A biography for Neal Adamshasn’t been written yet.
“I think that Curt Swan, when he did Superman for the longest time, became the definitive Superman artist, and everybody got it. That made him very, very special in the annals of comic books.”
“I live in New York and California, and I get to travel.”
“Nobody is looking for work who doesn't need work. That's why we look for work.”
“I believe in advancing the story with the cover so that the audience gets taken in immediately with that cover.”
“As far as I know, no kid ever bought a children's book himself with his own money, but they'll buy comic books. So we better make them good.”
“Back in the olden days when we were rubbing sticks together, everybody wanted to have a comic strip, to live in Westport Connecticut, to have a Jaguar and to have a wife and two and a half kids and to have a girl in town in their studio in Manhattan that they'd romance, and then they'd have people ghost their strip. It was like this big dream.”
“People tend not to want to question dogma. But I'm afraid of dogma.”
“When I did get into comic books, it was after a whole other career, and when I got into comic books, they didn't even know who I was.”
“The first work I ever did in comics was for Archie Comics, and I didn't do that very long because I did other stuff.”
“The thing about covers that's relatively important to remember is that it doesn't matter how good an artist you are: if you don't have good ideas, the covers don't stand out.”
“I think of myself as a storytelling, and one of the reasons why people have held my stuff close to them is because it's one thing to draw pretty pictures, and it's another thing to create a story. That's what I've always done, whether it be for advertising clients or commercial clients or comic books. My hand is in there, and I am the storyteller.”
“You don't get dead and there not be consequences.”
“You could say everybody's a fan of Jack Kirby. I would say I'm a fan of Jack Kirby. I'm a fan of Jack Kirby the man.”
“Everybody's 'odyssey' is a little bit different. Batman's is his own and unique to him.”
“I'm a fan of Superman as created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Remember that Jerry and Joe created a character that was the biggest superhero of all.”
“I don't get involved in criticizing or extolling really good artists who do their job. That's for other people.”
“To me, it's the outstanding people, people like Jack Kirby that really make a difference, that are very, very important.”
“One of the reasons that DC, Marvel, and other comic book companies have always asked me to do covers and variant covers is because they know that when they tell me 'icon,' I jump over their words, and I give them an iconic cover - but while I'm doing it, there is going to be an idea there.”
“I changed the layout of comic books in general. When I came in, layout design wasn't really part of what you did. It was all just panels, panels, panels. So when I came in, I thought, 'Nah, let's change that,' and I designed the page.”
“The 'Superman vs. Muhammad Ali' book was printed in every free country in the world, OK? Now, it's so good in its way that we can go in and make fun of it and feel good about it.”