(Jewish Group) Remembering Neal Adams, a comic book legend who championed Holocaust awareness
Comic artist Neal Adams, who passed away at age 80 in New York City on April 28, is best known for having revolutionized Batman and other iconic comic book characters for both the DC and Marvel brands. But Adams himself was also a fearless crusader: He battled comics publishers for the rights of artists and writers, rescued Superman’s Jewish creators from abject poverty and campaigned for a Holocaust survivor to regain portraits she painted in Auschwitz.
Adams, who was born in New York City in 1941 and spent much of his childhood on a U.S. military base in postwar Germany where his father was stationed, was not Jewish. But he had a strong interest in the Holocaust, both because of his childhood memories from Germany and because his mother-in-law was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Poland who helped the Polish Embassy in Morocco design counterfeit documents for other Jews fleeing from the Nazis.
In school, “they showed us some pretty harrowing stuff — newsreel footage of what the Allied troops found when they liberated the camps, severely emaciated prisoners, huge piles of dead bodies,” he later recalled. “It was very hard for a 9-year-old to take. I came home from school and wouldn’t speak to anyone for days.”
Those memories would influence his interest in Holocaust education many years later.
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