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Arthur 'Art' Adams is one of your favorite comic artists' favorite comic artists. While he doesn't have one of those long runs on one title such as Jim Lee on the X-Men, Greg Capullo on Batman, or Mark Bagley on Spider-Man, Adams quietly became one of the defining artists for a generation - inspiring the styles of Lee, as well as Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, J. Scott Campbell, Olivier Coipel, Ed McGuinness, and Aaron Kuder. While those artists had long runs on key books, Adams excelled at short runs and specials - in many ways his once in a generation style talent to be a special occassion when he draws an issue of a comic book.

Recently at Chicago's C2E2 2025, Popverse spoke with Adams about his career - what we wanted to know about was what he was working on, and meekly the one thing he wanted us to tell you is that yes, he is still alive. 

Popverse: Arthur, I appreciate you doing this. How is C2E2 going so far? 

Arthur Adams: C2e2 is, as always, going very nicely. Thank you very much. Good business yesterday, it seems like it was pretty busy. I'm told we made some money, but they never let me have the money until the very end. But it seems to be going pretty well and, as usual, everyone's really awesome and nice, and we had a good dinner last night, which is also important.

Very good. Glad to hear it. Any strange or memorable recent commissions as you're doing the commission scene? 

Not here so far. Some of the stranger ones recently have been someone who wanted a drawing of Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie. Which is not my usual. 

Let’s see. A drawing of Dr. Who, again, not one of my usuals. 

Done some Transformers, which I don't think I've ever actually drawn before. It was… it had the fun of being a change of pace. Don’t know if I'd want to do any of those on a regular basis. 

What's the most common request for you? Storm? Longshot?

It’s been Wolverine. So far this year, probably number one is Rogue. Which, if everyone doesn't mind giving me a break from Rogue for a little while, I'd be okay with it. I've drawn a lot of Rogues recently. [Laughs]

Do you think it's X-Men '97 inspired? 

Oh, almost certainly. Almost certainly. I used to draw it and was asked for Rogues very regularly in the '90s. And then there was a long, long break, and then they did that cartoon, and suddenly Rogue is back. 

What's the coolest ‘what if’ from your Marvel comics days that would blow fans' minds? A good road not travelled?

There were several really. Annie [Nocenti] and I were close to doing more Longshot comics. 

Mike Mignola and I were on the verge of doing some X-Men comics, and those would've been pretty fun. It was gonna be Wolverine and Rogue and a couple of others of the really popular characters at the time.

What time period would that have been?

That would've been the mid-'90s. I think we'd only started discussing it, and then Image Comics happened, and we all kind of went and discovered our own paths from there. It's a good thing.

Would it have been you and Mike alternating on art working together? 

I think the plan was that Mike was gonna write it, and I was gonna draw it. 

What else… Walter [Simonson] and I just briefly discussed going into some new Fantastic Four. Chris and I talked about doing more X-Men.

 What else with the Fantastic Four? A continuation of your new Fantastic Four?

More like a sequel to that. I almost did a story where it was Dr. Strange meets Mœbius the Artist. It was supposed to be a four-issue mini-series that I started, and I just couldn't bring myself to keep doing because, as much as I love Mobius’ artwork, I didn't want to try to draw like Mœbius for 200 pages. Which is how many they wanted me to draw. So that would've been like a special miniseries, graphic novel kind of thing. Each issue would have been 48 pages. I realized we already have a Mœbius. He was doing perfectly well.

Flesk Publications actually published a book preliminaries by me. There are a couple of the layout pages in there. 

As someone who's publicly talked a lot about needing time with your art, certainly on interiors, what do you think is a reasonable amount of lead time to pencil interiors? Do you think the industry's churn is too quick? 

I mean, the industry has changed quite a lot. I'm two minds about it because part of the pleasure of doing comics, buying comics, is their reasonable regularity.

I think the main thing, if I was gonna do my own comic book series again, writing and drawing, I would make more of an effort to do single issue stories instead of the current goal of everyone seems to be doing five or six issues. And as a buyer, I don't want to have to buy 20 or 25 or $30 worth of books to get one story. When I could just buy, you know, cover price for something that was a single issue, which was regular practice not that long ago. 

If you came back in your own thing, do you think you'd want to do Monkeyman and O'Brien, or would you do something new? 

There a couple of other things that I would like to pursue. I just need to stop going to conventions [laughs].

Conventions are fun and lucrative, but they are a distraction. 

If you did Monkeyman and O'Brien, would you want to pick up from where you left off? 

Oh, yeah, I'd pick up exactly from where I left. 

My son and I have been drawing versions of a Savage Adventures print you did. It's like a T-Rex versus a gorilla, so I showed it to my eight-year old son who loves to draw. We've been just doing our own versions of it. What advice do you have for the aspiring 8-year-old artist? 

Well, when you're eight years old, as long as you're having fun, you should just keep doing that. And if someone tells you can't draw, they're wrong. Everyone can draw. I think a lot of people just kind of forget that they can draw.

A lot of people, I think, think they're supposed to draw like somebody else. And we forget that no one else draws the way we do. So it's important to be okay with just looking like yourself. 

Love it. What are you working on now that you want people to know about? 

Secret projects. I can't tell you.

Okay. Unrevealed stuff. Unrevealed secrets. Looking back, what are the projects that you are most proud of? 

You know what, I've had a very fortunate career, so I can't think of any. There's maybe one issue that I wish I'd been able to do a little bit better, but considering I've done relatively little for as long as I've been doing this stuff, I don't think there's any that I think are actually terrible. 

What's the one you think you could do a little bit better? 

I think I could have done better on the Excalibur book that I did with Chris Claremont. There were some difficulties with the deadlines in that I was told one deadline at one point, and then suddenly the deadline got much shorter. Which was problematic. And again, that's a minor frustration because people seem to like that book.

Maybe on the Batman and Superman book that I did with John Byrne. I might have wished that I hadn't been so overwhelmed by Frank Miller's Dark Knight. I tried so desperately to draw like Frank for at least one issue. That was a little bit sad. So I wouldn't mind necessarily redoing that one and making it a little bit more me, but again, that's another book that people seem to like, so don't look to say they’re wrong. 

Anything else you want to make sure people know?

I am still alive. That apparently comes up occasionally as to whether or not I'm still alive. And to my knowledge, I am in fact still alive.