12/19/2023
Neal Adams' words from 1982 on why everyone should read superhero comics:
Superheroes are terrific. Superheroes are totally stupid postulations that could never exist in real life but are fun to play with... Ridiculous things: there could not be a Superman... It’s ridiculous, but it’s fun to play with. It’s wonderful mental exercise.
To be philosophical about it for just a moment, the thing that men do that makes them greater than they are is their creation of new things. How does a man or woman — let’s not leave women out of this — get into the habit of putting aside all of the things he knows in order to delve into his imagination for things that he doesn’t know? And thus comes up with the concept that perhaps if you dropped something that weighed 50 pounds and you dropped something that weighed one pound, they would both reach the Earth at the same time? Since it’s obviously an illogical concept, what would make a person’s imagination come up with such a concept? What would make a person ‘think that the world could be round, and people not fall off of it? It takes a certain exercise of imagination, so exercise of imagination has in its own way made all the things that man has become, and with it he entertains himself as well.
Comic books are like training and exercising your imagination and they can lead to all kinds of good things. (Yes, they can lead to a lot of bad things too.) But it seems to me we have found a way to exercise our imagination in very, very safe ways. I would bet that there are an awful lot of inventions and concepts that are created by people who read comic books a lot when they were kids.
