like that. That is not what I do. When I created Man Bat or I created Havok, or Sauron, I was creating comic book characters that have a history.  OFFENBERGER: Then they developed a life of their own afterwards. They are the lasting characters.ADAMS: Bravo. OFFENBERGER: Continuity Comics published on a very slow schedule. It was by no means monthly. What were the factors behind this? ADAMS: From Continuity’s point of view, it was not a moneymaker. We did the comic books when we could. We weren’t really publishers. We got into it walking backwards, and we turned out our comic books when we could get them done. I tried to work with new people as much as I could. I suppose one of the things I did was create new artists for everyone else to use. OFFENBERGER: Most of those people ended up working at either DC or Marvel. ADAMS: Yes, we sort of published the comic books for fun, because we liked it. As I said they never really made money. It wasn’t until we did Deathwatch 2000 that we really got serious about it. We got books out on a real schedule and we kicked a little ass. Deathwatch 2000 was pretty successful for us. OFFENBERGER: In addition to outstanding art, Continuity Comics pioneered every enhancement used in comics today. You had alternate newsstand covers, foil enhanced covers, poster covers, trading cards, company wide crossovers… ADAMS: And indestructible covers. “You can’t tear this cover” made from the same stuff FedEx envelopes are made from. OFFENBERGER: Image Comics came along and gave DC and Marvel a clear challenge. That was never the plan with Continuity? ADAMS: The shock to me was the success of Image. The shock to me was also our success, when we did Deathwatch 2000. Continuity and I seem to have this habit, we seem to be the groundbreakers and everybody else comes in. The person or the company that breaks the door down is usually not as successful [as those that follow]. When we did Echoes of Future Past it was a $2.95 comic book. When people saw this they said it was too expensive. But it turned out to be a great package. The number of pages and the cover price now are a standard. That kind of a comic and that kind of a cover price are a given now. People love it. When we first did it, people said, “Whoa, that’s too expensive! You can’t do that. You can’t charge that for a comic book.” The idea of doing a $2.00 comic book…  OFFENBERGER: I remember the reaction of the clerk at 7-11, when I bought Revengers for $2.00, he was shocked at the price.ADAMS: Exactly. To be an independent publisher but still be in the mainstream was very, very difficult. It was the kind of thing you wouldn’t do. But what happened was Image came in afterwards and basically took our model and used it for very, very successful publishing. So, if I look back at it, I don’t think I could have done it a different way, because I don’t think I could have blasted out there and been immediately successful. I had to sort of make the tramping grounds, then everyone else could come along and do it. I was right, big deal, now why don’t we do Deathwatch 2000 and really kick out with a series that is a moneymaker and is successful on a commercial basis? And it was, we sold 10 times as many comics, 10 times per title than any other comic we did before that. OFFENBERGER: That’s tremendous, that’s a huge jump in volume. ADAMS: We were selling like 15,000 copies, we went to 150,000 copies. OFFENBERGER: Those are huge numbers. ADAMS: Yeah. OFFENBERGER: But the whole line came to an end in January 1994. Why was the entire line canceled?  ADAMS: Not because of me. Because of Image. There was this increasing flood of comic books. There was this intention on the part of collectors to collect these comic books and buy them in boxes of 100 and store them away in their warehouses. We got million selling comic books; we even got two million selling comic books. It was totally insane. Then the collectors finally realized, “What the hell are we doing? Everybody is doing it. We are doing exactly the same as they are. We will never sell these comic books.” It almost seemed like in one month, or in a short period of time, it shocked people. The collectors left.OFFENBERGER: Implosion. ADAMS: That’s right. And we were in the backwash of it. We never had our retail prices lowered, but I saw Image Comics selling for 50 cents apiece and they were stacked in the front of the stores. Well, the stores paid more then 50 cents for these comic books, so every one they sold lost money. It was totally, totally nuts. OFFENBERGER: After all the Continuity Comics came to an end, how did the deal with Acclaim Comics come about? ADAMS: Well, what happened is I decided to close down. Everybody's comic books were being cut. Comic book stores took any opportunity to cut their orders and the new orders were terrible. I ran into a couple of situations that were really rough. The new orders were terrible because essentially what the stores were doing was losing money on a daily basis. They were cutting their orders even to DC, Marvel and Image to the least number of books they could order and still stay in business. Naturally, [being] a second-tier comic book company, our orders were cut immediately. If you’re on a roll and you fall into that situation you cannot survive. It’s not like we have Warner Communications supporting us. Marvel, during this time, went into debt. Some people say $800 million some people say $400 million. Continuity couldn’t possibly survive. That would be totally insane. It was like we had been thrown into a bowl of disaster. What were we to do? The smartest thing I could do is say we are cutting our losses here and we are not moving on. I am in a position to do that, because everything happens through me. So I can say, “I am not going to loose any more money. I am not going to stay in business for the sake of honor. An insane thing is going on. I am not going to do it for the sake of showing a good face. I don’t want to go bankrupt.” There were other companies at that time that went bankrupt. I can’t think of them off the top of my head. I don’t dwell on it. Normally, it’s a very, very bad business, comic books. You can tell by CrossGen. CrossGen got some of the best artists, some of the best creators in the business. OFFENBERGER: And had a lot of money. ADAMS: And had a lot of money. As far as I know, I don’t think they ever had a month where they had a profit. Well, if you’ve got a lot of money you can do that. Continuity didn’t have a lot of money. We were paying bills just like everybody else and we couldn’t afford to take those chances. We weren’t going to go belly up for the sake of the comic books. It would take everything else we do down with it. So I decided, this may not be the favorite thing for the fans to have us do, but the best thing I can do for the company and to save us, was to get out of business for a while and see what happens. So I backed off. We call it a hiatus. That’s what we did. We have been on hiatus for quite a while. On the other hand, we are making money on our other things.  OFFENBERGER: Acclaim published your comics for about three months, how did this come about?ADAMS: It was one of those things. I guess they wanted to show a good front to sell the company, so they published a bunch of our comic books. I never thought it was going to work. They just wanted a bunch of comic books to sell for a period of time. They sold them okay; they did okay. But really not enough to continue. The company was going to go. That whole thing was an inflated bubble. The problem with being an independent publisher is that even your friends will point to you and say, “How come you aren’t as successful as these guys? How come you are not doing this? How come they are getting past you?” You have to sit back and say, “Well, maybe they are just smarter than me. Maybe they know more then I do. They have more money behind them.” In the end, you look back and see who survived and who didn’t. Continuity is still here. We have comic books in the drawer which we will eventually publish and we are doing fine. I am sitting in a conference room with nice marble and glass on my wall here and I edit the advertising of commercials. We just finished a computer-animated commercial that is on the air. When you are watching television at night there is a commercial that has been on for the last couple of weeks. That has to do with Nasonex. It has this little bee that is in your face. That’s ours. That’s Continuity’s first on-air-commercial. I made more money from that than I did from any month of good selling comic books. OFFENBERGER: Do you get royalties for that? ADAMS: No, but the money you get upfront is very good. Very good. Neal is walking around with a smile on his face. They pay well. And I am getting to direct some live action stuff. That makes me very happy. End of Part Three. Look for Part Four tomorrow. To read Part One click HERE. To read Part Two click HERE. To read Part Three click HERE. To read Part Four click HERE To read Part Five click HERE. |
