A note: Heads up that the following interview includes adult topics as well as language.

You can name any female character in the respective Marvel or DC Universes and there’s a damn good chance that Adam Hughes has drawn her. Not only has he probably drawn her, but you can bet that he’s drawn her looking the best she’s ever looked, with the most confident hotness she’s ever been seen in, and somehow also ready to be the face of an Ovaltine ad like some kind of contemporary wartime bombshell. All of these things combined make up just a pinch of the appeal that comes with the AH! signature on a piece of art; the whole of which is never as simple as a beautiful woman, a sexy pose, a cheeky smile, or some cheeky cheeks – but an impressive amalgamation that begs its viewers to join Hughes in his appreciation of female beauty AND a good laugh.

Initially cutting his teeth in the bizarre trenches of 1980s independent publisher Comico with detective series The Maze Agency – most accurately described as Moonlighting for total nerds – as well as a doing backgrounds few independent series such as Star Rangers, Nexus, and Warriors, Hughes was later snatched up by DC comics as a regular artist on Justice League America. Since dipping his toes into the DC market, Hughes has become best known to most for his pinup covers, marking himself as THE Good Girl artist of a generation. (With good reason, I might add. One can’t look at Hughes’ Wonder Woman, Zatanna, or Catwoman covers in particular, for example, without remembering the first time you saw a Vargas girl or, for that matter, a photo of Bettie Page.)

That being said, there are a few of us who remember Hughes for his more direct approach to female sexuality and humor within the pages of the infamous Penthouse Comix – the pornography magazine’s painfully enjoyable attempt to crack into the 1990s comic book craze. Touting not only some of the best names in comic art and the best page rates in comics history still to this day (the two – I should note – are surely not unrelated), it’s no wonder that Hughes’ “Young Captain Adventure” series was one of the most consistent, funny, erotic, and beautiful of the magazines’ lineup. And that’s where we land here – behind Hughes’ table at Rose City Comic Con in Portland, Oregon, where I’m able to chin-wag with Hughes about introversion, perversion, respectable erotica, and the avoidance ritual of drawing damn good hair.

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Popverse: Adam. Hey.

Adam Hughes: Hey bud. How’s it going?

Pretty good actually. It’s been a good show…for me at least. How’s it going for you?

Oh, here we are at the penultimate show of my return convention season. I think this is our fourth show in eight weeks, and I'm ready to be done. I'm actually a little nervous about the fact that the final show in two weeks is New York [Comic Con]. That's not going out on a quiet note. That’s going–

– out on a very loud, very cramped note.

[Adam laughs and nods]

Before the pandemic, were you a massive people person? I mean, are you the guy who shows up to shows and talks to everybody and interacts?

I'm…tentative people person. I'm a people person in the morning.

That’s not how normal humans work, Adam.

Well by late afternoon, I'm tired of people as a concept, so it's like I don't have the ability to have that flight attendant 'goodbye, goodbye, hello' vibe. I can't maintain that for more than four or five hours, which is why my wife bakes in these breaks, so I can go away and cry in a shower if I can find one.

Then I fuck that up by making you talk on a recorder on your lunch break. Sorry, bud. [Chloe laughs]

Nah, not at all. It's actually been chill. At this show, I haven't been... I was more swamped at Colorado Springs Comic Con a couple of weeks ago, where you and I initially met. There were way more people lined up to get stuff drawn or get signed. But here? I was just watching one of the Rankin Bass Lord of the Rings cartoons with my assistant on her phone ‘cause we figure someone will want something at some point but otherwise… Rankin Bass.

That’s….good? Maybe? That’s at least a healthy mentality.

I guess. It's good because it means that in two weeks when I go to New York, I'll be in the mindset that cons are easy and that you get to just sit around and watch cartoons.

Then you'll get slapped in the face by interacting with thousands of people! But at least you’re making in good money in the process, for the most part.

Basically. I will make good money, so the therapy will be affordable. Still, you're going to get slapped in the face by New York, which you will. But really, it's all good. This is a fine show, and I love coming back to Portland. As you get older, you want certain things in life to not change. You want to be able to go, ‘Hey, there's Powell's bookstore. I can go to Powell's. It's always been there in the 30 years I've been coming. I hope it's there forever.’ I love coming to Portland and realizing that it’s just weird and that hasn’t changed.

Okay, so speaking to things morphing but not really changing…you're known for a certain aesthetic, obviously. Lots of Marvel and DC fans for your superheroines especially. But how many people do you get coming up asking about things like The Maze Agency?

Well, every show is a little different. This show, I have signed more copies of my very first work from 1987, which was a pinup in a kung fu sorcery story in Eagle

Seriously? Damn. That’s a deep dive, even for me.

Yeah! It's become a joke actually. Normally I'll sign one every eight conventions and I've signed 20 of them this weekend alone. [Adam laughs]

It’s Portland! [Chloe laughs]

It's Portland. Stay lucky, you nut, Portland. But people bring up the Maze Agency – that happens a little bit more than that first book. It's nice. I just don't like it when somebody comes up, and they're obviously an assisted-living nerd. They're on a walker, and they've got a tooth and a nine-foot beard, and they tell me that they've been reading Maze Agency since they were a kid. Like fuck you grandpa. Jesus fucking Christ.

[Chloe laughs] Like ‘Don’t you tell me that with your dentured mouth!’

I hate it. I hate it when people with gray hair tell me how much they've loved my work their whole life.

Time comes for all people, especially comic artists, etcetera

It really feels that way sometimes.

So what about people who bring up stuff like Penthouse Comix? [Chloe – with the unchecked glee of a sugar-addled child – pulls a copy of Penthouse Comix #1 out of her bag]

[Adam looks through the magazine] Oh golly. Maybe three or four times a year. They'll come in with the oddness and the weirdness.

Adam, they hold up. They're so much fun. Like you can really see the growth of your work here as the Hericane stories and various other bits and bobs get published.

It was very interesting. That was the very first time that I penciled and inked my own interior work.

Wow, really?

Up until that point, I'd been inked by others. On this one, they were paying so much money, that I was like, can I ink my own stuff? And they said sure. I was making bank for the first time in my young career. I discovered the pitfalls of inking your own pencils though – which is something that has taken me 20, 30 years to work the bugs out.

The bugs being…?

I used to pencil super tight for other inkers so that they wouldn't have enough to change. They just follow my lines. I even had people say, you should loosen up your pencils. And I got it, but I was thinking that they're going to misinterpret what I'm doing. So like…when I draw hair with a pencil now, I just draw a shape, right? And I find the details in the inks 'cause I trust myself to do that. Back then, I would've drawn every follicle, every hash line, every brush stroke. I would've delineated in advance, which would eat hours of your day up. Now, it's just creating the good shape and then finding the detail later. If I'd known that back then, it might have looked even nicer, but it's a process.

I hadn't thought about the fact that that was my first interior penciling and inking job until you cracked that comic open just now.

It's one of those things when you're in the moment, right? At the time you just wanted to do the thing. It's not until years and years later where you get to enjoy the idea that simply wanting to try doing something was pivotal and significant.

Yeah, that was actually a threshold that I crossed over.

So you're talking about doing all these fine line details – how much of that comes from particular influences like Alphonse Mucha or anyone else who was really influential with the art nouveau movement? Or for that matter, some of Norman Rockwell’s early stuff.

Yeah, specifically when it comes to the inking part, that comes from my comic book art heroes and less so than my traditional illustration art heroes. All of my favorite inkers were like anal surgeons. [Adam laughs] They just were in there with surgically precise lines. It was like Dave Stevens, Kevin Nowlan, and guys like that. I tried to be those guys for the first 15 years of my career. One of the things that'll smack that idea right out of the side of your head is when you start getting older and your hands start trembling and your eyesight fails. Then it’s all about going ‘okay we’re gonna be Alex Toth instead’. Fuck yeah to nice big brush strokes.

Working smarter, not harder. Shapes good.

Another thing about the intricate inking is it's a sign of neurosis.

Oh, 100%.

I think in some of us it's a sign of neurosis when you sit there and go, I don't know where to go with this, so I'm going to do a shit ton of cross hatching. I'm going to noodle this hair to death until the inspiration for the rest of the body comes to me. I've had that happen in a few pieces.

Go on, then. Like what?

Oh, like Wonder Woman. I used to have this saying that would weird some people out, and it’s the idea that a really good drawing of Wonder Woman has about 7,000 lines in it, and it's all about where you put them. If you put all the lines in her muscles or whatever, she's going to look like a dude. So instead you go really elegant and conservative on her biceps and her triceps and her leg muscles, and then you go berserk with the other 6,000 lines on her hair. You draw glorious Grecian hair, and you go crazy with it. That always served me very well. I could forget my problems and woes for three or four hours if I could work on Wonder Woman’s hair.

[Chloe laughs] Just studiously hunched over your drafting table mumbling how fine everything is with a .20mm pen.

That’s right. And I convince myself that I literally cannot do anything else until this mass of Mediterranean hair is finished.

Fair enough. The mail, the taxes, the dog, the rubbish can all wait because this woman has to have the most illustrious head of hair.

It's all an avoidance thing. It's either vacuuming my studio or ink a lot of hair. Just sitting in the studio with literally a mountain or drift of dust and dust bunnies and dog hair up around you, but at least I’m fucking great at hair.

It’s kind of handy because so much of drawing women is angles and intricate detail. Frankly, my opener was going to be like, “Hey Adam, you really like women; funny story me too.” What is it about women?

I've always loved beautiful women, obviously, and I've always loved strong women. Not physically strong even, but just strong characters. I've never been a big fan of shrinking violets or the Penelope Pitstop types tied to the railroad tracks. When I was a teenager drawing, my uncle – my mom's brother, who was the only other artistic person in the family who actually taught photography at the Smithsonian – he actually gave me some artistic advice early on. The biggest one he gave me was that if you make your avocation your vocation, it's time to find a new hobby. He was right. He was absolutely right. I used to draw for fun, and now I draw for a living. But I was always strangely fascinated by women and female characters even before puberty, and then during puberty, for a very definite reason.

One time, I remember really clearly, I was drawing Rogue or something, and my uncle looked over my shoulder at this Rogue drawing and said, ‘Must be tough drawing with an erection” and I said “I draw with a pencil, Uncle Bill”.

[Chloe loses it.] That’s a good one.

During those years you’re just so driven by hormones so it's real easy to - ‘Hey, I love strong super heroines and strong female characters. I'll draw them all the time’.

The doubling down paid off.

Right? That's just like a twofer. Then the further I got from puberty, I was thinking that I’d eventually just grow out of it and like…no, I'm still doing it. [Adam laughs] Like, don’t get me wrong, when I'm drawing a Zatanna, I'm not sitting there going ‘Hey hey I know what I’m gonna do once drawing this is one’ But. I still have this fascination. I'm still on this sort of endless vision quest to draw the most beautiful woman and then she’s perfect and can belong to the ages and then I can just die.

That makes an unironic amount of sense to me for some reason.

Although, I did have a moment where – you know when a memory surfaces from really, really early years in your life, and you go, I did not remember that until now? I remember as a kid watching cartoons, Bugs Bunny, superhero cartoons, all the other stuff. I used to love the old Popeye cartoons. Popeye would take this spinach, become super strong, and beat the crap out of Bluto or the goons or whoever. I remember this one episode where Popeye was in dire straits, so Olive Oyl ate the spinach, and she made a muscle on her arm. In the muscle, I think there was a tank or an atomic explosion, something like that. I remembered that as a four or five year old.

[Chloe laughs] The formative origins of Adam Hughes, holy shit

It was a formative moment. I was fascinated that this girl had muscle, and she's beating up Bluto. I thought, holy moly, was that the moment? Was that the moment where I realized that powerful female characters excited the little jangle of nerves at the base of my skull in a way that other things don't?

At the intersection of inspiration, aspiration, and fetish is a little house that this memory built.

Yeah, I believe that. I actually believe that. It's amazing that I didn't remember that all through those years. I just thought I liked beautiful women. I think I had a crush every moment that I was in school, but even if they weren't interested in me, just talking to beautiful women, that gave me a zing.

Like it didn’t need to be a physical sort of interaction for it to be thrilling.

Right, exactly. It's just that wow, a beautiful woman is actually paying me attention. That gave me a high in kindergarten, and still does to this day.

You’ve been a gentlemanly letch since day dot is what I’m hearing.

Somebody once said, "You're just going to end up a dirty old man," and I proudly told them that I am an aging pornography connoisseur. [Adam laughs] But I like to think that what I do is done with respect.

Oh my god, yeah. Entirely. It’s stunning and tasteful, always.

I mean, yeah, I draw crazy boobs from time to time, but a lot of that is that I love the humor aspect of pinup stuff.

Well I was going to actually ask – do you take umbrage with the term cheesecake?

Oh man, no. In fact, so many of my favorite illustrators outside of comics from the 20th century, they're registered cheesecake offenders.

Hey, I’m never going to knock something for being cheesecake. It rules.

It's great, and it's wonderful, and it's eye candy. Some people come up and say, that's very harmful to society and that's harmful to young girls and stuff, but I meet women like you and women like my wife who see that it’s great art and it's a lot of fun. I think once I drew a drawing of Wonder Woman tied up, that was for a friend, but that was just a threshold I didn't enjoy crossing, even though that's a serious part of her origin.

Oh totally. Massive BDSM, leather and heel and shibari fascinations happening there.

Oh my god, yeah. He loved strong women, and he also liked strong women tied up on a table. So I said that I would do the drawing for a friend and told them to not ever show it to anybody. I didn’t really enjoy doing it, surprisingly. When I draw a beautiful female character in a sort of sexual or erotic moment, I want to make sure that she has agency. She's in charge. She's not being controlled or manipulated by a guy or another force. If she's sexy, she's sexy because she wants to be. She's in charge of that moment. She's doing that because she wants to look the way she looks. I know a lot of women who are like that. I vibe off of them for being the way.

That kind of makes me think about…I mean, you were you responsible for Diesel Dyke in the Hericane stories in Penthouse. And that initial image is still tattooed into my brain. She’s got the pixie cut and she’s crushing the vibrator and the tight jeans and the mean look. People have made the Muff Diva t-shirts.

It's Muff Diva. It's a play on muff diver! And yeah, Diesel Dyke was actually thought up by the writer. I believe it was George Caragonne, but I'm the one that drew the design, and I'm the one that came up with the Muff Diva t-shirt. I was just like, I've seen so many lesbians post that on social media and I get to say “ha! That’s me! I did that!”

It's one of the funniest fucking things. And it’s the humor that separates it – and a lot of your more sexy pieces – from everything else. It's really, really unique. I don't know, I particularly like, because you do get that very mid-century sort of vibe to it as well. It all ends up being very sexy while remaining tongue-in-cheek.

There is an unnamed quality. We don't have a term for it yet, where it's like, this isn't hurting anybody. This isn't entertainment or humor or glorifying beauty at someone's expense. That's kind of my line, my personal line. I get a lot of feminists, a lot of strong women, come to my table and say that they love my artwork and the way I depict women and I can’t help but thank them, more than anything else, for getting it; for understanding. I think the greatest loss of the last twenty or thirty years is context.

The internet has given people an incredible ability to respond with auto-judgment. Particularly when it comes to types of art and creativity.

Yeah, auto judgment, as opposed to using five of those ten minutes you had free to get angry to do some research and find some damn context and understand what you’re looking at.

Have you caught flack for things because of that?

Not as much, not as much. There've been one or two instances where if the person had done eight seconds of research, I would not then lose three days of my life doing damage control press. It’s all time I could have been working. I don't think I've had too much trouble. Also, I don't have a million fans, but I've got 10,000 really, really solid, smart ones. When somebody comes after me, and they're clearly wrong, I don't have to do anything. I have these people. It's not like I'm one of those sort of people calling in the hounds either. They just come in and point out why they’re wrong or why they’re not looking at things in a way that it’s intended. I'm very fortunate. I don't think too many feelings have been hurt. I don't think too many people have been forced to walk away, stomping their feet.

Rabble rabble rabble that damn Adam Hughes

Yeah, fuck that guy.

Okay. Oh, you know what? Before we stop, I did want to bring up – I was at the CGC office in Sarasota, Florida recently and when they invited me back to the artist wall, I snapped a picture because Adam Hughes drew just a pair of tits – just some cartoon boobs with the AH! [signature]. Gave me a good laugh.

[Adam laughs] It felt appropriate. I think we'd be in a lot less trouble if people understood more harmless fun from the harmful stuff. And the harmless fun is boobs on the artist wall. ‘Cause, c’mon.

Cause boobs can be pretty funny?

‘Cause boobs can be pretty funny.

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