When Muhammad Ali & Superman Saved the World

[CBR News]

In 1978, Neal Adams and his collaborators teamed two American icons in a book that continues to serve as a reminder of why Ali was the greatest.


Full article here.

[superduperman]

Say, that picture looks kind of familiar. I think I've seen it somewhere before.

[DieHard200904]

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Love this picture. Also I felt tempted to do the fan art of Superman welcoming Muhammad Ali to the afterlife, but decided not to because that might be offensive.

[Rod G]

I'm reminded of John Wakelin's "Black Superman" song.

[Car2nst]

They forgot to mention that Joe Kubert originally drew the cover ( http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives...bert_cover.gif ) & Ali's publicist didn't like the likeness so they got Neil Adams to draw it. Adams also admitted Joe's cover was so iconic that he couldn't do better so he drew his style over Joe's layout and added DC charters and modern celebrities (for that time period) into the crowd.

[baronvonblackheart]

This was a great article. Well done!

[Kuwagaton]

I love Joe Kubert but I have to admit his Ali is pretty off.

[manofsteel1979]

Say, that picture looks kind of familiar. I think I've seen it somewhere before.

You don't say.....

[saidestroyer]

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Love this picture. Also I felt tempted to do the fan art of Superman welcoming Muhammad Ali to the afterlife, but decided not to because that might be offensive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNNHs7lbUJQ

[Jim Kelly]

As I once blogged about, when I was a kid we judged comics from Gold Key and other companies--those comics that adapted TV shows and movies--on how well the artists caught the likenesses of the real life people. On that score, many great artists were failures.

SUPERMAN VS MUHAMMAD ALI came out several years after that, but on some level I still judged it as not quite what I wanted, because I didn't think Neal Adams fully captured Ali's likeness. And of all comic book artists, I would have expected Adams to do the best job at capturing the likeness of a real life person. If I judged it against THE GREATEST (a powerful movie about Ali, where Ali appears as himself in the later portion of the movie), it doesn't fit with the character I saw in that movie.

But I give Adams a pass on this score, because I understand that Ali and his people had some input on how Neal drew the man. So maybe Adams was trying to make the boxer look like a super-hero rather than a man. I think the best page is that one, shown in the article, where Neal Adams used photos of Muhammad Ali in the background. However, that served to point out the contrast between the real person and the likeness in the comic.

From what I understand, it took a long time for Neal to finish the book. So it probably went through a lot of development over that time. And I expect many of the Crusty Bunkers--not just Adams, Giordano and Austin--worked on those pages (perhaps Joe Rubinstein or Bob Wiacek). Carmine Infantino must have still been publisher when the project began and by the time the book came out, Carmine was long gone and Jenette Kahn was installed in his chair.

I bought two copies when it came out. One to keep nice, and the other so I could take off the cover and put it up on my bedroom wall.

[DieHard200904]

All right, somebody said do it, so here it is. The two meet each other since they both just died recently.

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[AndrewBatman82]

Say, that picture looks kind of familiar. I think I've seen it somewhere before.

hahah yeah your profile pic looks similar.