Neal Adams: THE "DEADMAN" COLLECTION

It fills me with a great sense of pride to announce that I have, without a doubt, decided on the identity of my all-time favorite comic book artist: Mr. Neal Adams. My (conscious) introduction to Adams came earlier this summer (you'll find it profiled on this blog, actually) with his work on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, was followed up a short time afterward with a (not profiled on this blog, because I forgot to) three-volume collection of his Batman work, and has most recently manifested itself in my completion of The "Deadman" Collection, a compilation of some of Adams's best work. And that, my friends, was a very long and complicated sentence that needn't have been so long or complicated. But you've got the story now, and I can start talking about Deadman for a second. Deadman is the name of a DC Comics superhero who happens to be, brace yourself, a dead man. Boston Brand, famed aerialist, is shot and killed by the mysterious "Hook." He dies, but doesn't quite die, no...instead, he's allowed to stalk the earth and seek revenge on his killer, thanks to the intercession of eastern deity Rama Kushna. You've called it already: no, this is not your typical superhero series. But it gets better: Deadman can't even touch the various evil-doers he must thwart as he continues his quest. All he can do is inhabit the bodies of living people, controlling their actions for a time. It is, at the very least, an extremely unlikely superhero concept--but in the hands of Neal Adams, it turned out to be a surprisingly good one. Adams's art helps to drive the story: it's realistic enough that you actually can suspend your disbelief in a story that requires quite a bit of disbelief to be suspended, and nice to look at on top of that. This whole collection, in fact, is really quite a beautiful volume (it's my father's, not mine; my father, who sells books, owns a lot of nice ones; I, who only buy them, own a lot of shoddy, used paperbacks that smell faintly of cigarettes, old men, or cat urine, if I'm lucky), and one I'd count myself lucky to own. And, since I haven't had a single bad word to say about it, I think I have to grade this on an A.

Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams: GREEN LANTERN / GREEN ARROW, Vol. I and II

Whoa! Two Dennis O'Neal collections in a row! This is just getting crazy (in truth, I'm just reading a lot of comic books for escapist purposes, because you can't just keep applying for jobs forever. At least, not without some reason for hope. Not that there's no reason for hope, which is why I eventually start again. That, and my addictions to eating / drinking, wearing clothes, and sleeping underneath a roof)! This time around, we've got his complete Green Lantern / Green Arrow run, with art by the inimitable Neal Adams (probably my favorite comic book artist? Tough to say, but the man can really draw...). I loved these books, but then I was already inclined to: Green Lantern was my favorite DC hero--hell, my favorite hero, period--growing up (maybe rivaled by Batman), and Green Arrow's been my favorite since I discovered social democracy (well, at least since I discovered that he discovered social democracy, which confuses the timeline a bit, but you get the point: I've always liked Green Lantern, and now also like Green Arrow. Got it?). Add to that the fact that these were groundbreaking comics (they were, however cheesy they seem now; Speedy on heroin is still a great story, forty years or so later), and, well, they're just great. GL is the straight-laced, law and order sort, GA the rowdier, bawdier believer in freedom, equality and the kind of justice that law and order don't always mete out. So, yeah: these are great stories, not just great comics, and deserve their A+.