Adams, Art(hur) 1963-

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ADAMS, Art(hur) 1963-

PERSONAL:

Born 1963, in Holyoke, MA; married.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Dark Horse Comics, 10956 Southeast Main St., Milwaukie, OR 97222.

CAREER:

Graphic artist and writer. Dark Horse Comics, Milwaukie, OR, cofounder of Legend imprint.

WRITINGS:

(Penciler) Walt Simonson, Stan Lee Presents the New Fantastic Four: Monsters Unleashed, Marvel Comics (New York, NY), 1992.

(Illustrator) Art Adams' Creature Features, Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1996.

(And illustrator) Monkeyman and O'Brien (graphic novel), Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1997.

(And illustrator, with others) Godzilla: Age of Monsters, Dark Horse Comics (Milwaukie, OR), 1998.

Creator of "Monkeyman and O'Brien" comic-book series; also illustrator of other comic-book series, including "X-Men" and "Fantastic Four."

SIDELIGHTS:

Art Adams is an illustrator whose work can be found in dozens of comic-book series. His drawings of monsters are probably his most widely recognized work. In an online interview with Jon B. Cooke of TwoMorrows, he said that as a child he "drew everything. Mostly I drew dinosaurs, King Kong, and monsters. I was crazy for all those monster movies, the Creature Features every Saturday."

Adams' first published work was his contribution to Marvel's "Longshot" series, and he worked on several other projects for Marvel and DC Comics before he was approached to create his own series. Because of his fondness for King Kong, he came up with Monkeyman and O'Brien. The title characters are Monkeyman, a ten-foot-tall scientist gorilla who comes into the world from another dimension, and Ann O'Brien, who is soaked with a type of radiation that causes her to grow seven feet tall and become powerful. These characters first appeared in Mike Mignola's Hellboy: Seed of Destruction years before Adams created his own series, beginning in 1996.

The first villains in Adams' series include frogs from space, living gargoyles, and the Shrewmanoid, a small man who lusts after Ann. The stories are collected in a 1997 volume from Dark Horse Comics, who also published Art Adams' Creature Features the previous year and Godzilla: Age of Monsters in 1998.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

ONLINE

TwoMorrows,http://www.twomorrows.com/ (August 4, 2003), Jon B. Cooke, interview with Adams.

Westfield Company Web site,http://westfieldcompany.com/ (April, 1996), interview with Adams.*

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