Honestly, Art Adams Created Image Comics
Pop a Whitney Houston tape into your Walkman, get an ice-cold Pepsi-Free out of the fridge, rip the sleeves off your best concert t-shirt and let’s take a trip back to the summer of 1986 for the secret origin of Image Comics. It involves someone you don’t normally think of: Art Adams!
At the height of their popularity Marvel’s top artists left en masse to start their own publishing company, Image Comics, and changed the mainstream comics industry forever. Debate the quality of these comics all you want, but there’s no denying that the foundation of Image was one of the most seismic events in the history of superhero comics.
But where did it all start? Did Todd McFarlane get stuck in an elevator with Jim Lee? Were Rob Liefeld and Jim Valentino both reaching for the last cruller in Marvel’s break room? Maybe Erik Larsen got a “make big bucks self-publishing your own comic book” fax in his junk mail? The circumstances that brought the Big Seven together as artistic and business partners have been well documented elsewhere (and much more accurately), but this article is about the REAL birthplace of Image Comics.
By that point in time, each of the artists who would go on to found Image was drawing comics professionally, with anywhere from a few months to five years of experience under their belts. Several were working steadily for Marvel and DC, but none had landed the career-making assignments yet that would establish them as the biggest names in superhero comics. These were young artists still finding their voices, and their styles could change radically from one month to the next as they learned their craft. Most of them were heavily influenced by John Byrne, the biggest star in comics in the mid-eighties, sometimes with elements of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, or John Buscema thrown into the mix, depending on if that month’s gig involved drawing Conan, Batman, or Hulk.
By the end of the eighties, though, the soon-to-be Image founders were well on their way to developing their signature artistic styles, and had either blossomed into fan-favorites or were just that one blockbuster title away from achieving that status. No more fill-ins on Cloak and Dagger or Alpha Flight, these guys were ready for prime time and making Amazing Spider-Man, Uncanny X-Men, and Punisher War Journal into must-read comics, with word-of-mouth and fan enthusiasm translating into skyrocketing sales on every Marvel title they touched.
So what happened? What was the crucible that forged these up-and-coming freelancers of the eighties into the superstar artists of the nineties?
This book right here happened. Uncanny X-Men Annual #10, written by Chris Claremont, inked by X-Men legend Terry Austin, and penciled by ART ADAMS.
Adams had slowly but surely built up a name for himself in the early 1980s through small assignments and pin-ups before teaming up with editor Ann Nocenti to illustrate Longshot, a six-issue miniseries about a plucky amnesiac adventurer with good luck powers whose escape from the villainous extradimensional TV executive Mojo bounced him across the Marvel Universe. The quirky series was a surprise hit, in large part because of the dynamic, detailed artwork from Adams (and inkers Whilce Portacio and Scott Williams) that was unlike anything Marvel readers had ever seen before.
Nocenti, editor of The Uncanny X-Men and its spinoff title The New Mutants, kept that momentum going by assigning Adams to illustrate a crossover event that took those two mutant teams to Asgard, and some additional high-profile cover gigs and poster illustrations that followed made Adams one of the most popular and in-demand artists of the era. (An era that, coincidentally, saw Adams sharing an apartment with artists Mike Mignola and Steve Purcell, possibly the greatest assemblage of cartoonists who ever shared a mini-fridge.)
From 1985 to 1987, there was a steady stream of buzz-generating Art Adams artwork hitting comic shops on a regular basis, and the Image founders–all dyed in the wool comic fans themselves–were undoubtedly keeping close tabs on the most electrifying new artist of the mid-eighties. While all of them may have scooped up Longshot, The New Mutants Special Edition, and the second Web of Spider-Man annual, it’s the 1986 Uncanny X-Men annual, #10, that must have found a place of honor in each of their studios that summer. The Source which begat all Image Comics, and the Rosetta Stone that explains it all.
Make it stand out
*Check out the cover! It’s a callback to Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum’s cover for Giant-Size X-Men #1, the introduction of the second wave of X-Men, which by 1986 was known to everyone in comics fandom as one of THE major turning points in Marvel Comics history. Was it youthful confidence, arrogance, or simply editorial direction that led the 24-year-old superstar to apply his own take on that classic cover spotlighting the next generation of X-Men? The message came through loud and clear–this wasn’t your father’s X-Men.
Make it stand out
Dig the splash page! All-out action! Lanky figures striking extreme poses! Big muscles and big special effects! Wonky backgrounds set up to allow maximum awesomeness from the fight scenes! Every early Image Comics team book was full of this kind of sequence.
*Ever see one of those old family photos where you realize that every one of your ancestors going back a hundred years has the exact same nose, and it all started with your great-great grandpa? The inking on this drawing of Magneto (thanks, Terry Austin!) has turned up a million times over in every Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld and Jim Valentino comic from the late eighties onward. If Magneto were a guest on the Maury Povich Show, DNA testing would show that yes, he is the daddy of McFarlane’s Hulk, Spider-Man, and Spawn, and that he and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants owe him decades of back child support payments. It’s uncanny.
It’s a longshot, but it just might work! Or, better yet, Longshot just might work as a member of the X-Men! Unsure what to do with their signature character after his surprise hit miniseries, X-Men editor Ann Nocenti and writer Chris Claremont decided to bring him into the X-Men, figuring that joining Marvel’s most popular team in Marvel’s best-selling title would be a nice profile boost. And who better to draw that first Longshot/X-Men team-up than Art Adams?
Think back to classic Marvel costumes. Original X-Men wore simple school uniforms. Daredevil’s got a streamlined red-and-black outfit. Iron Man’s a red and yellow robot. Now look at Longshot: long blond mullet, leather head to toe, extraneous belts and pouches and buckles and impractical weapons and a big star on there just so he’ll have some kind of superhero symbol on his jacket. It’s…a lot. But it works! It’s a whole bunch of crazy elements that defy all logical rules of costume design, but the excess pulls it all together.
*Got that Mojo working! Longshot’s archnemesis, Mojo, also shouldn’t work. Robot legs, terrible personality, weird proportions, and perspectives that guarantee every artist who draws him will have to budget twice as much time on a Mojo page as they would for any other page in the comic…that’s the Image villain aesthetic right there.
Check out Overlord from Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon if you want to see a typical “it’s going to kill me if I have to draw this guy more than once per issue” character that ran riot in the early Image books.
And how about those bad guy designs in Jim Lee’s character pinup page from X-Men #1? (So…many…lines.)
Cheesecake! Art Adams made his rep as a superhero action artist pretty quickly, but fans noticed his female characters right away, and smart writers like Chris Claremont (he’s the best there is at what he does!) realized that fans would like more scenes featuring Storm walking around her room with and without her bathrobe.
Not saying that Art Adams invented gratuitous cheesecake in Marvel Comics, but it’s not hard to see that scene’s impact on Todd McFarlane’s decision to have Mary Jane constantly forgetting how to wear clothing in his run on Amazing Spider-Man.
New duds! Remember those wild new New Mutants costumes on the cover? The ones with extra belts and pouches and cool, impractical boots and other excess-of-excess gear? When Rob Liefeld got to reinvent the New Mutants about five years later, his first order of business was hooking the team up with new costumes (including purple duds for Cannonball).
It’s all there in Uncanny X-Men Annual #10! Crazy action scenes with lines going everywhere! Dramatic group shots! Really, really, really lanky characters! (Not just seen in the first round of Image creators, but also a big influence on the second-wave creators like J. Scott Campbell and Joe Madureira!) Helen of Troy may have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but Art Adams’s X-Men Annual was the book that launched a thousand tiny, tiny crosshatched lines, extra accessories, and cybernetic superteams. Quite the bargain for a buck and a quarter.
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