Comic book artist and editor Carmine Infantino died April 4. He was 87.
Infantino worked on various superhero comics for both DC and Marvel. His accomplishments included designing the costume for an updated version of The Flash, a comic whose success contributed to the superhero revival in the years after Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent.
As Toonpedia’s Don Markstein said —
Sleek, beautiful art by Carmine Infantino, illustrating stories by John Broome and occasionally Gardner Fox (who had created the original Flash) ensured the comic’s success.
[Thanks to Morris Keesan and John King Tarpinian for the story.]
Update 04/08/2013: Corrected name to Fredric Wertham. Thanks to those who gently pointed out the error.
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His art was sleek and streamlined, with a 1950s view of the future. His comic book work was also spare, often with city towers in the distance, with expansive space around his graceful figures. He was also pretty amusing; nobody took the Barry Allen Flash all that seriously at DC, at least not for years, and that included Infantino. He particularly enjoyed fooling around with the captions (the little boxes in the corners that described stuff and made comments). For The Flash, Infantino’s captions often had little hands pointing out details, gesturing, sometimes merely shrugging. He actually visualized Barry Allen on a cover–he’s amazed that he has the peculiar feeling he’s turning into a puppet. And that’s what Infantino drew.
I remember reading those Flash comics in the early 1960s, and whatever deficiencies the story line had were offset by a highly elegant and economical ink line.