34 Facts About Adam Hughes

Adam Hughes was born on May 5,1967 and is an American comics artist and illustrator best known to American comic book readers for his renderings of pinup-style female characters, and his cover work on titles such as Wonder Woman and Catwoman.

Adam Hughes is known as one of comics' foremost cheesecake artists, and one of the best known and most distinctive comic book cover artists.

Adam Hughes is a fixture at comics conventions where his commissioned sketches command long lines.

Adam Hughes was born on May 5,1967 in Riverside Township, New Jersey and grew up in Florence, where he attended a private elementary school.

Adam Hughes, who had no formal training in art, began his career in 1987.

Adam Hughes penciled two short stories and the first issue of Death Hawk, created by Mark Ellis.

In 1988 Hughes became the penciller on writer Mike W Barr's detective series Maze Agency, as his portfolio bore samples of both that series and Mike Gustovich's Justice Machine.

Adam Hughes continued doing covers and interior art on the title for two years, before switching to providing covers only.

At the age of 24, Adam Hughes moved to Atlanta, Georgia to join Gaijin Studios, believing that working more closely alongside fellow artists would improve his own skills.

Adam Hughes drew that character subsequently in the 1994 one-shot Ghost Special.

When that character was given her own series in 1995, Adam Hughes penciled the first three-issue storyline, "Arcadia Nocturne".

From 1994 to 1995, Adam Hughes drew the satirical storyline "Young Captain Adventure", which appeared in the first several issues of the adult comics anthology magazine Penthouse Comix.

Adam Hughes provided cover art on Tomb Raider from Top Cow Comics.

When Wizards of the Coast created their 2000 d20-based Star Wars RPG, Adam Hughes created designs for both the original and revised core rulebooks, as well as the Star Wars: Invasion of Theed adventure game mini-RPG.

In 2008, Adam Hughes created a poster of major DC Comics female characters as a giveaway for that year's San Diego Comic-Con to promote the publisher's upcoming projects.

Adam Hughes, wanting to avoid making the poster look like a bridal magazine layout, gave each outfit a different color temperature.

Adam Hughes was fond of the character, so he drew her on the far left, figuring that he would edit her out of the final version.

However, having seen his progress, DC's editorial team decided that they liked his version and told Adam Hughes to include Catwoman.

Adam Hughes is dressed in a black latex evening gown with a white shawl.

Adam Hughes reasoned that Selina would have been irritated by being included in the group at the last minute and thus wore the blackest ensemble she could out of spite.

The poster's popularity resulted in requests for Adam Hughes to create similar ones with men, Marvel characters, etc.

Adam Hughes accepted the job of drawing that miniseries, which was announced in February 2012, and premiered August 22,2012.

Between 2009 and 2012, DC Collectibles produced a series of statues of various female DC characters that were based on Adam Hughes' cover art called Cover Girls of the DC Universe.

In January 2023 it was reported that Adam Hughes would be drawing an eight-page Rocketeer story written by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, which would appear as one of the stories in a one-shot anthology, The Rocketeer, to be published by IDW Publishing.

Adam Hughes had been approached for the project by filmmakers Kelvin Mao and Robert Windom, who had discovered during production of their documentary, Dave Stevens: Drawn to Perfection, which focused on the creator of the Rocketeer, Dave Stevens, that Bilson and the late De Meo, who wrote the screenplay to the 1991 feature film adaptation The Rocketeer, had written an unpublished Rocketeer comics story guest-starring real-life aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.

Adam Hughes keeps collections of works by Alphonse Mucha near his drawing table.

Adam Hughes elaborated on this in a 2004 interview, explaining:.

When given the freedom to illustrate what he wants for a cover, Adam Hughes prefers not to depict action scenes, which he feels are his weak point, but the "pregnant" moments immediately before a climactic moment.

The penciling process Adam Hughes employs for his cover work is the same he uses when doing sketches for fans at conventions, with the main difference being that he does cover work in his sketchbook, before transferring the drawing to virgin art board with a lightbox.

When penciling his convention drawings, Adam Hughes prefers 11 x 14 Strathmore bristol vellum paper, because he prefers that paper's rougher surface, although he uses smoother paper for brush inking, and he illustrated some Catwoman covers on animation paper.

Similar to his penciling, Adam Hughes tends to ink different portions of the sketch at random, though when rendering an attractive female, he begins with the face, so that in the event that he fails to capture her good looks, an entire rendered illustration has not been wasted.

Adam Hughes uses Sharpie markers to fill in larger areas, which he feels would be too tedious to render in pencil, such as the costumes of characters like Batman, which he believes should be rendered in black rather than blue.

Adam Hughes sometimes uses colored markers to embellish parts of a convention sketch, as when he uses red for female characters' lips, or a silver pen to render scenes set in outer space.

Adam Hughes has conducted demonstrations of Copic markers at conventions on a number of occasions.