Neal Adams is a controversial figure in the history of comics, but that doesn't make him any less admired by fans and pros alike.

In addition to his unassailable resume of work, what has made him so beloved is the work he's done for others and for the industry. Through Continuity Studios he's hired and mentored dozens of creators, and continues to do so to this day. He was at the forefront of the movement that pushed DC Comics to return the artwork of artists and to pay royalties, and he was one of the people pushing for credit and a financial settlement with Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.

RELATED: Neal Adams Explains his Return to Comics & Why He Left In The First Place

Adams' reverence for Superman's co-creators continues to this day, as evidenced by his statement that "my Superman is Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster's Superman" when discussing his just-completed miniseries "Superman: The Coming of the Supermen."

In the course of our conversation -- the second half of a wide-ranging discussion -- Adams explained why his "favorite Kirby character is Kirby," how "Superman vs Muhammed Ali" continues to be the comic book work that's had the longest lasting, and most gratifying effect on his career, and the reason why he wears ties emblazoned with comic book and cartoon characters -- especially when conducting business.

CBR News: Right now on the stands is "Superman: The Coming of the Supermen," which you've finished.

Neal Adams: It was a lot of fun. People were criticizing my Superman for being, like, "my" Superman; meanwhile, in the movies they're going further and further away from Superman. I don't know. My Superman is Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster's Superman.

You used the New Gods in "Coming of the Supermen," and you're drawing "Kamandi." Do you have a favorite Jack Kirby character?

They're all great. My favorite Kirby character is Kirby, to be perfectly honest. Jack Kirby when he was finally let loose at Marvel. I think Stan [Lee]'s greatest achievement in life was unlocking the lock on Jack Kirby. Jack had been bumming around the comic book business for ages, doing Space Commandos and all these different types of characters, but when he finally got to Marvel and the padlock was opened, he started to do things like Thor, and then in the back of "Thor" he would tell "Tales of Asgard." Who the hell could do that? Nobody. Stan had to play catch up, because Jack was throwing this at Stan. Just unbelievable stuff. Then, when he came over to DC, it was as if he had saved up all this creative incredibleness.

When Jack Kirby first did the Silver Surfer, you went, what? That is so dumb. You're taking some guy in bathing trunks who surf on the beach at Malibu and turning him into this thing. That's ridiculous. But it's not. You just have to put a Jack Kirby hat on, and it becomes brilliant. The guy is brilliant. How does he think of this stuff? Who has all these technical journals with images of gears and shit that he's able to do so well in these double-page spreads of machines that don't exist? The crappy reproduction we had in comic books had only 62 lines per inch, so it had the worst reproduction in the world, and he did stuff that the comic book business didn't deserve to have. Who would do that? Nobody. Nobody in the business did that. I don't even know how he had time to do it. He would pencil six pages in a day. Nobody's like that.

This is your second big Superman title -- I saw the framed cover and the signed boxing gloves in the hall. "Superman vs Muhammad Ali" sounds like a crazy idea.

It was first proposed by Julie Schwartz and everybody laughed at it -- including me.

But you made it work.

It's a classic. You know how many black guys come up to me at comic book conventions holding this. Not just black guys, it represents so much to so many people, but black people in particular. This was printed by two companies, DC Comics and Whitman did another run of it. I don't actually know how many they printed. In so many ways, it was significant --tremendously significant. We made a big splash around the world. It was Julie's idea, and after I stopped laughing, I became very supportive of it. They were going to have Joe Kubert do it. They had Joe draw a cover, but the Ali people didn't like it. They thought it was too crude and ugly. It wasn't, it was just done in Joe's style. I could do likenesses very well, so to keep what Joe did, I took the layout and I traced Superman and Ali and drew them in a more illustrative style, and then I had celebrities around the ring watching. If you go to the Joe Kubert School, you can see Joe's cover that looks just like my cover, but in Joe's style. I didn't want that to get lost. At that time, I made sure everyone knew that.

It was a good idea, but the question was, what was the story? Julie decided on some kind of invasion from outer space. Denny began the project, but he had too many other things to do and he couldn't finish it. Julie called and said, "Denny's off the book, you're going to have to write it." I used as much of Denny's stuff as I could -- he does a good job. I got to do things that I never thought I would get to do. I could beat the shit out of Superman. I can scream in space. I can reintroduce Superman as a character by giving his powers back. I can wax poetic. I can do funny lines, like the reason Superman is fighting in his costume is because the differences between Superman and Ali are so small, the aliens can't tell them apart. We pulled Ali's own words as much as we could. It was tremendously sincere project, and Julie was a gigantic pain in the ass about it, which I appreciated because he became a really good editor during that thing.

It was a very sincere project.

Every project I do is sincere. For that reason, I didn't realize how significant it was. You cannot possibly know how significant it is, being white. It's as simple as that. I have groups of black men and their kids, and they tell me, "I have that at home," or they bring it and it's been read a thousand times. It meant so much. John Stewart was significant, but Ali. Remember, America didn't love Ali. Half of American hated Ali, but he was a hero to the world.

I don't know if you know, Denny O'Neill and I both had to be approved by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. We had to go out to Chicago to the compound and sit and be observed by Elijah Muhammad, who didn't actually talk to us. Apparently, he felt that we were not a danger to whatever the hell they were doing, and then we were dismissed and took the limo to the gate, which was two miles away. We found out later that we were approved. [Laughs]

That was a great project. The point of going to conventions is so people can bring their copies to me, to see the looks on their faces, how it means so much. I can't even explain it. It's emotional, it's not intellectual. They don't talk about Superman and Spider-Man or those other things, which were all very good. They remember Superman with a black eye, and Ali did it. [Laughs]

Another project form the past is being re-released soon, as Dark Horse has a collection of "Blood" coming out...

With an animated cover. Fully animated. I know I look like a fireman or a police man or whatever, but I really am a geek. I know the technology for lenticular lens work, and nobody takes advantage of the technology. The people who produce the technology sit in utter frustration that nobody takes advantage. What they do is, they have a picture, and it turns into another picture, but you can actually do full animation with a lenticular lens. You can do up to 32 frames of animation with a lenticular lens. That's a lot of animation. Nobody does it. When I went to the lenticular lens guys, they thought they were selling me. I said, "Let me explain lenticular lens to you -- this is why I want to do it." We started to break it down into how many frames we could do, and they were just delighted that somebody understood. That's the other thing -- I went away [from comics], but I came back with more toys.

Today, you're working on this advertising project involving meerkats.

This is for England. It's for insurance, like how Geiko has a gecko. They're tying them in with these Superman and Batman outfits. It's the perfect job for me. We ask for a little extra money, and they get a special job. When you're in favor, you get treated well, but I get treated especially well because then people get a benefit.

Do you have to fight for these jobs? Is this a challenge?

It's a game I have to play. I try to walk between the raindrops. I'm a target, and I understand that. In my science stuff, I'm a target. In everything that I do, I've always been a target. I attract too much attention. It wasn't my idea to do 28 covers as an homage to Neal Adams. [DC Comics] called me up and said, "We'd like you to do 28 covers as an homage to a great comic book artist. Sure, who? You." I thought about it and I thought, "Well, who else has 28 covers?" It's attention. I get that attention. I can't stop doing it. I have fun doing it. Everything is new and crisp and wonderful.

My daughter battled DC Comics over our contract for nearly 3 years, back and forth with these lawyers. She would go to these meetings, and we finally ended up with a decent contract. The reason we got it was I said, "Look, I've taken the time to take care of everybody in the business. All the artwork is returned, everybody is getting royalties, we've got better reproduction, all the fights are mostly done, and now we're talking about me. You put my name on the front of books and you don't have that right. You have the right to reprint my stuff, but if you make a book, 'Neal Adams Presents Batman,' that's my name. You can't do that. I'm not going to sue you, but this is bullshit. Let's straight talk. You've got characters that appear in movies that I created, and Paul Levitz came over and gave me a $100,000 dollar check out of courtesy."

You say that you have to dodge a lot, but people talk about you in a way they talk about few other people in comics.

I get along with everybody. Nobody really crawls under my skin. If they do, we have a confrontation and we finish it. There are an awful lot of people out in the shadows that have a problem with me, and I know that. I went to a movie last night called "Batman and Superman" or something. [Laughs] I waited until the end because I was told there were special thanks to various artists, and my name wasn't up there. Now everybody in the world knows the contribution that I made to Batman. There were over twelve people named. I don't know why my name isn't up there. Maybe because they don't want to give me a royalty? Somebody in the background has something negative to say? I don't know, and I don't care. I just can't care. I deal with the people who are straight up with me. If anybody confronts me, I say let's go have a cup of coffee and talk. That's what I've always done. That's how I got the original art back. That's how I got royalties for artists. By having a conversation and making the either guy see that this was either the law or the right thing to do. And those people -- Paul Levitz, Jenette Kahn, the guys at Marvel -- they've remained friends.

You've been doing a lot of conventions recently, and you're spending a lot more time and energy working in and looking at comics. You seem very upbeat about where things are right now.

This is the greatest time in the history of art. There's never been a time like this. We can do anything. We can publish it, and a portion of the population will buy it. So we don't have to satisfy everybody, we can satisfy a niche, and they will buy it and love it. It's not like rock and roll, it's better. This is only going to get bigger. This is a community of people who believes in their community. They have artists, and they have magic -- those long white boxes of comic books. The ones who are going to focus on the whole multimedia thing, they're right and they're wrong at the same time.

Everybody's going to get it and it's just going to get bigger. Forget Halloween: cosplay. They can wear anything they want, they can become anything they want. I don't even recognize half the characters anymore, and there's nothing wrong with that. They love it. It's a creative community, and it's coming out of America and it's going to China and Russia and South America and Australia and all of those cultures have something to contribute to it as well. It's incredible. This is the greatest cultural explosion in the world. People don't recognize because people don't recognize the thing that is happening right under their noses. Ever. To expect human beings to recognize a cultural change that's happening under their noses is expecting too much of human beings. We don't do that.

No one named the Renaissance until it was over.

Until it was gone. That's just the way it is. But -- who cares? It's rock and roll. Leave it up to the French to name it. [Laughs]

Do you have a favorite thing of all the things that you do?

My favorite thing is the science. None of this [Adams gestures at artwork] means anything. This is what I do. The science is the most important thing. That represents the third book of my life. That is so big, so incredible, that it makes all the rest of this stuff look like child's play. Look, if I'm wrong, I wasted 35 years of research. If you can prove me wrong, then I can drop it and do something else. So prove that I'm wrong. So many facts have lined up.

It's like when I have battled the companies on various things, and it seems as though it was a battle, but it was never a battle. It was always pre-ordained that I would win. You could say, how would you know? Let's take the return of the original art. You have copyright law. Copyright law has to do with the right to copy. It has nothing to do with owning art. Interestingly enough, there are areas of the law which have to do with owning something. It's been codified in more recent times by the sales tax law. So if you want to own a right to something in the sales tax law, then you don't pay sales tax. If you want to own something, like that piece in a frame -- if you were to buy that from me, you pay me for it physically, and I would give it to you, but you would not be able to print it. No matter what. Ever. Because you didn't buy the right to print it. I couldn't sell the right to print it, because the copyright is owned by somebody else. If it was a painting that had nothing copyrightable, you would still have to buy the copyright from me.

In conversations with the lawyers at DC and the publishers, I would say, you people believe that you own the right to this artwork. We've been through lots of tests -- you've sold it and withdrawn it -- but you haven't codified the fact that you don't own it and it belongs to the artists. Although you may have read the copyright law, you haven't read it properly. I'll show it to you. It doesn't say anything in there about owning artwork. I also have the sales tax law for New York State. Now, you believe that you own that artwork -- fifty years plus of artwork -- although you don't know where it all is. We've come to a point where somebody is going to go up to Albany to the sales tax people -- they have a building up there -- and they're going to find an agent who knows something and say, there's a company in New York who believes that they own fifty years of artwork, but they haven't paid one penny of sales tax on it. Are you going to do that? I'm not saying that. I'm saying somebody, sooner or later, is going to go to Albany and visit these people, and when you press that button, it will never be unpressed. Tax people are not like that. They will hound you to your death.

The next week, they started to return artwork. I did my homework, and they didn't.

It all comes down to homework?

Royalties. Another conversation. What you pay is an advance on royalties. "No, we don't -- we pay a rate." You can call it what you want, but in book publishing... "Oh, we don't publish books, we publish periodicals and magazines." Okay, I'll be glad to take you down to NYU and take you to a course on the publishing of magazines. You can have these definitions that you have, but they are not real definitions. I can send you to a classroom that will tell you what these things mean.

My question was, how many do you have to sell to make a profit? "We don't know." Of course you do. I know what it is. It costs you so much money to print, it costs you so much for paper, for the artist, for the writer, for the editor, for rent. After you pay for all those things, then you make a profit. I can tell you what that number is -- it's 35,000 copies. "Well, we expect one comic book that's successful to support two books that aren't successful." Okay, fine -- pick a number. It doesn't matter. Make up a number. Say it's a hundred thousand copies. Are you going to make money at a 100,000 copies? Now, because we're in book publishing, if an artist and a writer get together and they make a comic book and it sells half a million copies, do you believe that they deserve a royalty? Then our conversation is over and I've won. You've just admitted to me that there's a point at which we should receive a royalty. Figure it out. We don't even care what the number is. We just want to be paid for what we do. If you say it's 100,000, if you say it's 500,000, pay us a royalty after that.

Okay, final question. You're wearing a Spider-Man tie. Is that a sign of a project to come? Or do you just have a closet full of comics characters?

Let me tell you something about children and grandchildren. Children and grandchildren have no idea what to get dad or grandpa for Christmas or their birthday, so what they usually do is, they buy some weird cologne. They have no idea what to get. And the truth is, dads really don't want anything. I tell my kids that I love cartoon ties. I do. I especially love to go into business meetings with cartoon ties. But you have to hunt for a good cartoon tie. You're not going to find it in a regular tie shop, so you have to make an effort. I like to be at conventions and the kid goes," Batman!" I love to have a conversation with someone who's serious about his business and he'll be talking about percentages and then go, "Is that Taz? I love him!"