Saturday, September 17, 2005
Comic Art
Continuing our look at the "Honorable Mentions" from my now long ago Evangelical Outpost Expert Witness piece we want to take a look at Carmine Infantino. He has the distinction of being the first comic artist I ever noticed as an artist. This was in large part due to covers like that you see here which were done way before writers and artists sold more comics than characters and stories.Infantino had a huge role in defining the look of the silver age at DC. The "classic" look of the general stable of characters was defined in this early 60's revival of the DC stable and he drew most of them at some point in there.
Despite his enormous influence at DC, he did work at Marvel too and you can see with this Daredevil page. I do not know the business dealings of the time, but I really wonder, based just on how things looked to me as a kid reader/collector, if he was not the first star talent war in the industry.His work at Marvel had the same level of excellence as his work at DC, but by the time he got there the look at Marvel had been pretty well established by the one and only master -- Jack Kirby. Thus to the eye of this kid he never really caught on at Marvel -- but I sure did miss him at DC. Things just did not look quite right over there.
While he did virtually all the characters at DC -- the one he "owned" and really deeply defined was Flash. This was the Barry Allen silver age Flash.Doing the Flash he did some of the classic covers in my living history of comics. He drew the classic Flash #123 which introduced "Earth - 2" and united for the first time the golden and silver age Flashes. This comic helped define the entire "DC Universe" for the next 20 years. It is a classic turning point in comics.
So important and famous is this cover that adorning my desk even as I write is a statue based upon it, which when viewed front on, in fact duplicates the cover. It's pretty cool.
But for sheer memorability, at least to my then 10 year old mind, nothing beats this cover you see on the right. It's the book that dared ask the question that every 10yo was asking every other 10yo every time they gathered around the comics rack in the corner drugstore.This is an image that is burned in my brain and has been for years. So classic is this story that it has been told and retold many time through the years. Why in the last year or so, the current Flash, Wally West, raced Superman while searching for his wife.
Two of the most classic covers in all of comics and both were drawn by the one and only Carmine Infantino.
