Carmine Infantino

Mark Evanier has a brief piece on Carmine Infantino, who died today and whose distinctive artwork left an enormous mark on Silver Age Comics.

More obituaries:

From Newsarama: Legendary Artist and Editor CARMINE INFANTINO Dead at 87

From IGN: Carmine Infantino Passes Away at 87

From Bleeding Cool: Legendary Comic Book Artist, Former DC Comics Publisher Carmine Infantino Dies

Very sorry to see him go. His art really did define a whole era, maybe more than one era, even.

I've been posting links about Carmine Infantino because I didn't really get into comics until after his era; my knowledge of him is second or third hand and I've been linking to other people who have more to say about him.

Here is another post by comics historian and co-writer of GROO THE WANDERER Mark Evanier, about Infantino talking about his tenure as Publisher of DC Comics. For an artist to rise up into management in comics is rare, but not unheard of; for an artist to become promoted to Publisher is something outstanding, and Infantino was justly proud of this.

Unfortunately, Infantino held that job during a period, during the early '70s, when the company was going through some hard times. Evanier argues that what with the way things were, he probably managed the company about as well as anybody could have and talks about this overlooked aspect of Infantino's career:

More About Carmine Infantino

Kurt thanks for posting the links. Very sad news. Carmine Infantino was one of those artists whose work defined DC comics for me. Curt Swan, Jim Aparo, Joe Kubert, it was the era of iconic visions, definitive looks and lunchboxes.

A very nice obituary over at the SyFy channel...

http://www.blastr.com/2013-4-4/carmine-infantino-who-helped-save-superhero-comics-dead-87

The headline and first sentence: "Carmine Infantino, who helped save superhero comics, dead at 87
The greatest penciller of all time is no longer with us. He was 87..."

It goes to show that timing is everything, but my fondest memories of Carmine Infantino are those Dial H for Hero stories in Adventure Comics. They may have been the least significant thing the guy did in his career, but they were among my favorite comics at that time.

Mike

It was some of the obscure characters that he was proudest of. Everybody asked him to draw the Flash and Adam Strange, but he liked to say that his favorite was Detective Chimp.

He certainly was a busy, and important creative talent in his day.

Saying he'll be missed in the industry probably is less than true, he was quite old and out of the game, but I will say people with his kind of talent don't come along very often. So we should raise a glass and toast his legacy.

Carmine Infantino was not only a snazzy artist and cover designer in his own right, he was - as Mark Evanier wrote in his obituary, linked above - editorial director and publisher at DC Comics in the early 1970s, when a lot of really great comics were launched: GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams, Jack Kirby's Fourth World line (and KAMANDI and THE DEMON and OMAC), BAT-LASH, PHANTOM STRANGER, Steve's Ditko's THE CREEPER, Mike Grell's WARLORD and SWAMP THING, among others.

Evanier noted that most of these comics didn't last long. This is true. But many of them were first-rate and continue to reverberate in comics (and sometimes television and movies) today.

Yeah, as Evanier noted, many of the books unleashed during the DC expansion sponsored by Infantino have since been collected in hard and soft cover. In one way or another the characters and books continue to make money for the company to this day. In hindsight, their cancellations might seem premature, but I guess low sales has always been the sole deciding factor of when to cease publishing, and comics companies have never been famous for taking a long view of things.

Some of those early 1970s comics at DC were ahead of their time.

Jack Kirby's Fourth World line, for example. Apparently it didn't sell that well on the newsstands. Tastes had moved on to hot new realistic artists like Neal Adams and Jim Steranko, and here comes Kirby looking Kirbier than ever -- and with some whackadoodle stories, now that Kirby was writing and editing his own stuff -- and this isn't really superheroes, is it? -- so meh, pass.

Thus spoke the market in 1972.

But here we are 40 years later, and damned if those comics haven't been collected and resissued in multiple formats -- I've got the terrific new paperback collection myself! -- and the Fourth World series have been relaunched many times by different folks, and the characters are now core parts of the DC Universe, including the live-action and animated television shows.

In hindsight, it's hard to view the Fourth World, or the decision to publish it, as a mistake.

If it was, I wish I made mistakes like that!