Superman Through the Ages! Forum

well, an alternate cover for DC’s All-Star Superman No. 1 anyway  :P

Brace yourself for his massive ego attack, and read on ;)

The report on Adams’ website reads:

Neal Adams, cover artist of choice, is back in the saddle:

drawing the first alternate cover for a hot new DC title. He’s revisiting familiar ground: crafting iconic covers for the Man of Steel. All-Star Superman, the much anticipated Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely take on this classic icon, will feature an alternative cover by Neal for issue1, except this alternate cover will be harder to find as only one of nine issues to press will feature Neal’s cover.

Historically, Adams’ covers have driven sales of books to enthusiastic collectors, spurring yet more covering gigs for Adams. These covers cemented Neal’s place as one of the great comic book cover designers of all time. Alternate covers over at Marvel have driven just released books to $20 to $26 per copy with his alternate covers.

With Superman who can say? Neal only says that the same work went into designing these new covers that made the classic ones famous. “Maybe even a skooch better,” winks Adams. We’ve included partial layout ideas of Neal’s for your perusal!

How powerful an incentive can a cover be? Hard to say. Neal says, “Please please please if you want to get that alternate cover… tell your dealer now. Put in your order. It will be so hard to be at the New York Con in February trying to explain why ‘you’ weren’t able to get a copy of that cover for your collection.” There will only be one of the alternates to 9 of the regular issue which by he way is an incredibly fresh take on Super the Man, by Morrison and Quitely.

This is what I love about DC. They'll get a guy like Neal to do the cover but it's Quietly who gets to do the inside. ..and gee those styles just mesh SO well, it certainally will not be a jarring transistion.   :roll:

No different from when Neal did those Superman covers back in the 1970s.  Great covers by Neal, then great inside art by Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson.

Hopefully Mr. Adams' current work is at least as good now as it was back then.  I'll be curious to hear what our resident Neal Adams expert/fan extraordinaire, Nightwing, thinks of the cover once it's unveiled.

:s:

See I would have to disagree with you there because I think Neal and Swandersons styles would actually compliment each other better than Neal and Quietly.

Hey, it'll be just one more way this book reminds us of the Bronze Age, when we'd all snatch up whatever book Neal drew the cover to, only to open it up and find someone else's art on the inside.  :cry:  

We all got used to that, just as we got used to having things on the cover that never happened in the story!  (And once every blue moon, there'd be Neal art on the inside, too, which kept hope alive.  I'll never forget how awesome it was to stumble across a *giant-size* Adams-drawn Avengers story in issue #93.  If a train had hit me while reading that book, I'd have died happy. :-))

(http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/1571/400/1571_4_093.jpg)

But if you read the fine print, only one in every ten issues of AS Superman #1 will feature the Adams cover.  So odds are I won't luck into one.

I've always hated that. Even back then. It's like false advertising to me.

Hey, "Strength" was like that.  They tried to hook you in with Alex Ross covers only to find some cheapo, crap artist doing the actual insides.

I agree.  If Adams isn't doing the insides then it's a kind of false advertising.

Anything to keep Neal away from the gradual descent into madness, and anything featuring an old-school great like him works for me.



Boy, you said it, Kuuga.

The most irritating example of this in recent times that I can think of is in IDENTITY CRISIS where they had "good girl" artist Michael Turner do the cover art. WHY?

Now, I can kind-of/sort-of understand the logic behind, for instance, Frank Cho being assigned to do SHANA THE SHE-DEVIL or the "Tess of the Tigers" story in the TESLA OF MANY WORLDS special - the guy can draw women, albeit rather overstated, pneumatic ones. But Michael Turner's assignment to IDENTITY CRISIS is a naked marketing ploy. That would not be bad in and of itself if not for that series's other obvious attempts to call attention to itself in ways apart from actual quality of the work: "shocking" character death, a New York Times Bestseller author as writer, and enough hype to choke a humpback whale.

Dumb question - where is this actually mentioned on

http://www.nealadams.com

I looked there and saw nothing about All-Star Superman.
Perhaps DC had him take it down?

Maybe they did, it's not there anymore. :?

I'd like to see this cover.
Neal's covers during the Bronze Age were wonderful.

Ok, so I saw the cover and I must say that Frank Quitely's cover is better, IMHO.

But, judge for yourself:

http://www.newsarama.com/dcnew/allstarsuperman/ASSMCv1Variant.jpg

Gadzooks, where did this style of artwork come from? :D

Hmm, that background looks familiar (http://superman.nu/tales2/whotook/sunspot.jpg) somehow...

:s:

Frank Quitely's cover is way better.

Neal's best days are way behind him, sadly.  He seems to be trying to ape Jim Lee, which seems ironic somehow.

Of course Neal can be "influenced" like any other artist.  As a kid I always thought his style sprang full-blown from his brow, like magic, but looking back I can see it was pretty much lifted halfway from Stan Drake and half from Joe Kubert.  But I'd have thought by now he'd built enough of a following that he could stick with his style and not worry about competing with the flavor of the month.

Oh, and though I don't have it in front of me right now, this image seems awfully reminiscent of the panel in "Superman vs Muhammad Ali" where Supes is shot in the back by a photon torpedo (or whatever).  Which fits with Neal's other weakness: tracing his old stuff and passing it off as new.

Certainly very little here to justify paying extra money to the dealers and "scalpers" who will no doubt horde them.

I'm not sure what Neal is channeling here. At first glance I thought it might be Stephen Platt.  :cry:

I like the Quietly cover better in concept, but it's stil Quietlys figure drawing style which hurts it. I also don't know where he and Grant go the idea that Supermans cape only comes down to his bum. It's Supergirls cape that come down to the bum. Supermans comes down to either the back of the knees or the tops of his boots. I don't like it too far in length either way. like when they try to give him a Spawn length cape.

The way they draw the current Supergirls cape it looks like the cape is wearing *her*.