I remember at one time thinking how Neil Adams was the cat’s meow. Along with a few other comic books artists of the 70’s like Barry Smith, Gil Kane, Jim Steranko, Bernie Wrightson and other such stylists I regularly spent the couple dollars a week I saved from my school lunch money at the various little convenient stores and markets to see what these and other true masters were up to currently. I used to just devour the artwork visually.  Adams had a special place for me with his super realist style and unique poses that no other artist seemed to be doing at the time, but that every other would be emulating soon enough. His work on The Avengers (with Tom Palmer doing amazing inks), Batman and The Green Lantern are just immortal comic book works even to this day.

I also like the slightly more adult stuff to be found in the b/w magazines of the period such as Savage Sword of Conan and all the Warren titles. No one to this day can draw like Jose Gonzales, Rich Corben or Estaban Morato. I picked up a copy of Creep # 75 with my lunch quarters and found in there this surprisingly graphic story by Adams and written by Jim Stenstrum. Not to say Adams had not other such material before and he had drawn stories for Warren already. But Adams came to be remembered for his well drawn superheros, and not his horror material (or his Western material such as El Diablo, which appeared in the back of some DC Western comic called Weird West or something, all I remember is his fine story in the back). He would drop out of comics for the world of advertising art, as well has having had it with comic industry politics. He was trying at one time to unionize comic book creators and I am not sure how all that worked out. Info on him on the net now is about him supporting some weird theory about evolution or the beginning of the Universe or something.

Thrill Kill is a sniper story and finely drawn and written.  When stories like this stopped happening I stopped buying comics (and when my mom stopped giving me lunch money to horde). I just have so little interest in what is happening anymore, plus I live in China where foreign comics are all but banned and there is no such thing as Chinese comic books and if there were they would probably suck. I found this story on the net complete and sharpened it up and wanted to share this with anyone who is interested. I am searching for a  werewolf story by Frazetta  he did for Warren in my collection of files. I have the thing somewhere and when I find that gem I will put it up too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under Comic Books . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.