Strange Sports

Treasured Stories: “Saga of the Secret Sportsmen!” (1963)

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« 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!

Someone slightly goofed here : The Brave and the Bold no. 47 was published in April-May 1963, not 1953.

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« The silhouettes I used in ‘Strange Sports Stories‘ [featured in The Brave and the Bold nos. 45-49] were innovations. Julie [editor Julius Schwartz] gave me the script and said, ‘We want this book to look different.” That’s all he said, and I went home and what I devised to make it look different was by using silhouettes as a dramatic device. The action starts in the silhouette, and then you go to the conventional panel, and the action follows through. One might almost call it an animated treatment. »

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As smooth and effective as the Infantino-Anderson pairing looks, there was some friction behind the scenes. Infantino explains: « I was beginning to experiment at the time and I threw anatomy out in favor of a higher level of design. Murphy was an excellent draftsman and I’d try to explain what I was trying to achieve to him but this was quite contrary to his own sensibilities. The more stylized I became, the more he thought the work had to be ‘fixed up‘. At one point, he asked for a raise because he had to change my work so much. What he thought he had to ‘fix‘ was the new style I was most excited about. »

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.

A relevant page from Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. no. 1 (Feb. 1963, Gold Key); story and art by Manning, with input from editor Craig Chase, who initially pitched the idea of a SF hero to the publisher.

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