Prepare Yourself, Mutant: Memories of Neal Adams’ X-Men

By Kayleigh Hearn

I never met Neal Adams. But I’m looking at his signature, scrawled across the front page of Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men volume 6 with an exhausted black Sharpie, one of countless books he signed at a New England comic book convention in the 2010s. It’s simple enough:

FOR KAYLEIGH

Neal Adams

Neal Adams died on April 28, 2022, at 80; the comic industry immediately mourned a legendary artist, a fierce proponent for creators’ rights, and (I can’t forget) an ardent believer in the expanding Earth theory. In a six-decade career that spanned the Silver Age of comics to the Modern Age, he was all those things and more – one could call him, to steal the name of one of the towering supervillains that passed through his X-Men run, a living monolith.

“Realism” is a word that pops up frequently when we talk about what Neal Adams brought to his comic book art (it shows up eight times in his Comics Journal obituary). But did his Batman or Green Lantern ever look realistic? Examining his tight nine-issue tenure penciling X-Men #56-63 and #65 between 1969 and 1970, we see the all-but final gasp of the series before the “All-New, All-Different” X-Men resurrected the title in the swinging seventies.

(Art from X-Men #59 by Thomas, Adams, and Palmer)

After the staid, flat work of artists Don Heck and Werner Roth, reading X-Men #56 is like seeing paper dolls transformed into flesh and blood. Adams imbues the Silver Age X-Men with a new, highly-detailed dynamism, a previously missing x-factor – young heroes Cyclops and Marvel Girl are lithe and statuesque yet constantly in motion, energy exploding from their eyes or fingertips. “It’s true – what the Pharaoh said!” screams Alex Summers, face aflame with plasma bursts. “I’ve got – the power –and – I can’t control it!!”

There is restless energy in these nine issues, with Adams, writer Roy Thomas, and inker Tom Palmer sweeping the X-Men from Egypt to New York to the Savage Land and even briefly the surface of the sun. Realistic? Not my word for it. Reading these issues, I’m stunned by their vision, scope, and immensity. X-Men #56’s cover is an iconic statement of artistic purpose. Why be content to draw two-dimensional characters when you can bring the Children of the Atom into a startling third dimension – and then break the fourth wall by crushing their logo between your colossal fists?

(X-Men #56 cover by Neal Adams)

Neal Adams was always ahead of his time. The word I’d use to describe his X-Men issues would come into fashion decades later, in the 1990s: Extreme.

Beyond the attraction of extremity (and the fact that these are just really good comics), Neal Adams’ X-Men issues hold a place in my heart because of the person who encouraged me to read them, the friend that sent me that signed Marvel Masterworks years after we first chatted about them on AIM way past our bedtimes on school nights.

I’m reading these books two months after Adams’ death, and I’m thinking of a twenty-year friendship. I met my friend (who I’ll call A. here, as it is, fittingly enough, a very important letter in the mutant community) circa 2002 through the reviews we left on each other’s stories on Fanfiction dot net. We both loved the cartoon X-Men: Evolution, which reimagined the merry mutants as angst-stricken teenagers navigating their explosive adolescences – just like us! It seems ridiculously starry-eyed to say this in the post-Tumblr age of social media fandom and stan culture. But in those Nickelback-soundtracked Bush years, the idea that the internet could connect you to another girl across the country who shared your same pop culture hyper-fixations was life-changing.

We had both been born about twenty years too late to read these comics when they were freshly printed, but A. was still ahead of me. I was well-acquainted with the X-Men from the 90s animated series and Evolution, plus the Fox films that were brand new in black leather. These were the days before any Marvel character with a handful of appearances had an annotated, closely-monitored Wikipedia page – my superhero education mainly consisted of stitching together a coherent storyline for the X-Men out of random back issues and the pure, unbridled madness of a teenage fangirl’s imagination.

Read this, A. said, nudging me toward the X-Men Visionaries: Neal Adams trade paperback, one of the then-rare collected editions available in print. These were the first Silver Age comic books I ever read, and like Angel caught in the glowing gaze of Sauron, I was hypnotized.

These were the young X-Men I recognized – Cyclops and Jean Grey arm-in-arm, in the bloom of their young love instead of trapped in Grant Morrison’s withering take on their marriage. Beware the Sentinels, towering, implacable, purple murder machines. (“Prepare yourself, mutant… The Sentinels live!” Were they warning poor Lorna Dane or me?) Here was Marvel Girl, finally finding her footing and taking a more muscular role on the team, her psychic powers appearing on the page in psychedelic splashes of pink and green. And Magneto! Unmasked, for the first time, by Neal Adams, somehow noble and dignified even when flying around with a jetpack and firing goofy Flash Gordon ray guns.

(Art from X-Men #56 by Thomas, Adams, and Palmer)

Somewhat unexpectedly, there was also a heartthrob hidden in these issues for A. and I: Lawrence Trask, son of Sentinel-creator Bolivar Trask, inventor of the Mark II Sentinels, an obscure Silver Age supervillain, and, unbeknownst to him, a secret mutant. Combining Anthony Perkins-level intensity with a groovy fashion sense (his giant medallion necklace was created by his father to suppress his mutant power of precognition) Trask was obsessive, tragic, and at the mercy of his uncontrollable mutant power, but he was not beyond redemption. He was dark, he was dreamy, and he was almost like a secret character we shared. Every X-Men fan has that one character – that Z-list, “Wait, who the hell is that, again?” character that they are absolutely ride or die for, no matter how few appearances they have on the printed page. For us, that character was Lawrence Trask.

Here is how I proved my fannish devotion in those dark days before digital comics and Epic Collections: when I found copies of Avengers #103-104, the Roy Thomas-penned conclusion to Lawrence Trask’s story, I scanned every individual page at my college’s computer lab, and emailed the enormous files to A. so that she could read the story too. Perhaps the most relatable scene in Adams’ run appears in X-Men #60, with Jean and Lorna bonding as they put their male teammates through the wringer in the Danger Room – I can see A. and I in their winsome, conspiring smiles.

Neal Adams’ X-Men is timeless. I can feel the decades between me and these books less in 2022 than I did in 2002, possibly because I have a better understanding now of how groundbreaking his artwork was and how creators are still catching up to it fifty years later. Time slips away whenever I revisit them; call it nostalgia or traces of the connection that I and A. still share – we keep in touch, and even saw the purple killer robots on the big screen in X-Men: Days of Future Past together in 2014. The news of Neal Adams’ death was a sad intrusion on the dream; the heartbreaking loss of an industry giant is a reminder that time is still passing for us all.

But the work survives, alongside the memory of when I first read it and the affection for the person who led me to it. My signed copy of Marvel Masterworks: X-Men Volume 6 is one of my dearest possessions. Tucked behind the front cover, next to the signature, is the index card that accompanied the book when I received it in the mail, a cherished gift with a message:

Dear Kayleigh –

I have been so glad to share these stories – and so many other stories – with you.

Lots of giant purple robot love,

A.