Neal Adams Ben Casey

The Look of Love: The Rise and Fall of the Photo-Realistic Newspaper Strip, 1946-1970

The Boy Wonder: Neal Adams and Ben Casey

Neal Adams’ first realistic professional work was as an background artist for Howard Nostrand’s Bat Masterson in late 1959. When Masterson ended for Adams after only 3 months at $9 a week, seasoned pro Elmer Wexler showed the young man, then only 18, how a shop like Johnstone and Cushing (whom Wexler also worked for) was using Polaroids, artographs, and sophisticated inking to create slick advertising comics and line art.

Adams had been famously turned down at DC after his graduation from School of Industrial Arts, his sample pages revealing a wild, exuberant storytelling sense even then but still very raw. Under Wexler's critical eye, Adams, in only a very short time, became as slick and polished as any artist at Johnstone and Cushing. And, to top it off, he reached this level in under two years. He often proudly tells the story of his co-workers sighing a breath of relief when he turns 20. It had been embarrassing for these industry-tested veterans to be bested by a teenager.

But it was his youth that partly made the difference. The standard of illustration craft at Johnstone and Cushing was exacting, as high as anywhere in the profession and far beyond what was expected in Comics. Adams thrived, perhaps because he had a burning ambition to be the best and in his words had the "strength and enthusiasm" to endure the long hours to get it right. As he recalls when he became a Johnstone and Cushing staffer, he did a Boy’s Life series where “even the light switches were referenced.” He was an insatiable “sponge” Adams remembers, “an incredible education” in line technique before him.

At 21, Adams gets a plum, Ben Casey, a soap opera strip created to cash in on the huge popularity of the TV show and a rival to Ken Bald’s Dr. Kildare. Writer Jerry Caplin, Al Capp's brother, called one day based on a recommendation and asked Adams to join forces, an agreement with Newspaper Enterprise Association for the new strip already in hand.

Elmer Wexler, born in 1918 in Bridgeport and now living comfortably in retirement in Norwalk Connecticut, had a quick apprenticeship in the pre-War art market after study at the NYC's Pratt Institute, working on jobs such as Black Terror and Fighting Yank and line art for Street and Smith pulps. With Vic Jordan in 1941, co-written by former reporters Kermit Jaedicker and Charles Zerner using the collective "Tom Paine," twenty one year old Wexler hit a gold mine, a strip that seemed to satisfy everything the public wanted in a adventure strip. It went over like gangbusters. But in the Spring of '42, Wexler leaves the strip and joins the Marine Corps. A fan of Jordan, a Marine Major, convinced Wexler to enlist in the Corps, go through boot camp, and then the young artist could spend the war producing a recruiting strip for the Pictorial Publicity Division based in Philadelphia. But Wexler found himself instead a Corps Combat Artist for the duration, in the thick of the Pacific island hopping campaign. (His replacement on the proposed strip with the Division, Alex Raymond, would likewise eventually be shipped out to the Pacific.) At War's end and return to the US, Wexler beat Raymond into syndication with the first strip that had a contemporary illustrative flavor, Jon Jason, but the new strip debuting in January 1946, distributed by the tiny Bell Syndicate, lasted only a brief year. (To my eyes, the strip looks remarkably like Yaroslav Horak's James Bond twenty years later). Wexler instead relied on Johnstone and Cushing, producing lucrative work like the Vaseline ad "Rusty and Dusty" above, the type of narrative advertising strip that took off after the war. By the time Adams enters Nostrand's studio alongside the disciplined older artist in the 1959, Wexler was earning a very attractive $700 a page for art like the sample shown above. To Adams, Wexler "was like God to me."

Adams' improvement from background assistant to one of the top artists at Johnstone and Cushing, in less than two years, is one of the most breathtaking advances in Comics. He has claimed that he was a late bloomer, not really climbing in skill until the summer before senior year in his art-focused High School. By the time of his graduation he was far ahead of his peers, copying various styles and whole stories, always "learning and progressing" with each one. As he said once, "I was trying to do Leonard Starr better than Leonard Starr." The Johnstone and Cushing tryout, at left, was a pastiche of everything he could do at the time, "a superhuman effort" he says now. Wexler had to verify that he had not helped the young man. The illustration at right is a Johnstone and Cushing trade ad.

Neal Adams on Stan Drake:

“I realized as I compared [his linework] with everybody’s else lines, that Stan Drake seemed to have created new lines . . . Those lines meant Stan had a variety no one else had. So I jumped on the Stan Drake bandwagon and started to create my own kinds of lines. . . .

If you render well with these lines, you’re able to do more things when you render. You can do textures. You can do wood that looks like wood. Metal that looks like metal. . . . They’re not cartoons. Better, different textures add a flavor to work that is hard to define. . . .”

A small town siren ponders a cryptic note, Ben Casey appears on a lonely station platform and a strange man awaits with a drawn gun. On such things are soap opera strips made. In this Sunday (10/24/65), note the main female presence--six of nine panels, from the provocative, rear view opening to bookend figures in profile. (A single reference photo?) Adams’ playful layout sense, which would energize Comics within a few years, is evident. The 2nd row middle panel (marred here by the binding from the scanned magazine) is a sly pan right from the stationmaster’s pointing finger to the irony of the girl’s expectation.

The next week, 10/31/65. (The Neal Adams Treasury 2 reprints the remaining eight weeks, a story running until 12/26. When the paper desired a third instead of a half page Sunday, the top row would be sacrificed.) Probably the hardest element for Adams was a consistent likeness for Casey television star Vince Edwards. Not that Adams couldn’t do a convincing likeness, as 1978's Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali famously proves, but in cases where he didn’t have a reference photograph with the expression he needed, his extrapolation was sometimes shaky and the pose stiff. Trade ads for the strip noted Adams own dark resemblance to the star, probably something that came in handy in his figure Polaroids. His women, in the best Drake manner, were much easier, meaning active poses, shifting POV, and emphasizing expression via the mouth and eyebrows, all topped with fluffy hair. The varied line, the thick black mass, cross-hatch, the heavy line juxtaposed against the thin, sharp detail, gave his figures a startling accuracy. At right, Nicki Siena, a late guest star in the strip, appearing in the second-to-the-last sequence in 1966. There are 10 Sunday stories and 19 daily story arcs. Casey ends on its own terms, for both the character and Adams. Sunday Casey ran from 9/20/64 to 7/31/66.

I Just Met a Girl Named Maria The original art clustered here, the Sunday (two weeks before the sequence above) and two dailies, a month apart, from late fall 1965, originally came courtesy of Bob Reilly and his website The Art of Medicine, which at one time featured these images in larger scans, a wide variety of other Medical-themed artwork, including a large run of Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, the Dell Comic Books for both doctors, Night Nurse and Win Mortimer, and commissioned sketches by contemporary comic artists. (The site no longer has linked larger scans.) How much a commercial artist like Adams could stretch the expectations of his Cooper Studio conditioned audience for a pretty girl was fairly limited, the hair and a accessories like a headband just about the full extent. The bottom dailies feature a fetching character called Maria, but she could easily be mistaken for many of the dark haired guest stars seen in the strip. See The Daily Adams for the transformation and idealization of TV Casey's brunette girlfriend and fellow staff doctor, Maggie.

Recently, the past three years or so, Adams has allowed his legion of fans to see more of his concept work and working processes (mostly through the indispensable efforts of Arlen Schumer).

His method is to draw incredibly small thumbnails, in a gestural approach somewhat inspired by illustrators Bernie Fuchs and Austin Briggs, enlarge the sketch via photocopy or artograph, then transfer the sketch to Bristol Board by lightbox, tracing what he

liked best from his initial drawing.

Adams said to Schumer that his figures became wilder and looser for a time when he went to work for comics because he no longer had the time and money to take the amount of photographs Casey had required (his technique from J&C). And without the constraints of the daily panel strip form, he was ready for even more outrageous experiments in comic book layout for Warren, DC, then Marvel, that was soon to revolutionize the industry. (Although Adams, as with Raymond, is often faulted for drawing too well!)

Adams credits his days with Ben Casey as the foundation of his storytelling skills.

Top left, the competitive Boy Wonder in 1962. His youth belies the long hours and hard work or the training by example he received in NYC’s best line-art shop. 21 year old Adams continued to do other assignments for J&C in the 3 1/2 year run of the strip, including ghosting Juliet Jones in 1963 (See Ghost Stories, below) In Casey, Adams has said his goal was to show he could match anyone, to have the best drawn strip that day. His feeling was that after one year, he did. Top middle, two dailies for a proposed project called Tangent, drawn in 1965. Timid artists might take shortcuts but not Adams. He seems to go out of his way to include hands of the characters for example, multiple figures and in this case, twin blondes with a penchant for leaning forward. Right, bottom, a Sunday from 1965 about a year before the strip ends, again featuring a comely lass, a beloved but sick child, a stubborn man, and the no-nonsense Casey.

Adams often did the strip, both Dailies and Sundays, at night after spending the entire day at Johnstone and Cushing doing freelance. Adams explains he was able to do this for 3 1/2 years because "I was young." His approach to the daily strip was simple: he felt each day had to have something "that went beyond the soap opera aspect . . . what you don't expect or find in a syndicated strip." Another element Adams said he went for was to tell a mini-story each day in three panels, a sense of closure to the day's action. The crisp dailies on this page come from Claude Mazere, who has already returned the original art to Adams. The strip upper left is from the first year, second story.