The Brando of comics

When I was a kid there was no comics character I loved more than Batman, and the main reason was Neal Adams.

Adams, the top superstar artist of the 1970s, had a graceful, almost photo-realistic style that, for the first time, made Gotham City a place you believed was real. I got to spend a couple of hours with Adams and his wife, Marilyn, Friday night and it was an extraordinary treat for a grown-up fanboy.

Adams was not only a sublime illustrator, he was a lion for artist rights and, with his burly build and tough-guy talk, it struck me that he is the comics world's answer to Marlon Brando -- a brawny poet with a social conscience, a shining star of his generation who always clashed with conformity and took headstrong excursions from the predictable career path.

Adams told a story about finding a DC Comics employee shredding pages of original artwork at the publisher's production offices back in the early 1970s. "I told him, 'If you don't stop that, I'm going to punch you in the face,' " Adams recalled. This is a man you would not want to punch you -- the 66-year-old New York native benches more than 300 pounds.

Anyway, Adams confronted Carmine Infantino, then art director at DC, and told him that the pages should belong to the artist, not the publisher or the trash bin. DC stopped scrapping them, and today there is huge marketplace for original art.

But all those classic covers and pages Adams did in the 1970s on Batman and Green Lantern were pilfered from the DC offices or, in some cases, auctioned by the publisher before the return policy took hold. Adams watched later as those pages won some of the highest prices ever paid for comic art.

"I would think: That's $100,000 that should have gone to me and my family. But that's how it played out," he said.

Brian Lowry of Variety was sitting with us and asked Adams whether today's young artists appreciated his legacy of fighting for artist rights. "Some do, most don't," Adams said. "It doesn't matter. I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish: Artists get their original art back now and they make a decent royalty. That was not the case before."

Adams is returning to Batman for the first time in years. He's doing a story called "Batman: Odyssey" that would be told in six 48-page issues. He outlined the plot but also said it was a secret. I can say it's a tale of an early moment in the hero's caped career that shaped his psyche. And it has Man-Bat in it, which is good enough for me. Adams expects to have the bulk of it done in six months. "If they don't make this the third movie, they're crazy.&qote;

I asked him about his influences. The first name he mentioned was the great Stan Drake, http://www.drake.org/Stan/Stan.html, who drew and co-created the romantic and realistic strip "The Heart of Juliet Jones," which ran for 25 years and at its zenith appeared in 600 newspapers. He also cited Michelangelo, Norman Rockwell and Toulouse-Lautrec.

I told Adams that I wore out my copy of "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali," that loopy and spectacular comic book special in 1978 that featured a tour de force by Adams. "I think it's the best comic book ever made, I really do," he said. It even earned him a meeting with the iconic heavyweight: "He had a gentle handshake, but then he walked by and I touched his shoulder. Wow. Impressive. A rock. And I thought, 'Oh, that's what a champ feels like.' "

I could have said the same thing when I shook hands with Adams and said good night.

--Geoff Boucher