Neal Adams’ Childhood’s End

Ages ago, Universal hired me to do designs and creation drawings for Childhood’s End. Sadly, the work that I did convinced them that the project was too expensive to undertake at that time, and so they abandoned the project. The world has changed. And tonight starts the first chapter of the Childhood’s End trilogy. I thought you’d like to see the work that I did way back then. Special effects made all of this possible, but the one character I would be very anxious to see will probably not show up until the second chapter. He is Karellen head Overlord, the spokesman and project leader of this process. I did several drawings, and then, finally, at the very bottom of the page you will see the last presentation I did of this character. It will be interesting for me and probably for you to see how Universal will handle the make up and characterization, and in fact the size of the character who is supposed to be about 12 feet tall. Please join me on this little adventure. And oh, by the way, watch the show tonight. For those of you who have read Childhood’s End, well, it’s not the happiest book in the world, but it is a classic, and you deserve to see it.

“I came up with new ideas that hadn’t been done in science fiction before,such as creating a more imposing scale for the spaceship’s massive size by placing it above the first cloud layer.”

“Nobody had done flying wings before, so I’m not just designing wings, but wings went up and out when you expanded your arms. I put the engineering specs together so that the rods supported the other rods and gave the design to the guys who built the props at Universal. They looked at them and said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ I said, ‘It’ll work if you build it the way I say, using car aerials and rings and some piping.’ A week and a half later, I got a note with some Polaroids. They built them to my specs, without believing in them, and they worked. Totally blew them away.”