Neal Adams - Creator's Rights

Creator's Rights

During the 1970s, Adams was politically active in the industry, and attempted to unionize its creative community. His efforts, along with precedents set by Atlas/Seaboard Comics' creator-friendly policies and other factors, helped lead to the modern industry's standard practice of returning original artwork to the artist, who can earn additional income from art sales to collectors. He won his battle in 1987, when Marvel returned original artwork to him and industry legend Jack Kirby, among others. Adams notably and vocally helped lead the lobbying efforts that resulted in Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster receiving decades-overdue credit and some financial remuneration from DC.

Inker Bob McLeod recalled in the 2000s the unique place Adams held in the industry when McLeod broke into comics in 1973:

Pat told me I really ought to meet Neal Adams, whom he had met at DC. . . . At that time, Neal held a position of respect in the industry that no one in comics since then has achieved. He was the single most respected artist in the business. . . . Neal looked at one of my samples and asked me what kind of work I was looking for. I said, 'Anything that pays.' (By that time, I was down to my last $10. . . .) He just picked up the phone and called the production manager at Marvel and said, 'I've got a guy here who has some potential as, well, some potential as an artist, but I think he has a lot of potential as a letterer.' I was immediately hired at Marvel in the production department on Neal's recommendation, and they still didn't even want to see my portfolio. If I was good enough for Neal, I was good enough for them.

In 1978, Adams helped form the Comics Creators Guild, which over three dozen comic-book writers and artists joined.

Also during the 1970s, Adams illustrated paperback novels in the Tarzan series for Ballantine Books. With the independent-comic publishing boom of the early 1980s, he began working for Pacific Comics (where he produced the poorly-received Skateman) and other publishers, and founded his own Continuity Comics as an off-shoot of Continuity Associates. His comic-book company's characters include Megalith, Bucky O'Hare, Skeleton Warriors, CyberRad, and Ms. Mystic. He and fellow artist Michael Netzer entered into a dispute over intellectual property rights to Ms. Mystic, a character they had worked on jointly in 1977, which Adams had published under the Pacific Comics and Continuity Comics imprints, leading to a lawsuit against Adams in United States District Court in 1993. The case was dismissed in 1997, citing the statute of limitations.

In collaboration with Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Adams has championed an effort to get the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which is operated by the government of Poland, to return the original artwork of Dina Babbitt. In exchange for his sparing her mother and herself from the gas chambers, Babbitt worked as an illustrator for Nazi death camp doctor Josef Mengele who wanted detailed paintings to demonstrate his pseudoscientific theories about Gypsy racial inferiority. Using text from Medoff, Adams illustrated a six-page graphic documentary about Babbitt that was inked by Joe Kubert and contains an introduction by Stan Lee. However, Adams deemphasizes any comparison between the Babbitt case and his struggle for creator rights, saying that her situation was "tragic" and "an atrocity."

In 2010, Adams and Medoff teamed with Disney Educational Productions to produce They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust, an online educational motion comics series that tells stories of Americans who protested Nazis or helped rescue Jews during the Holocaust. Each standalone episode, which runs from five to ten minutes, utilizes a combination of archival film footage and animatics drawn by Adams (who also narrates), and focus on a different person. The first episode, "La Guardia's War Against Hitler" was screened in April 2010 at a festival sponsored by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, and tells the story of the forceful stand New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia took against Nazi Germany. La Guardia's actions stood in contrast to the relative passivity of President Franklin Roosevelt, who historians such as David S. Wyman believe did not do as much as he could have to save European Jewry, a point underlined in the episode "Messenger from Hell". Other episodes include "Voyage of the Doomed", which focuses on the S.S. St. Louis, the ship that carried more than 900 German-Jewish refugees but was turned away by Cuban authorities and later the Roosevelt administration, and "Rescue Over the Mountains", which depicts Vivian Fry, the young journalist who led an underground rescue network that smuggled Jewish refugees out of Vichy France.