Comic Book Artist Pleads With New Yorkers To Find Artwork He Left In Cab

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- A legendary comic book artist is hoping New Yorkers can be his superhero and help him recover more than 30 years worth of artwork lost in Midtown.

Neal Adams is part of comic book history, famous for his series on superheroes Batman and Green Lantern.

While in New York recently, Adams said he accidentally left a portfolio stuffed with nearly 100 original pieces of artwork, including The Hulk, Thor and Batgirl, in a cab.

"Oh my God, I put that thing in the car like I never do and sure enough they're gone," Neal Adams told CBS 2's Vanessa Murdock on Friday. "I can tell you I've kept hold of it very well for a long time, but by golly."

Adams and his wife hailed a cab at the corner of 39th Street and 6th Avenue when they were in town more than three weeks ago and put a tote bag stuffed with two portfolios into the trunk.

That was the last time they saw it.

"The next morning, we realized that bag with those two portfolios probably had to be -- there's no choice -- in the cab," he told Murdock.

He immediately called his daughter, Kristine Adams Stone, who runs his studio, and put her to work in the recovery effort.

They've been handing out flyers to cabbies with a sketch of the bag and of the cabbie as Adams remembers him.

"If you're a taxi driver and you have a taxi cab, would you please look in the trunk and see if you see a silly beige bag that has a silly bunny rabbit on it," Stone told Murdock.

The lost art is worth thousands and the artist is concerned it will end up underground, but he's hoping it will get returned by some super New Yorker.

"If somebody finds it, look at it. If there's some joy that you can take out of it, take that joy out of it," Adams said. "In the end, please, please see that it gets returned to us."

The studio is offering a reward. The finder will get their choice between money or original Neal Adams artwork.

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