Carmine Infantino Remembered by Comics Professionals

The comics industry mourns a legend today after reports emerged of the passing of artist and [...]

By Russ Burlingame

The comics industry mourns a legend today after reports emerged of the passing of artist and editor Carmine Infantino. ComicBook.com reached out to a number of creators to ask if they'd like to say something about Infantino, and will continue to update this as they respond to our inquiry and/or if we find something on social media. J.M. DeMatteis Very sorry to hear of Carmine Infantino's passing.  His Flash and Batman were two of the defining images of my childhood.  Infantino was an artist of elegance and power, one of the truly great cover artists, and a consummate storyteller.  (And let's not forget that, as DC publisher, he was the guy who brought Kirby to DC in 1970:  without him, no New Gods.)   His contributions to our industry were massive.  My heartfelt condolences to Carmine's family and friends. Fred Hembeck Carmine Infantino, sadly now also gone. He was pretty much my favorite DC artist back in the sixties. When he stopped drawing The Flash, I stopped buying the comic (at least for a while). I realize that ascending to an editorial position must've been a great triumph for him, but selfishly, I always regretted how that prevented readers like me from getting a regular fix of Infantino art each and every month during those prime years. I was thrilled when he came back to the drawing board, first at Warren, then Marvel, and ultimately DC, producing more of his stylishly graceful artwork. For me, there's very little that matches his early to mid-sixties runs on Adam Strange, The Flash, and Batman. He'll be missed. Dan Jurgens I only had the opportunity to chat with Carmine Infantino on a couple of brief occasions, but, as a kid, I spent hours and hours of time with his work. He was a dynamic artist who left a unique, visual signature on everything he did. On top of that, I consider him the single best cover artist/designer ever. Some of his covers are truly epic, so enticing in nature that they practically forced a kid with a quarter in his pocket to buy them. Rest in peace, Carmine. Erik Larsen What a tragic loss. What a terrific talent. One of the best cover designers of his--or anybody's--generation. A superb storyteller. A stylist. An impressionist. A unique visionary artist. I didn't grow up with Carmine's work. I wasn't old enough to be there for Adam Strange or The Flash. Carmine was one of those guys whose work  became more and more stylized over the years. If you were there to see the progression you could fall into that world and grow with it as he grew. If you were approaching it late in the game it looked a bit foreign. A bit weird. A bit abstract. Same could be said of Jack Kirby, whose work took a very stylized and abstract turn later in life. I was, I'll admit, a bit put off at first but it grew on me and it got me looking back to see where it all came from. Carmine was, like many artists, his own best inker. His loose, frantic pencils presented something of a challenge. Those not up for the task did more harm than good. I really warmed to his work on Spider-Woman, inked at first by Steve Leialoha and later Al Gordon. Both gentlemen had it figured out. His work will live forever. George Pérez So sad to learn of the passing of another comic book legend. Carmine Infantino was one of the great influential artists in the history of the medium and I will always look upon his Adam Strange, Flash and Space Museum stories as wondrous examples of fantasy made even more magical at the hands of a master. RIP, Carmine. Greg Rucka I genuinely don't know what to say other than I'm crushed at his passing. His was a tremendous, defining talent for me, so fundamental to my introduction and love of comics. I didn't know him but through his work. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by how much his passing saddens me, and yet I am. We are poorer today, and we are smaller today, and my heart and my best hopes for all who remember him go out to his family and friends. Arlen Schumer R.I.P. THE GREAT CARMINE INFANTINO: Though he had drawn for many comic book publishers since he was a teenager in the 1940s—--the Golden Age of Comics--Carmine Infantino's style matured at DC Comics by the mid-1950s to make him the premiere DC artist of the Silver Age. He earned this title with his absolutely modern delineation of the first true Silver Age hero, super-speedster The Flash, in '56. His two-dimensional depictions of speed and motion—among many graphic innovations Infantino displayed during his eleven-year run on the strip—remain benchmarks in the medium. Science fiction landscapes and motifs received Infantino's signature stylization in his concurrent, memorable run on DC's interplanetary hero Adam Strange, and then, with the more down-to-earth Batman, whom he redesigned for the '60s (clearing the runway for the runaway success of the '66 TV series), Infantino earned his place in the pantheon of definitive Batman artists. His striking and successful cover designs for Batman and a myriad of DC titles led to his being named Art Director in '67, then subsequently Editorial Director, Publisher and finally President of DC Comics, setting the style for the company and leading it into one of its most fertile, creative periods ever. Though Infantino was the first artist to attain such heights in the history of comics, it came with a price: the de facto loss of Infantino the great comic book artist. "The enigma of my art is it never fully matured," Infantino said in his autobiography. "I stopped drawing in favor of attaining the executive positions. My artwork is an unfinished symphony, a painting never completed, a baby never raised. I'm not lamenting the creative loss; nobody forced me to stop drawing. What direction my unfinished symphony might have taken remains a mystery." You WILL be remembered well, Carmine! Neal Adams When I went to the School of Industrial Art, the only vocational art high school in the world, as far as I know, Sol Harrison, Head of Production at DC Comics, came to visit our school. He spoke of how bad the comic book industry was, and that it was a failing industry, even though many alumni from SIA, continued to due work there. I'm sure his talk was devastating to some, but all I saw was the original art pages that Sol had brought with him, that lined the auditorium. At the end of his talk that I really never heard a word of, because he was, well...boring, and probably since he didn't want to carry them back to DC Comics, he offered to leave the pages behind, to be divided between the cartooning students. You may have seen a pack of hyenas on the Discovery Channel pursue and devour their prey! This was us, of course. Within 30 seconds we had devoured our spoils, and now the business of trading-up with each other, to improve our position and secure our personal favorites, began. I got more pages than anyone else, because I leap-frogged the desks to get to the pile. But others had snagged prizes as the teacher tried to deal with it fairly. I had two Wayne Boring Supermans, but somebody had a Joe Kubert page. Wouldn't he rather have two Wayne Boring Superman's? Yes, the sucker would. I got an Eli Katz, but I didn't recognize the name on the back, Eli Katz. I kept it anyway. Turned-out to be Gil Kane. Then I got a Dan Barry. It wasn't an exciting page, but boy, was it well-drawn. I had two Ross Andrews and a Flash. But somebody had a Pow-Wow Smith penciled and inked by Carmine Infantino. What to do, what to do? Would this sucker take a Flash penciled by Carmine, and inked by Joe Giella, and a Ross Andrew? He did. I went off chortling to myself. Now you might think Carmine inked by other, even good inkers like Joe, was the same as Carmine inked by Carmine, it wasn't, and of course I love Joe Giella's work, and the guy. The work inked by Carmine almost wasn't comic book work. It had this scritchy, sketchy line. Almost like Carmine was still sketching while he was inking. Pow-Wow Smith's eyeball didn't look like an eyeball at all, it looked like a sketchy, glowing sun was the cornea, and it was trying to tell me it was something else. Anyway, time went by, I didn't get to work for DC Comics. Nobody did. I worked for everyone else in the world. I did work for Archie Comics, Advertising Illustration, comics for advertising, and even a Syndicated Comic Strip. Regular comic books were indeed, apparently, a terrible business to be in, as Sol Harrison had said. But things were beginning to change. Jack Kirby had arrived at Timely Comics and he and Stan were scaring the b'jesus out of DC Comics. I found myself temporarily in need of work. Even the Eu-ych Comic Books (any port in a storm). I got to see Bob Kaniger at DC, the war comics editor, and began my real career down the road of self-destruction, into comic books. First visit, I walked by a room with two editing desks and a drawing table. I asked about the guy at the drawing table, the only artist, who worked daily at DC Comics on the premises. It was Carmine Infantino. A couple of weeks later, I forced myself to introduce myself to him, and this is what I used as the excuse of that introduction. I brought in that Pow-Wow Smith original to hand to him. He was gracious, mildly interested, (apparently artists just handed in pages and watched them disappear into the draws and even cut-up and destroyed, I later found). But keeping them was not a priority. Getting paid $50. a page, was. And so I loosed my treasure into Carmine's hand. I cannot tell you how much it meant to me, while I kept it, and then when I gave it back to Carmine. I honestly don't have the words for it. I was able to give Joe Kubert back the two pages I had of his. He thanked me too. But I could see in all of this, that the world that Joe Kubert lived in, and the world that the brilliant, individualistic, stylistic, Carmine Infantino lived in, was going to have to change. They didn't realize their own greatness, only I did. Just to have those pages, for the six or seven years that I had them, inspired me, more than you can imagine. I know everybody else has a different view of Carmine Infantino, and that you folks can't really share this view of mine. I can only tell you that it was profound and significant, and I wish I could share the real feeling of that time with you. I wish Carmine had put out all those cigars so he could still be with us. And DC Comics, when in God's name, are you going to reprint all of Carmine's work for us, you knuckleheads?

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