Thirty Year Old Trash Talk

So Neal Adams gave an interview over at ComicFoundry here, which was pretty interesting (although Adams is so full of it on a lot of points. Take, for instance, this advice he gives artists in negotiations...totally obscuring the part of his advice that included the company "really liking your work." Well, gee, that is going to affect negotiations, isn't it? It is not all that helpful to point out that artists who companies really like are going to have stronger bargaining position, so it seemed silly that Adams spent, like, three paragraphs explaining how artists who companies really want to work with have good bargaining positions.)

In any event, Adams throws out, in his usual frank manner, the following:

Q: Over the years your work has influenced so many people. Is it bad if too many replicate your style?

A: Replicating? Nobody’s replicating. Imitating.

Replicating means they’re as good as I am. Well, that’s not the case because if they’re replicating, they’d just be doing what I was doing – just doing it over again.

You can’t crawl into somebody’s mind to find out what he does. You can find some of the things he does. There’s certain people, if you read their stuff, and you read it 20 years later somehow you still get some big kick or some big joy out of it. Why is that? That’s the intangible intangible.

That’s not to say that people who imitate don’t have some quality of their own. But, like DC Comics is reprinting my Batman, and these volumes that sell for $50 and $75. There are people that have imitated my work. They’re not reprinting their work. They may have imitated it very well, but they’re still not getting reprinting. What is that intangible intangible that causes that to happen? Obviously they’re not replicating. Because if they replicate it, same thing would happen.

So here is my question - who is Adams referring to?

I enjoy comic book history, so I thought this would be interesting to explore...what artists were considered to be Adams imitators back then and never became acclaimed artists (as this has to be what Adams is referring to, as he says that they were never collected) on their own?