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Carmine Infantino, Linchpin of DC's Silver Age

When discussing DC's Silver Age superhero revival, one name really typifies the art and some of the design that made that period work. Carmine Infantino put his stamp all over DC's early Silver Age. In a sense, one could describe him as the Neal Armstrong of that virile era, in that he designed and drew DC's official first comics of the Silver Age, the first appearance of Flash in Showcase in 1956.

Background

Born in New York in 1925, Carmine Infantino would belong to a generation of comics artists born within a five year period including Gil Kane (1923), John Buscema (1926), Nick Cardy (1924?), Curt Swan, John Severin, Wally Wood, and many other noteworthies of the medium who worked in comics in the 1960s.

Golden Age Work

Still in his teens, Infantino managed to find work for Timely (the company that would become Atlas, then Marvel) illustrating its Jack Frost feature. This period probably provided him the industry connections that would serve him well in his years as an art director, then editor, then publisher.

From Timely, Infantino nearly became an assistant to Al Capp of L'il Abner fame, but decided, on his father's advice, not to take a position that would have required him to move from New York to Boston. Instead, however, he found work all over the industry, including projects for Biro and for Quality Comics. He even managed a stint doing work for Will Eisner, a still-living (as of November 1999) comics legend whose name evokes the same kind of awe as that of Jack Kirby.

At nineteen, he enrolled in the Art Student's League, and subsequently entered programs at the Brooklyn Museum of art. Around 1944, he found work at National Periodical Publications, known as DC Comics today, just in time to see his friend Frank Giacoia, plus comics legends Joe Kubert and Alex Toth, start working for that company.

DC Cover Artist

Infantino worked on projects like Johnny Quick and the Shining Knight, and when DC decided to experiment with made-over Golden Age superheroes like the Flash, editors handed him the Flash project in 1956. The success of the Flash in Showcase, followed two months later by Jack Kirby's "Challengers of the Unknown," inclined editor Sheldon Moldoff to venture further into the then-sparse medium of superhero comics.

With the success of the Flash, Infantino would also receive work with other new DC characters like Adam Strange and the Elongated Man; however, his tenure on the Flash in Showcase and his own eponymous title would define how comics readers remembered his illustration work.

Infantino began to attract notice by the success of his cover art and became, for a time, DC's official cover artist. He also spent some time on Batman, defining one of the clear visual periods of that character about the time of the Batman television show.

Director, then Editor, then Publisher

The fledgeling Marvel Comics, enjoying surprising success with titles like Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, noted Infantino's work and made him an offer in an attempt to lure him away from DC. DC, not quite willing to match the dollar amount involved, instead offered him a promotion to Art Director, and Infantino stayed with DC instead.

Corporate restructuring resulted in another promotion to Editor in 1967, a position that Infantino claims essentially landed in his lap. From this point forward, however, Infantino would shape the directions DC followed, involving himself in hiring decisions, the invention of new properties, and the soliciting of DC comics themed films and cartoons.

In another restructuring, Infantino became Publisher of DC comics, a position he would hold for several years.

From his days as an art director, however, he found himself more and more involved in front-office work, and soon found himself unable to find time to do any art at all. He would also manage to leave a number of industry luminaries with considerable ill-will directed at himself.

Management Achievements

The presence of figures like Dennis O'Neil, Dick Giordano, and Jim Aparo in the fertile years of DC in the late sixties and early seventies owes mainly to Infantino headhunting the talent away from Charlton Comics.

Infantino also did what he could to involve DC Comics in other media, such as movies and animation. He reportedly personally went to California to pitch the "Super Friends" cartoon concept to Hanna-Barbara and also involved himself in the script negotiations about a planned Superman movie that would ultimately appear as Superman and Superman II.

Neal Adams, an essentially peerless comics legend, would come to DC under Infantino, and inherited Infantino's duties as the main cover artist for DC. DC in those days preferred to keep a central cover artist to present a consistent front to its products. Marvel accused DC of "bait-and-switch" marketing for putting top talent on covers for books completed by other, sometimes less able, craftsmen. During this period, Infantino still frequently laid out covers which he then had Neal Adams dilineate from his designs; Infantino says Adams did his best cover work from such layouts and could take another's concept places the originator might never reach.

However, Infantino seemed better at recognizing (and headhunting) talent than making such talent happy to perform for him. He purportedly added work to Neal Adams' load so consistently that it became impossible for Adams to meet deadlines, and did not adjust deadlines to meet ever- increasing workloads.

Infantino came to the height of his power just as the Silver Age began to end, sales-wise, and found himself having to scramble to attempt to keep a sinking boat afloat for several years.

The Crash of 1976

Flagging sales that no gimmick seemed able to prop up inclined Infantino to suggest to Stan Lee a reciprocal arrangement in which each company would limit itself to twenty titles, a deal not completely unfamiliar to Lee, who would recall the period when DC distributed Marvel's books and imposed upon them a title limitation. Though the double books, like Strange Tales, remain classic items for Silver Age collectors, Lee didn't want to step back to that kind of limitation.

Perhaps Infantino's rare ability to annoy the people he dealt with helped incline Stan Lee to deliberately and with clear hostile intent expand Marvel's line in the mid-seventies. Whether this actually ballooned up to the sixty or seventy books that Infantino claims Marvel used to flood the market (and, hopefully, consume all available shelf space, forcing DC off the racks and into extinction) we may not have the means to confirm; but we can believe Infantino's claim that DC matched Marvel title for title in an attempt to keep their shelf space on the spinner racks and to retain their market share.

Some combination of factors, doubtless including the mid-seventies contraction of the comics market (evidenced by the "DC Implosion"), the steady exodus of talent who took poorly to Infantino's (and the corporation's) management style for its comics division, and, most probably, the notion that cleaning house might fix everything led DC management to call Infantino, the director, editor, and publisher, into the front office, and they dismissed him from his position at DC in 1976.

From a reader's standpoint, bad things did happen at DC during his watch. DC lost Neal Adams, Jack Kirby, and Nick Cardy, a troika of talent that, in happier times, could have done much to remake a company suffering from a reputation for lack of innovation even in an age where DC's experimentation with concepts and formats seemed unconstrained by any rule except one that Infantino implies he supported: that DC should not attempt to remake itself in Marvel's image.

Could DC have done better by flouting this last principle and, after all, imitate Marvel? DC had considerable success attracting talent from other companies, including Marvel (that DC should have scored Jack Kirby, one of Marvel's two or three true fathers, demonstrates this ability). As late as the mid-seventies, observers of the medium could criticize Justice League of America under Steve Englehart's pen as having become too Marvel-like, as if that term inherently meant something bad.

As of the eighties, the question became moot. Enough talent, including editors, had worked for both companies: Marv Wolfman, Gerry Conway, Len Wein, Steve Englehart, Roy Thomas, Dennis O'Neil, and truckloads of others had dabbled across the company divide. Furthermore, DC's biggest success of the early eighties, the Wolfman-Perez Teen Titans, presented DC comics with Marvel talent and Marvel editorial standards.

Post-DC Infantino

Infantino's reputation and analysis of his statements suggest that he has a rugged character and probably can take as much as former employees claim he once dished out. However he might have coped with his fall from the peak of DC, he did not leave comics at that point.

The mid-seventies and early eighties show numbers of Infantino pieces. He did work for Marvel's licensed Star Wars title, with a style that seemed to influence the famous Howard Chaykin's work on the same title (though his later work would seem to have shed any such influence). He did covers and some interiors for Avengers as late as the early 1980s.

He even returned to do work for DC on such Infantino-connected properties as the Flash, though during his return he used the same modified and angular style typical of his Marvel work. During the years when he hadn't had the time to dabble in art himself, his feel for the work changed somewhat, a change very clear to an observer who compares his early DC Silver Age pieces to work after 1976.

Infantino may still do occasional pieces of comics art. He said nothing in his Comic Book Artist interview to indicate that he had stopped working in the medium altogether. However, his name doesn't appear on major titles for the big companies often enough to notice these days.

Some artists do continue working in their seventies. Ditko does, and Gil Kane does, and John Buscema does. However, none of these revered names appears all over a product line like it did in the 1960s.

Once DC gets around to properly anthologizing early Flash pieces, however, Infantino's work will see wide circulation again, especially if DC figures out that some equivalent to Marvel's inexpensive line of Essentials reprint volumes can bring in more money than it would cost to produce. Hopefully DC will get the idea soon enough that Infantino gets to see some of his own reprint royalties during his lifetime.