Don’t Believe, Here The Evidence 01 – ART ADAMS

I’d say a good 80% of the conversations I’ve had about comics have been done away from the internet, and they’ve all been with one guy. Jared Lewis is a highly skilled comics artist and illustrator, my longtime collaborator, and best friend. He’s also a pretty damn good writer who has some real opinions about any aspect of comics you care to name, and we’re going to put one of these conversations up for you to read. Jared and I each came up with a long list of artist we wanted to talk about, ones we both could talk about with some authority, that we felt weren’t talked about enough or were under-appreciated. These twelve – we both love all these guys and our lists are largely interchangeable – but it started with me saying to Jared that most of my favorite artists (after the obvious ones – heyy-ay, Frank Quitely), have largely been untouched by any critics on the web. So here is PART ONE:

Self-portrait by the artist of himself as Clarence Boddicker

Sean’s picks: Art Adams, Mike Allred, Chris Bachalo, Masamune Shirow, Adam Warren, Chris Weston
Jared’s picks: Geof Darrow, Seth Fisher, Brandon Graham, Jamie Hewlett, Yukito Kishiro, Cameron Stewart

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Jared Lewis: So starting off, let’s look at some of the guys you want to talk about. Art Adams? Masamune Shirow? Adam Warren? Chris Bachalo even, to an extent earlier on. My question is just what exactly is it with you & mall hair?

Sean Witzke: All those 80s slasher movies I watched in high school, I guess. When I saw House of the Devil last year I realized I still had a thing for that look. Shameful is what it is. How about you, considering you love all of them too?

JL: You & your Final Girl Fetish. Me? Yeah I don’t know. I’ll take mall hair over that weird thing where a chick has short spiky Zuul hair but with a long trailing ponytail? The fuck is that shit?

SW: Oh the Romita Jr Phoenix look. Along with the trail of blood coming of the nightstick thing, his contribution to the medium.

JL: If you say so. So who’s jumping out at you first?

SW: Let’s do Art Adams? Who you could say is probably responsible for everything both good and bad that happened in comics from 1988-1998.

JL: Yeah. Tell me about it. Sadly, my first real memory of digging Adams’ work was the set of Marvel cards he did & some weird other merch stuff he did on the side, mostly X-related. But not so much the comics. Which is definitely bullshit, as while he’s certainly up there for me as one of my all-times.

SW: I definitely remember seeing his version of the Thing long before anyone else’s on those trading cards. I think the first comic I had that he had drawn would have been that one issue of Cloak and Dagger? Where they are hiding out in the circus and the villain has cancer powers? That was the only issue of that comic I’ve ever read, and his style kind of clashed with the material. The thing about Adams when you were buying comics as a kid was how he would just randomly appear because he never had an extended run on anything. He just surprised you and popped up in a Spidey or X-Men annual.

JL: From what I’ve read, Marvel ended up sitting on a certain jobs he did. So it seemed like he had a variety of small things that all happened in relative quick succession, but in reality he had a year or two to bounce around on all these low profile things before officially getting his big break, you know? I guess it all saturated the market in a chunk all at once during a lot of aspiring artists’ formative years.

SW: Outside of being the godfather to the Image style he was also the first artist I can think of that made himself a huge name on piecemeal work rather than a name-making run on a character (even though he’s maybe THE definitive X-Men artist for me), while there were a lot of artists doing work like that before him, he was the the first “superstar” comics artist in a time where all the big names were like Byrne and Perez, guys who would do 30, 40 issues without breaking a sweat.

JL: You mentioned that Thing card. Marvel series 2 right? As cheesy as they were, as a little kid they were awesome. He definitely seemed to corner the market on some of their more iconic pieces of merch during that time too.

SW: Yeah, I remember he did that famous Wolverine poster that was in every shop, and I still have the one X-Men poster where he redrew the famous X-Men Classic #1 cover with the current roster of Uncanny and X-Factor (which is so fucking pretty). For a while he was Marvel’s Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, the face of the company. At least it seemed like it.

JL: Probably because it was mostly jobs with a quick turn around. That Wolverine thing didn’t take him long at all, I’m sure. But that’s all merch, & really, we’re here to talk about comics. So fuck that. What was it about his style that drew you in? It may in fact be my inner manga nerd surfacing, but of all the crosshatchy line heavy guys of that time, he didn’t seem afraid to stylize his faces just a little, giving characters expressive eyes. It really helped push the emoting where a lot of other guys would either fall flat or have the same gritty, pissed look on every man, woman, & child.

SW: I think what I latched onto most is that he is one of those post-Kirby guys who has an exaggerated way of drawing people, but he could still individualize them. He’s kind of a perfect superhero artist because all of his people look super-human. Also the mall hair.

JL: Of course. Lest we forget. But yeah he could really power his way through a team book too because he really could work out distinctions between even the most similar & generic cats. Everyone was defined as their own person, & stood apart from everyone else.

SW: He was also just an amazing monster artist, which is why I think the first memory I have of the dude is him drawing the Thing, the Monster Island stuff in his three FF issues. And you were saying the other day that he’s the “Rick Baker of comics” because of how great his apes/gorillas look (remember the Angel and the Ape covers? Sickness.).

JL: Yeah. Immensely. You can tell that he’s one of those artists that really like certain things. And it’s not that they’re going to cop out on the things they don’t like, but they really go all out on the things they do. Like Rick Baker. Rick Baker did a bitching werewolf transformation, but he pulls out all the stops when it comes to monkeys. It’s also just apt because that too though, yeah. Adams’ really big on the primates, sure, but also, the Black Lagoon creature, & of course, fuckin’ Godzilla (& company). So that’s pretty awesome material to go that extra mile with, you know?

SW: Let’s go back to the manga influence – it definitely is an aspect of his style, while he wasn’t beholden to it the way that a lot of the people who came later, he was in there with Miller and Sienkiewicz doing manga covers for translations back when comics from japan meant like 3 possible books rather than a genre.

JL: Yeah he was really covering those Appleseed cover duties like a boss. He certainly did dial it back a bit from your Joe Mad’s or Ramoses that followed, but do you think that might’ve been from editorial input, or some perception that there would be resistance to too much too soon on his part?

SW: I don’t really know, and he’s certainly a lot closer to “bigfoot” American cartoonists than Shirow, I think the biggest influence of that stuff on him was page design – the X-Men annuals are super-kinetic and he would bust out page designs that were forward looking but still easy to immediately parse. Not like Wagner or Chaykin who were intentionally pushing what is readable in page design

JL: Right. In the bits of solo stuff I’ve been able to get my hands on, it’s really defined. Probably because he can give himself the room to really push some text or an expression. But I think one of the things I read he was always striving for mainly was clarity. So while he might’ve been treading new ground with certain layouts, chances are he wasn’t going to bunk the instinct to clearly get what you’re seeing.

SW: The other huge part of the appeal is just how great his designs were – costume, characters – there was a short period where every year Adams would come in and redesign the X-Men from the ground up. Like in Annual #12 where he gives the New Mutants their “graduation costumes” and accidentally gives birth to the 90s pouch thing.

JL: Yeah. His fault. But I think the real start of that was with Longshot’s character design, in what? 1985? To his credit though, he only seemed to be approaching character design from a pretty realistic, thoughtful way in that, the guy’s going to need to carry some shit. It’s your Liefelds & Portacios that took it & ran it deep into the pavement, with shoulder holsters & bandoleers & what-have-you decked out with them.

SW: The crazy thing is that Portacio inked Longshot, which to me sounds insane but I guess I’m expecting everyone to be Klaus Janson when they graduate to penciller.

JL: The thing is too that Adams, usually hated not inking his own stuff. He hated how different people would always misread his line weights & stuff, or blackout a little more than they needed too because they felt it necessary.

SW: I can see that, especially since his 90s stuff got a lot more washed out by the inking. The detail on everything was what always got me – I know in that Modern Masters book he mentioned not really liking drawing pages with single elements/figures, because he was hard on himself, so he actually decided to take jobs where he had more to draw on the page – and then his style was detailed to begin with – he is one of the rare artists who stylized his work but drew great hair, great drapery on clothing — he never sacrificed those elements to make his job easier.

JL: No, he was always pretty consistent. And he certainly was never one to shy away from detail. He seemed thrive on it. Texturally, he was always one of my favorites, because he wouldn’t just draw a surface, he’d make you feel it. Do you think it was a matter of his influences? Certainly the work of Barry Windsor Smith, who I was never really fan of, to the chagrin of a lot of people I talk to. But you certainly see those elements at work in this stuff.

SW: I can see that – BWS is one of those super-techinical guys, who would just delineate everything. Kirby too, but he kind of processed Kirby through Simonson – so the large figures and really clear motions of Kirby are kind of filtered through that weird selective detail thing that Simonson, and that reroutes back to Kirby… it’s cool how his pages and figures feel very Kirby but don’t have a lot of easy-to-spot Kirbyisms the way even Mignola does.

JL: What about your favorite stuff of his? Definitely that Fantastic Four arc with the replacement heroes. Sure it was really just a marketing ploy to get more eyes on the FF with everyone’s favorite guys at the time, but that shit was just pretty. And that was some top level stuff coming from him.

SW: Oh man, so fucking amazing – his Mr. Fixit? And he drew Ghost Rider probably better than anyone except Romita Jr and Tony Moore – and those guys are like 15 years apart. For me – it’s gotta be the X-Men annuals for me, especially #10, which is basically his own characters from Longshot and redesigning/de-aging the X-Men, New Mutants, and Power Pack. The story plays to his strengths so well, which is comedy with serious action sequences and bugged out Mojo stuff. How about covers? For me it’d probably be the on Gumby special where he’s against the huge chunk of text or the first ish of the Chaykin/Tichsman/Bond Angel and the Ape, which is the meanest gorilla he’s ever put to paper.

JL: Well that Classic X-Men #1 is pretty iconic. But I think I gotta go with those Appleseed covers he did. With the cityspaces? And the crazy?

SW: That huge mech on the cover of the fourth issue? Where it blots out the fucking sky!

JL: Thats what I meant by the crazy.

SW: Well shit be crazy.

- Jared Lewis and Sean Witzke, February 2011

MORE OF THIS COMING SOON