Posted By Dan Greenfield on Jul 12, 2026 | 1 comment

An EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT from Back Issue Annual #1…

The first-ever Back Issue Annual is out Wednesday, July 15, and it’s billed as “The Best of the Neal Adams Issues!” And that’s exactly what it is — a Neal Adams smorgasbord covering a huge swath of his career, all in one place.

Publisher John Morrow — who founded The Jack Kirby Collector — has a new column in the issue that explains why there was never a Neal Adams Collector.

This EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT from the mag presents the column in its entirety. (And you can find a piece by BI Editor Emeritus Michael Eury over here. Plus, click here for a SNEAK PEEK at the ish.) — Dan

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By JOHN MORROW

Confession time: I almost published The Neal Adams Collector®.

A couple of years after I launched TwoMorrows Publishing with the first issue of The Jack Kirby Collector in September 1994, I was seriously kicking around the idea of doing a similar fan magazine on my second-favorite artist. But unlike
Kirby, Neal was still alive and doing stellar work, both artistically, and promoting his own legacy with regular convention appearances. (My third choice was The Will Eisner Collector®, but like Neal, Will was also still with us, and didn’t really need a promotional vehicle at that time.)

It’s probably for the best that TNAC never came to pass, as I ended up publishing the original incarnation of Comic Book Artist magazine instead—but historians will note that editor Jon B. Cooke heavily featured Neal on the cover and interior of his inaugural issue (something he got no argument from me about!). Jon’s mag cemented TwoMorrows’ place in the fanverse, and when his first run of CBA concluded, its successor was Back Issue (a title I initially tried to push on Jonny B. for CBA, but he wisely advised me it wouldn’t work, since his mag would be about the creators first, not the comics themselves).

Which brings us to editor Michael Eury.

Though now retired, Euryman shaped Back Issue from its first black-&-white issues in 2003, through over 150 issues, into its current incarnation as a full-color spectacular under editor Roger Ash. But my longtime yearning for a Neal Adams Collector never really died, so when I decided it was time for BI’s first ever Annual, what did I choose for its focus to be?

Neal was many things besides a stellar comic book artist. He was co-founder of the Continuity Associates advertising studio, an advocate for creators-rights (who helped Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster get a pension from DC Comics), creator or co-creator of numerous characters (including John Stewart, Man-Bat, and Ra’s al Ghul for DC), and head of his own line, Continuity Comics.

This Annual is a compilation of some of the best work about Neal we published in BI, and it only scratches the surface of his career— but I’m thrilled I finally got to scratch my early Adams itch, and I hope you enjoy this de facto
issue of TNAC!

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Back Issue Annual #1 is out Wednesday, July 15. You can get it at your comics shop or directly through TwoMorrows. The 100-pager lists for $12.95. Click here to order.

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MORE

— Why BACK ISSUE Magazine Owes Its Existence to NEAL ADAMS, by MICHAEL EURY. Click here.

— EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEAK: Inside BACK ISSUE ANNUAL #1 — The Best of NEAL ADAMS. Click here.