« I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate. » — John Buchan
Over the course of several posts, I’ve extolled at length Carmine Infantino‘s skill as a cover designer. Yet the ability to envision and execute a single static image does not automatically translate into the skill of clearly and tidily breaking down a story into a suite of sequential panels, in much that same way that a superbly dexterous surgeon may be incapable of writing legibly. It pleases me to declare that Mr. Infantino’s no one-way specialist.
Infantino describes the evolution of his visual thinking: « The use of negative and positive shapes inside the panel had to mean something. So, to me, if the shapes didn’t draw the eye in, then they weren’t worthwhile. I had to move and change the shape to make it work for me. And that’s what I did. For me beforehand, the figure was the most important thing, and nothing else in the panel mattered. But later on, I found out that it was the total figure I had to worry about. » (all Infantino quotes excerpted from The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino: an Autobiography (2000, Vanguard Productions; edited by J. David Spurlock)
I’ve long wanted to feature this particular tale… for both script and artwork reasons. However, my copy was in Mysteries in Space: The Best of DC Science Fiction Comics (Apr. 1980, Simon and Schuster/Fireside; Michael Uslan, editor)… and I’d be all-but-guaranteed to destroy this beloved book in any attempt to scan from it. But — aha! — I’ve recently acquired a copy of DC Special no. 13 (Jul.-Aug. 1971), which granted the tale its first encore. Game on!
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Our featured story shares a central perspective with Russ Manning‘s rightly celebrated Magnus, Robot Fighter, whose inaugural issue had come out a mere two months earlier — though with that close a gap, it’s most likely a simple case of coincidence.
Are we getting less physically able with every succeeding generation, as our elders have been claiming for eons? Is it just a mistaken, shallow assessment arising from tone-deaf obduracy and bad faith — or have our forerunners all been correct about a general and ongoing decline?
-RG
vry funny pic
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Thank you for taking me back to those years of wonder of the early 1960s. Looking at the artwork and jolting memories of fragments of comics here and there had me realising what large body of work Infantino produced.
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“Yet the ability to envision and execute a single static image does not automatically translate into the skill of clearly and tidily breaking down a story into a suite of sequential panels, in much that same way that a superbly dexterous surgeon may be incapable of writing legibly.”
Great gosh-amighty, that’s some top-class writing!
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Thanks, Caspar — I guess I got a little carried away there. 😉
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