A new, recurring interview series on DC’s ghostly avenger…
Neal Adams’ latest project is a Deadman miniseries launching Nov. 1 — cleverly coinciding with the Day of the Dead. (Click here for details.)
Deadman, of course, is one of those touchstone DC characters where Adams is concerned. He didn’t create Boston Brand — that was Arnold Drake and Carmine Infantino — but he did define him, producing a series of spooky and surreal stories late in the ’60s that helped build a bridge to the Bronze Age.
Adams used his prodigious creative muscle in Strange Adventures — Deadman’s home title — experimenting with layouts, perspectives and techniques that dazzled readers and inspired the generations of artists that followed.
And now, he’s set to talk about it all in NEAL ADAMS’ DEADMAN TALES, an ongoing interview series that will run here at 13th Dimension between now and through the launch of Deadman #1 (and probably after that as well).
Deadman #1‘s glow-in-the-dark cover effect
The backbone of the series will be Adams’ look at each of his Strange Adventures covers, which crystallized his groundbreaking artistic approach. Each cover not only sold the book, they told a story — and Adams will be telling the stories behind the stories.
The first installment will appear later this week, so keep an eye out. And keep coming back to this post because we’ll be updating it with links throughout the next several months.
In the meantime, check out this video Adams put together about his new series — promising that everything you know about Deadman is dead wrong:
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LINKS
— The Scoop on DEADMAN #1. Click here.
— EXCLUSIVE FIRST LOOK: Neal Adams’ DEADMAN #1 Art. Click here.
— EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW: DEADMAN #1 Finished Pages. Click here.
— ADAMS Recalls a Classic Cover: STRANGE ADVENTURES #207. Click here.
— ADAMS on STRANGE ADVENTURES #208. Click here.
— ADAMS on STRANGE ADVENTURES #209. Click here.
— ADAMS on STRANGE ADVENTURES #210 and #211. Click here.
— ADAMS on STRANGE ADVENTURES #212-#214. Click here.
— ADAMS on STRANGE ADVENTURES #215 and #216. Click here.
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BONUS COVERAGE
This isn’t the first Adams interview series we’ve run. Check out the links below for more comics history in the artist’s own words:
— NEAL ADAMS INTERVIEWS Index: Adams talks about his life with Batman. Click here.
— NEAL ADAMS MONTH Index: Adams and some of comics’ biggest stars analyze dozens of his greatest covers. Click here.
— 13 DAYS OF THE NEAL ADAMS GALLERY Index: Adams walks you through his original art hanging at his Manhattan gallery. Click here.
February 16, 2018
I was pretty excited by Neal’s ideas about this series when I talked to him last summer about it at Boston Comic Con. Unlike a lot of DC’s other classic Silver Age characters, Deadman really hasn’t gotten any significant evolutionary development under the hands of other creators since Neal’s classic run of stories. As such, even after the long passage of decades in the breach, Neal is the one man uniquely suited to advance Deadman’s character development. I’ve been enjoying the new series arc so far, and when it concludes I plan to go back and re-read Adams’ entire Deadman oeuvre. So nice to see all the classic DC mystical characters involved in the story, as well as Batman.
February 16, 2018
I should add that the reason that Neal Adams’ new Deadman series is such a strong one is that it proceeds from a complete re-thinking of the classic series’ original premise, in the same tradition of such well-remembered character deconstructions/revisions like Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing… in other words, “Everything you thought you knew is a lie”, without violating any of Deadman’s previous continuity. In the original run, the central conceit of a random individual who is murdered, only to find that he now continues to exist as an earthbound spirit with the unique ability to take possession of the bodies of the living, is never quite adequately explained. Neal’s rethinking of the idea is much stronger than such vague explanations previously offered like “to track down his own murderer” or “to preserve the balance” (given by Rama Kushna) to Boston Brand. Neal’s answer to the question of Deadman’s unique existence is that events were orchestrated and the people closest to Brand were manipulated in order to CREATE a being with those special abilities… by R’as Al Ghul.