In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn how Neal Adams went rogue to get a rejected Batman story by Marv Wolfman and Len Wein published
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and thirty-seventh installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.This time around, it's all Neal Adams legends! Click here for the first part of this installment's legends. Click here for the second part of this installment's legends.
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COMIC LEGEND:
Neal Adams drew a rejected Batman story by Marv Wolfman and Len Wein on his spare time to try to "force" Batman editor Julius Schwartz to publish it.
STATUS:
True
The late Neal Adams received a number of tributes from all sorts of comic book icons upon his tragic passing earlier this week, and one of those icons, Marv Wolfman, shared a touching story of how Adams went out of is way to help Wolfman out when he and his friend and fellow burgeoning comic book writer, Len Wein, were trying to break into comics at DC in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
I've previously written about how Wolfman and Wein had a story intended for an issue of Teen Titans #20 that would have introduced a Black superhero that was rejected at the last minute in 1969 and Neal Adams had stepped in to defend them then, as well, noting to Jon B. Cooke in TwoMorrows' Comic Book Artist #1, "I was sought out by individuals as the ‘defender of the faith' and I was handed the script by an irate Len and Marv with the request to read it and see if there was anything wrong with it because Management was being crazy and they stopped the job. I read it and felt that it was going way overboard in that it offended White people just as People of Color had been offended for hundreds of years-this was not cool; I could defend it, but not in the face of total rejection. This was a comic book medium and this was the Teen Titans!… [the story] was simply too much! First I offered to edit it down to try and save it, but my edit was rejected.”
Adams then quickly wrote and drew a new version of the story and that was what was published. It drove Wolfman and Wein to Marvel at the time, but they still wanted to work at DC, although they were having troubles getting work there.
As it turned out, around that same time, Wolfman and Wein had also tried to sell a script to Julius Schwartz, the editor of the Batman books. Wolfman explained what happened after Schwartz rejected it, "Neal asked to read the script we wrote and liked it. So much so that he decided he wanted to draw it. Note: he was not assigned to draw it and without an assignment it would not be published and he would not be paid. And remember the editor had already rejected it once. And yet, even knowing all this, while working on his normal paid assignments, Neal drew the entire script. Free. It took him about a year."
Wolfman continued, "When he was done Neal turned it over to Julie who, after reading it, remembered that this was the story we had written a year earlier that he rejected. And now it was drawn behind his back. Some editors would have rejected it out of hand because they hadn’t officially okayed it, but Julie liked the finished job and approved it. All he said was “Don’t do that again.” Neal had more than all the work he could handle and he certainly did not have to draw a story gratis, yet he believed in something and put his money where his mouth was."
The published story appeared in late 1970's Detective Comics #408, with a striking Adams cover...
Wolfman finished by noting, "In all sorts of ways that story ignited our careers. And it exists only because Neal wanted it to see print and decided to make sure it would. Rest in peace, Neal, and thank you for everything."
Thanks to Marv for such a wonderful story.
CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!
In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Discover whether Kirk Cameron really had the TV wedding between his Growing Pains character, Mike Seaver, and Julie McCullough's Julie Costello, canceled becsause McCullough appeared in Playboy
MORE LEGENDS STUFF!
OK, that's it for this installment!
Thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually anymore, but I used it for years and you still see it when you see my old columns, so it's fair enough to still thank him, I think.
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well! Also, if you have a correction or a comment, feel free to also e-mail me. CBR sometimes e-mails me with e-mails they get about CBLR and that's fair enough, but the quickest way to get a correction through is to just e-mail me directly, honest. I don't mind corrections. Always best to get things accurate!
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