A Bunch of Bad News For Comic Book Fans

It seems that we may be heading back to the bad old days of superhero free tv...

Just a decade ago I was lamenting that with the loss of Smallville there were no longer any superheroes on the tube.  Then the 20-teens happened.  Suddenly EVERY show was a superhero show.  

Then Netflix dumped Marvel.

Then DC started and ended a streaming experiment.

Now it seems the CW is getting out of the cape and cowl business.

While Superman and Lois has been renewed, as has The Flash, EVERY other CW superhero show is either cancelled or on the bubble.  

Stargirl Season 3 has just wrapped shooting and won't air for a bit, so it's fate may be a while in the deciding.

Of the other CW superhero fare, no good news.  Batwoman has been cancelled.  Not a great loss as it's never really been great.  Legends of Tomorrow gone too and that one hurts.  It ended on a cliffhanger and was always fun even if it was terribly goofy.  No word on Naomi but I'm betting it's done.  I couldn't get through the first half of the season and it only ran 13 episodes.

So that all sucks.

And then this.

Today we learned that legendary comic book artist Neal Adams passed away.  

 

 

Neal Adams drew a good portion of my childhood.

Adams is best known for his work on Batman and on Green Lantern/Green Arrow.  He worked at the time of my greatest love of the genre and his art is some of the stuff that I copied as a young kid dreaming of drawing comics.

 

This Neal Adams image is what I see in my head when I hear "Batman".

 

I have this one on a T-shirt.

 

 I would be FOREVER grateful if someone would put a Batman on film that looked like Adam's version.  His and Jim Aparo's iconic blue/grey look are what Batman is supposed to look like, dammit.

Adams also helped drag comics into the modern age.  Back in the 70's, the medium was dying a slow death and it took superb artists and writers like Adams and his partner Denny O'Neil to resuscitate the comic book by updating characters like Green Lantern.  They partnered the retooled Lantern, now a cosmic police officer, with the unpowered Green Arrow and let their clashing politics loose in the pages of their now classic run on the book.

 

For it's day, Green Lantern/Green Arrow was revolutionary.  Adams/O'Neil's partnership on the book is still one of the all time GREAT runs of art and writing on a comic series.

In the 70s, comics didn't deal with race, politics or drugs.  Period.

 

Then Adams and O'Neil changed ALL that.

Adams and O'Neil did it all anyway.  They paved the way for artists and writers to tell stories that mattered in a medium that up to then had largely been dismissed as a kid's only funny book.  While you won't see their names headlining the next Marvel or DC movie, if you watch the credits, Adams and O'Neil get thanked down at the end in the small print pretty often. True fans remember. 

You know how you see "Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster" at the beginning of Superman movies and shows?  Before the Superman movie in the late 70s, that didn't happen and Siegel and Shuster were living in poverty despite having created the most well known superhero of all time.  Neal Adams was instrumental in righting that wrong and spent his career championing creator's rights in the comic industry.  A LOT of very wealthy comic book folk owe him more than a little gratitude.

O'Neil died in 2020 and sadly now we have lost Adams.  

I observe that I have reached an age where more of the folks I admire are dead than alive.