Dc Universe Illustrated By Neal Adams Hc Vol 01
It’s fair to say that artist Neal Adams revolutionized superhero comics when he arrived at DC in the mid-1960s. With a background in advertising, Adams brought unprecedented realism to the genre, and his unfettered page layouts challenged conventions. His best-known work—an influential run on Batman, a socially conscious revamping of Green Lantern, and his supernatural superhero, Deadman—has already been collected in deluxe hardcovers, but that leaves enough miscellany to fill this book and two further volumes. This one’s a fairly motley assemblage of Adams’ first piece for DC, a short tale featuring second-string hero the Elongated Man; a story in which the adolescent superhero team the Teen Titans fight interdimensional aliens; an oddball Superman yarn lacking Superman, featuring only Clark Kent; several undistinguished war stories; and a worthier effort in that genre starring the German World War I pilot the Enemy Ace. While lacking the substance of Adams’ more renowned work, every one of these stories boasts his dynamic illustrative approach, singularly innovative in its day and still exciting some four decades later. --Gordon Flagg