As soon as I read the title, I already agreed with you. Reading the post just added to it.

Now, I love Adams' art, especially the middle 70s period (his covers for DC and Power Records [the ones he drew himself, that is] are things of wonder. But I definitely have to agree with points B and C here. Any time Adams tries to do anything even slightly cartoony, it looks horrible.

In an interview with Amazing Heroes, Gil Kane touched on Adams' influence. Brief comments about Adams are on pgs. 24 & 28, but the entire piece is worth reading. Kane also mentions the prevalence of "advertising techniques" in comics - he doesn't attribute it to Adams, but no doubt Adams was a driving force behind that. It ties in well with your point about "the kinds-of-stories-that-Neal-Adams-can-tell became over-represented in American superhero comics." You can read it here.

As for "texture," I'm not sure if it's the right word, but I don't have a better one. However....

A year or so ago, my wife convinced me to watch "The Minority Report." My curiousity about the concept was stronger than my dislike of Tom Cruise, so I watched it, and noticed that a lot of the movie seemd to have high-contrast. It occurred to me that a lot of Adams' work - at least his 60s and early 70s stuff - has a similar look. I know Adams often worked from photos he took, so I wonder if he deliberately took high-contrast photos to increase dramatic lighting, tension, and mood.

So, yeah... Adams was great, but too many people went too nuts about his art (myself included, probably).

P.S. The opening line of the Gil Kane interview - "It's like an overweight woman squeezing herself into a tight corset: an overabundance of certain qualities being pressed into a very limited area." While Kane wasn't referring to Adams at all, but rather the mood of comics at the time, I think it applies to Adams' influence on comics over the decades.

Some general caveats and a note on style:

EVERY SINGLE FREAKING NEAL ADAMS ARTICLE I READ is all "He returned Batman to his darker roots... blah... blah... blah creature of the night yadda... yadda... yadda.."

I don't care.

I'm going to concentrate on more general trends in N. A.'s style. I don't care about Adams as a Batman artist or an Inhumans artist or a National Lampoons artist, I care about Adams as a COMIC artist. So there's going to be a different tone to my commentary than most of what you'll read about Neal elsewhere.

My discussion here concerns only Adams' Marvel and DC comic book (not magazine) work from the '60s and '70s. Two reasons: (A) That period is by far the most influential and most discussed period of Adams career, and (B) That period is all that I'm familiar with. Toyboy and Ms. Mystic could (for all I know) be 1,000% improvements on Adams' Silver and Bronze age work.

And....



When Adams is on, he's on. The above page with Beasty here directly contradicts my next point - And every argument I make should be mentally prefaced with "sometimes he..." and ended with "....but other times he did it perfectly!"

So there are two Neal Adamsses. First, there's the crazy experimental design based Neal Adams who whips out a comics page comprised of five septagonal panels surrounding a half oval that's larger on one end with a giant figure of R'as Ah Ghu; overlayed on top of the whole shebang. Then there's the relatively placid "I told Stan I wouldn't scare the kiddies" restrained Neal Adams who works (mostly) within traditional square grids. I'm going to complain about the former for a minute.

The crazy design-centric Neal's major flaw is that (sometimes he...) created these weird-ass and wildly original pages that don't serve the story. In the X-Men page the unorthodox panel design emphasizes the vertiginous danger than our X-hero is in, increasing the tension (hell, the terror!) of the page. It's great!

But, sadly



This is more common. The twisty, wavy panel borders look cool, but they don't add anything to the narrative; if anything this experamentalism makes the story harder to follow. Where did that spooky tree come from? The X-men page is using creative design as a way to make the story more emotionally gripping, the danger feel more real. The second image is using creative design for it's own sake.

Which is fine! It's fine. Honestly, I prefer the twisty panels/magically appearing tree approach to another hacked out 6 panel grid! "Cool looking page designs at least look cool" he enthusiastically tautologied. But this is also the first time in American comics that the utilization of design principles is more important than story.

So. Flash forward twenty years. This idea is copied and simplified ad nauseum by artists who don't have Adams' flair for design. What they DO understand isthat "Hey, the art can be more important than the story!"

These inferior artists also note Adams' skill at drawing incredibly striking individual panels, images that stay in the reader's mind long after the rest of the story has been forgotten...

And you have early Image comics. Art is more important than story. Cool panels full of awesome poses are everything. These ideas were not good for comics.
These ideas did not exist before Neal Adams.

And this led to another problem; Between Neal's twin fixations on design and cool images, his actual panel-to-panel storytelling often got lost in the mix.


So what the hell is actually going on here? This page wasn't impossible for me to follow but I had to read the text very carefully twice. The most important story beat (the fact that criminals are pupaed up in cocoons that are going to hatch) is conveyed in the smallest panel on the page. And that panel is further de-emphasized by cramming it in the upper right hand corner, while the page is designed to lead the eye downwards. You actually had to stop and search to find the most important story element being conveyed. Now I grant you we are now used to shoddy storytelling. Nothing here seems particularly egregious to the modern comics fan. But in the era of Swans and Ditkos and Romitas and Kuberts and Toths and Decarlos and Bollings storytelling this hard to follow was damn near unheard of.



You can blame some of the problems with this page on the coloring, but there's no denying thatthe character continuity between the first, second, and third panels is really weak, which this makes the whole page hard to follow. There's SOME effort in transitioning focus between lead characters, (the energy lines and the floating legs) but the rapid-fire switching of three POV characters in three panels is jarring.



*Shrug* Honestly I'm still not sure what's happening here.

Now I am absolutely cherry picking negative examples here. Neal's story-telling was clear and effective more often than it was obfuscatory or poor - and sometimes it was downright great. But on the downside Adams' panel to panel storytelling was murky or jarring or simply hard to follow far more often than any of his late silver age contemporaries. Adams - and his massive popularity - made it acceptable to focus on aspects of art over telling the story as cleanly as possible... which led (again) directly to Rob Leifeld but is STILL leading to no-sense-of-place-no-sense-of-character storytelling muddles like this.



But that's not the biggest flaw in Neal Adams' work....

Adams definitely experimented with some of his panel layouts. Which he did have some misses because of that. Still, as mentioned earlier, he was more on the ball than off it in that aspect. Maybe if he had stuck to a more non-experimental method of panel layouts like a John Buscema, there would be less misses. At the same time though he wouldn't have had any of his pages that worked well when he tried to go out of his comfort zone.

I wouldn't say mostly negative, but he worked best with an editor. His highpoint was the Green Lantern series and his low point was the Continuity comic books.

I always thought this but never said it for fear of criticizing a legend. I don't know how to read some of his pages.

You are right!

"Adams' does not effectively communicate storytelling information, and in this example puts the most important piece of information on the page in a small panel in the upper right hand corner in a way that the eye is not drawn to it"

means exactly the same as

I hate Neal Adams works and he is awful!

Those are 100% synonyms.  There is no difference in the intent of those two sentences at all! 

I haven't noticed the experimentation in this newer stuff, The pages are more straight forward. The writing is the weak point.