RIP Carmine Infantino
ctowner1
Posts: 481
Damn. One of the all-time comics giants and, based on my personal experience, one of the all-time nice guys. I took a comic art course from him at the NYC School of Visual Arts back in 1992 or so - he was a terrific teacher (I'm talentless!) - and listening to him talk about comics - it was stunning. He would give us pages to compose - and you'd spend an hour trying to figure out the best way to tell the story - and he would effortlessly show you an elegant, powerful, simple solution. A giant loss in the comics community.
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Can't say I was a huge fan of his art, but he was a true workhorse and his contribution to the industry was monumental. I have lots of his issues in my collection.
The thing about his work is that while his early stuff was heavily influenced by Milt Caniff (much like Kirby, Meskin, and nearly everyone else in comics in the Golden Age), during the ’50s he became much more influenced by architecture and fine art (particularly Degas and Modigliani). Even though he’d been a professional artist for several years, he began studying under William McNulty and then illustrator Jack Potter, and his focus shifted from figure drawing to design. It was this shift and these new influences, which all came from a desire to keep learning and growing as an artist, that led him to develop a truly unique style and voice, and to become one of the best artists in comics history.
I've always dug his Star Wars stuff. Quirky but full of energy.
Plus he designed all of Flash’s rogues’ gallery and what I think is one of the best superhero costumes ever, the yellow-and-red Kid Flash costume. Not to mention the period he spent as art director, during which he designed nearly every cover DC produced
Also, the Immortal Man, another minor Strange Adventures hero that Infantino drew.
And, yeah, the modifications on Spider-Woman were a welcome improvement -- still used to this day.
And he was also responsible for attempting to modernize the DC books to compete with Marvel in the 1960s. He wasn't always successful, but he at least got titles like Batman to shift away from the wacky sci-fi stuff of the 1950s and inch closer to what we think of as the character.
newsfromme.com/2013/04/06/more-about-carmine-infantino/
herocomplex.latimes.com/comics/carmine-infantino-an-appreciation-by-mark-waid/#/8
Infantino was the artist and he became THE Flash artist for me, the one with whom I compared all the others who came after. The way he drew superspeed in this second run on Flash was beautiful, dynamic, and wholly unique to him. Nobody else seemed able, or willing, to delineate it the way Infantino did.
I was talking with Pants at Super Show last weekend about how I was watching an Infantino Flash page online near the end of last year. it was from that first issue I bought, had Flash racing across the page, and was exactly what I wanted to add to my collection. But I needed to wait for tax time before I'd be able to afford it. But, it was sold very early this year, before I could pull the trigger. So, I did another search and found some other pages. when news of his passing came across the web, I knew it was time. I don't have very many original pages (5, total) and this one certainly holds a special place for me:
chris