X-Men Annual 9, page 44

I was trying to find a way to describe where Arthur Adams and the Asgardian Wars storyline fit within the teenage nostalgia side of my OA collecting, but it ended up being too much of a confusing (for me) jumble of stories and anecdotal links... so I'll just summarise by saying that in the mid to late 80's I was absolutely and profoundly obsessed with both the Artist and the books.

The only teenager stories I'll pick out are:
1) In 7th grade one of our assignments was to write a sort of analysis and opinion piece on a work of Art we liked. Most of the class picked obvious stuff like the Mona Lisa or a Van Gogh. I did mine on one of Adams' Classic X-Men frontispieces (can't remember which it was). I went well over the word count requested, made a cover for it, added supplemental pages of his Art and even hand stitched the pages together instead of just using a stapler. I still remember my teacher handing it back to me and saying "you REALLY like this Artist don't you?". I was left beaming more for the recognition of it as a valid form of Art and a valid interest than for the A+.

2) Adams to Mignola: I'm from Montreal and in the 80's we only had pokey little comic conventions with maybe 3-5 Artists (often not very well known) tucked away in a small side room. As I had ambitions of drawing comics for a living I'd spend most of the day in that room regardless. In April of 88 we got Mignola as a guest and I remember thinking "oh, that guy who took over Alpha Flight for a few issues right after Byrne... he sucked!" and didn't pay him much notice. At some point though he started telling a personal story about Arthur Adams and my ears perked up. I scooted over to his table and in the time it took him to tell his story I got the chance to flip through some of his more recent stuff (World of Krypton, Cosmic Odyssey) and was blown away. Beyond the quality of those pages, he conveyed so much Artistic knowledge and insights in the hours I was glued to his table that he cemented himself as one of my all time favourite Artists. Side lesson: this is also how I discovered that an inker (Talaoc on Mignola's Alpha Flight work) can have a huge impact on your perception of someone's pencils!

Back to this piece:
I stretched hard to secure this page at auction. While it wasn't in my list of grail pages it's most definitely a page from one of my ultimate grail books and one I feel I can be content enough with to scratch "80's Adams mutant related annual page" off my wantlist. I know I still want a better page... but this sates me enough that if I had enough cash to secure a better page from this era I'd just as soon spend it on one of his more modern covers.

The page itself comes right after Kitty berating Loki and warning him that there are too many mutants in Asgard to contain and that he's screwed the minute even one of them reaches one of Asgards heroes. It starts the wind-down for the story's resolution. From an Artistic perspective, Adams' depiction of Karnilla in the 2nd and 3rd panels is phenomenal. The inking for the book is credited to Mignola and Al Gordon, so I'm not sure who handled those panels, but they are fantastic. Another aspect of Adams' work on these books was how he depicts and accentuates the characters' heights. It can be a pain to allow for that kind of range in heights in panels but he always seems to do a good job of it. For something so early in his career it also shows that he already had a decent grasp of composition and flow (see additional image).

Added bonus: It's always fun to see notes and goofy additions to a page that are not part of the final printed page. Part of the magic of having something physical a human being put some of their own into. In this case, there is a pencil note on the bottom left that reads "Meanwhile, back at the ranch" just above the name Mignola (not sure if that's really a signature or just a note), and one on the bottom left that reads "Fer Christ's sake Rahne, he's just a dog. Jeez"

Acquired via Heritage auction.