![](\"http:\/\/thecomicbooks.com\/misc\/JamieInfantino.jpg\")
A much younger me with Carmine Infantino. Picture taken at Hobby Star Toronto ComiCon, April, 2007<\/p><\/div>\n
—<\/p>\n
Carmine Infantino is a legend in the comic industry. He’s best known for drawing\/co-creating the Silver Age Flash that first appeared in Showcase Comics #4, which gave birth to the Silver Age of Comics. He was also the artist involved in Batman’s “New Look” and his work on Batman spurred the famous Batman 60s camp TV show. In the 70s he was promoted Editorial Director of DC Comics. As Editorial Director he would make many changes to DC Comics, among them promoting artists into editor positions.<\/p>\n
Infantino would also be an uncredited contributor for the late 70s Superman 1 and 2 movies and personally approved Christopher Reeve as the actor to play Superman. This interview was done live at the HobbyStar Toronto Comicon on Sunday April 15th. Along with me was my friend Nancy asking questions and along with Carmine was publisher J. David Spurlock helping Infantino with some details of his career.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jamie:\u00a0<\/strong>You mentioned in another interview that you had created your own superheroes when you were younger?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Yes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0What Were those Superheroes?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> That I worked on?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Yes.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Jack Frost was one of the very first ones I created, that was sort of a Superhero. That was around 1941 – 42. That was the first thing I worked on. No, I worked for Fox before that. They gave me a script, I did it, they didn’t like it and didn’t pay me. That was my beginning.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0You mentioned that you created a character named Captain Whiz..?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> I was a fan of Captain Marvel. A big fan. In fact, when I took over DC I brought him over remember? So I was fan. I created a character called Captain Whiz and the Colors of Evil. I created a whole bunch of characters, I forget the names, all I used were colors.\u00a0Purple, Orange, Gray, so on and so forth. Then Julie (Schwartz) was looking for a character, the Flash, I told him I had this thing, I couldn’t sell it. I did everything I could to sell it.<\/p>\n We had a tradition, Julie and I, where we created a cover we were always trying to one up each other. We always did cliff hanger covers, you know like in the old serials, at the end you’d the guy in a car and it would go off the cliff and that’s how it ended. The next week you’d see the guy outside the car, hanging onto the cliff. So finally one day I decided “I’m gonna fix this bum” and drew a cover with both Flashes on it (Flash #123, introducing the concept of Multiple Earths). But by the time I got home, he already had a script for me.<\/p>\n Julie was a very good editor. I worked for him for about 35 years. We did a lot of work together, he and I. We did Adam Strange. I didn’t create Adam Strange though, I was in Korea at the time. Someone else did. What else did we do..<\/p>\n <\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0Pow Wow Smith, Detective Chimp.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0That was all before the Flash. Comics were dying at that time. The Flash opened up an all new era for comics.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0Elongated Man. Super-Chief.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0Oh yeah yeah, Super-Chief. It was not an incendiary character. From there we tried Sports too. Strange Sports. Remember that? It was a very difficult one to do, with the captions and everything. To promote Action, that’s why I did it that way.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0He also did Airboy and the Heap in the Golden Age.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah I wrote some of those.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0Animal Man.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0Animal Man. On the Flash I did little hands pointing at the captions.\u00a0You don’t read captions as a rule, so I drew hands (laughter). It was just a gimmick.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0I understand you created Poison Ivy?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Yes. The only reason she came about was because of Catwoman on the Batman show. They wanted more female villains. What was the other one I did.. the Silver Fox! And then Batgirl. That show, because of it we were selling a million copies a month. But that show, when it died, so did the comic books. Because it was so corny, y’know, Pow! Zam! You couldn’t take Batman seriously for a while. So we had to rebuild him.<\/p>\n One of the great writers was Eddie Harron. He was the Editor in Chief of Stars and Stripes, a famous newspaper during WWII. He worked on Captain Marvel and did a lot of work at DC. He and Bill Finger were brilliant writers. Eddie was just as good, if not more creative.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nancy:<\/strong>\u00a0One thing I rarely hear anybody talk about in interviews are the colorists. I love the coloring on the old DC covers from the 60s.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> That was Jack Adler, but he didn’t do the coloring.\u00a0He farmed it out to different people. Tatjana Wood, she was a terrific, unbelievable, brilliant colorist. She was Wally Woods Wife, then ex-Wife. There were 3 other people besides her and I had to approve it.<\/p>\n She knew I hated the color purple. And she would purposely stick it in there, she’d fight me all the time. She was a wonderful colorist. Sorry I can’t remember the other guys name.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0When you were promoted to editor, did any of the other editors have a problem with that?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> No, no, no, they bought it right away. If they didn’t, they kept their mouths shut.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0They wanted to keep their jobs, so they kept their mouths shut (laughter).<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0There was no fooling around, they accepted it immediately. I didn’t have any problems. If I had, I would have thrown them out (laughter). I did get rid of some of them. I reshaped the company because I wanted more artists as editors. There wasn’t enough of that at DC so I brought them in, [Joe] Orlando, Dick Giordano, and that helped quite a bit.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:\u00a0<\/strong>Joe Kubert as well.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Joe as well, I’m sorry. Bob [Kaniger] got sick at that time. Kaniger was a fine editor. So I asked Joe, could you please take over? And he did and it worked out quite well. They were all good, all 3 were excellent.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:\u00a0<\/strong>In the 70s, were you involved at all with the CCA, the Comics Code?\u00a0The guideline changes?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> No, I wasn’t involved in that at all. We just went right through it. What happened was we just ignored it after a while.\u00a0Y’know when it broke? When Stan and I both did the drug stories, you remember that? Stan did it first.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0They couldn’t do any type of drug story and they both did an anti-drug story.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0Only thing was different was I got some guy in there to make sure it was wholesome first. Stan did it crazy, having some guy jumping off the roof. It was haphazard. He got yelled at for it. I was a little more careful.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Going back to Captain Marvel. What are the details of you using the character?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> I just went to them [Fawcett], said I loved the character. They said, fine, take it, just give us a percentage. It was that simple.\u00a0I put Julie Schwartz as an editor of that book and that was a mistake I made. C. C. Beck wanted to be the editor but he never said a word to me.\u00a0He should have said something, I would have given it to him. He knew what the character was about and how he worked, he knew the flavor.\u00a0Julie didn’t know the flavor of it.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0Julie’s background was in science fiction. Everything he did was based in science fiction really.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0So you didn’t have to convince Kinney [then DC owner] to buy Shazam or anything?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> I didn’t ask anybody, I just did it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0You went over to the Philippians to get some artists. Who came up with that idea?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Me, because we ran out of decent artists. There was a Filipino named Tony De Zuniga who was already working for DC. He said there were a lot of cartoonists over there making peanuts.\u00a0Unfortunately, I put him [De Zuniga] in charge in the Philippians. The rule was, you paid them a certain rate, a good rate, and you get 10%<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0They set up a studio, De Zuniga and his wife set up a studio in the Philippians and they would hand the scripts out to the artists there.\u00a0The artists would turn in the artwork there and they would forward it to New York.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0I wanted certain artists and I wasn’t getting them.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0He was wondering why am I not getting Nester Rodondo and Alex Nino, who were the top guys and instead getting other people? Then Carmine went to San Diego and one of the Filipino guys went to him and wanted to know why he was ripping off the Filipinos? They asked, why are you only paying us $5 a page? He said, no I’m paying you $50 dollars a page. She [De Zuniga wife] were keeping $45 dollars a page and paying them $5 a page.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0That’s what she was paying them. I got rid of her immediately. She wrote to me ‘How dare you tell me what to do. Don’t tell us how to run our business.’ And that was the end of that. Then I put Nestor [Redondo] in charge and he started doing the same thing.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0They actually felt like, because the Filipinos were used to being paid so little, it was a waste to pay them anymore.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0It was so bad, Nino walked around with no shoes.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:\u00a0<\/strong>When he and Orlando and DeZuniga first went over there, artists from all over the country shoeless and with their families would show up.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0They were starving, starving. It was a very sad thing to see. When we got there, I knew there was going to be a problem. The car that we had alternated as a cop car and had a machine gun sitting on the roof. The hotel said, this is a big problem, you shouldn’t be riding around that way. That was when the Marcos was in charge, the dictator. They got a little piece of everything too. After a while everybody came here. Alex Nino is in Japan now, that’s what I heard.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0In the 70s there were a lot of returns coming in from the newsstands…<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> You know who complained about that? Neal Adams. Neal had a fan, a big heavy fan, he was a dealer. He came yelling at me ‘You killed the Deadman.’ I said, ‘what are you talking about?’ He says,\u00a0‘300,000 copies of that was sold, you shouldn’t have killed the book.’ I said, ‘that’s interesting, I only printed 275,000 of them.’ (laughter) Neal was spreading that story around. It was his writing that ruined it.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0That was just fluffed up stuff. That was when people started to figure out that when there was a new book or a Neal Adams book there was a greater market then what they were seeing at the newsstands. People were finding out where these comics were coming into town and were making deals to pay somebody off, and take stacks of hot new comics and they wouldn’t make it to the newsstands. He [Adams] was talking 100,000,\u00a0200,000 a book and yeah some of that did happen, but Carmine, he amazingly remembers a lot of those numbers.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong>\u00a0It was maybe a couple thousand of them. Neal was imagining things. It wasn’t major. I remember those numbers.\u00a0Bat Lash, was my favorite book. I couldn’t make it work. I wrote it. I desperately wanted to keep it, but I couldn’t do it. The numbers talk, you don’t talk.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Were you at all suspicious about the returns?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> We knew they were stealing some, but it was a minimal amount. When you print 300,000 or 400,000 and they steal maybe\u00a05000 it doesn’t mean that much.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Comics were 10 cents for so long..<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Then 12, then 15..<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Do you think the industry hurt itself by keeping them so cheap for so long?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> What they are doing now with the thick ones? That’s a pretty good bargain. Black and white, 15 dollars. I had some work in them and they are selling quite well ain’t I right?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah the Showcase books.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> So are the Marvel ones. I get paid well for them so they must be selling well (laughter).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0But do you think it was a mistake to keep them so cheap for so long?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> You couldn’t do anything about it. The distributors would really dictated the price. Plus the newsstands, they had to make a certain amount on a book and if they didn’t make that, you were off the stands. You know, there was a diminishing space for comic books. Can’t make money, they don’t want it. Used to be you’d sell over 6 million books in a month, now you sell 250,000. There’s something wrong. The whole business. The creativity part doesn’t mean anything. It’s the business end that dictates what happens, unfortunately.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0I know you tried other formats.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> I tried everything. Big, small, everything. It\u00a0didn’t work. The big ones, we even gave them boxes to put them in. Even\u00a0that wouldn’t work. We tried anyway.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Did you go to any of the early comic conventions?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> No. Well, I think I went to some as an editor, but\u00a0not as an artist. There was a teacher that started all that, you\u00a0remember his name?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Phil Suiling.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Suiling. He began the market that never existed\u00a0before. That was Phil.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0He became a distributor, Seagate.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Did you ever think the Direct Market would ever overtake the newsstand\u00a0market?<\/p>\n Carmine Infaninto:<\/strong> No, never realized it. It was never that big. When I was\u00a0there it was selling a couple of thousand a month, at most. We didn’t\u00a0change to it all that much. But I heard it grew like hell later on.\u00a0Comics couldn’t exist without it now. Different, lots of changes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Are you surprised they are still publishing comics books these days?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Well they aren’t making money that’s for sure. It’s\u00a0the tail wagging the dog now, they have to put them out for the\u00a0copyright. They gotta do it. They make their money back 10 times over\u00a0with the toys and games and films and everything.<\/p>\n As I said, the tail is wagging the dog. They have to keep doing it.\u00a0Pulps began, then comics took over. Comics will have to develop into\u00a0something different.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0The Graphic Novel format is doing well in bookstores. Most of it is Manga.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Carmine Infantino<\/strong> (to Nancy):\u00a0You read any Manga?<\/p>\n Nancy:<\/strong>\u00a0Yeah<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> What is the secret behind it? I can’t figure it out.<\/p>\n Nancy:<\/strong>\u00a0I don’t know. I used to watch the cartoons and I used to like those.\u00a0The Manga I don’t know, I read more comics.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> They are very popular for some reason. And they’re\u00a0very static you know?<\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0There is a lot of emotion in it.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Is that what it’s about? There is a lot of sex too\u00a0isn’t there?<\/p>\n Nancy:<\/strong>\u00a0It depends on the book. There are some more extreme genres. Manga\u00a0plays on the girls a lot with the drama. But this got me thinking, were\u00a0you involved in the romance period?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> I drew them, yes. We tried again to bring them back,\u00a0the titles. Joe Simon created them, so I made him do them. They\u00a0collapsed like that. In those days it didn’t interest them. It couldn’t\u00a0touch what they do on TV. Forget it, y’know? It’s too calm.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Siegel and Shuster.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> I never met them. They got screwed badly, no\u00a0question about it. They both died. Joe had bad eyesight. He was coming\u00a0home from a movie and he got mugged. But they settled with DC, and what\u00a0they get.. 25 grand a piece I think, and some licensing. There is a\u00a0lawsuit still going on about Superboy. They haven’t settled it. DC made\u00a0an offer but the family wants a lot more. I have no idea what they are\u00a0offering.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0You went and worked for Marvel.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Yeah, I worked for a lot of people. Marvel,\u00a0Hanna-Barbera, I’m all over the place, I never hang around for very long\u00a0(laughter).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nancy:<\/strong>\u00a0Did you only retired recently?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> No, I’m retired… Jesus, David.. when did I retire?\u00a0I was retired and then he made me come back (laughter).<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0Well, it was a gradual thing. On occasions and even recently he’s\u00a0accepted special projects. He recently did a cover for DC. He was still\u00a0doing the Batman comic strip up until the early 90s. He was working\u00a0steadily early 90s, and he was teaching at the same time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Where were you teaching?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> The School of Visual Arts.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0That was the school that Hogarth co-founded. A lot of people taught\u00a0there. Joe Orlando, I taught there. Kurtzman, Eisner, the greatest\u00a0comics people all taught there. And some of them went there as students.\u00a0Ditko went there, Wally Wood.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jamie:<\/strong>\u00a0Did you go to school there?<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> Yes. I studied there with Jack Potter. He too was a\u00a0big fan of design. But he had such a complex way, he just threw in\u00a0everything that you knew.<\/p>\n J. David Spurlock:<\/strong>\u00a0It’s a different orientation. Most people think of, what I refer to as\u00a0draftsmanship. They trying to put dimensions into the drawings. He\u00a0wasn’t worried about that. He wanted to do something more interesting.\u00a0Something to keep you artistically aware, so he was looking for\u00a0something different. His teachers gave him a different orientation. He’s\u00a0a big fan of art, you go into his apartment he’s got art everywhere.<\/p>\n Carmine Infantino:<\/strong> The French Impressionists. I’m a very big fan of their work. And Amedeo\u00a0Modigliani especially. You know his history? After they brought his\u00a0casket through the streets of Paris his girlfriend jumped out the\u00a0window. There is a plaque on the street marking where she died. Now\u00a0that’s true love (laughter).<\/p>\n The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino<\/p><\/div>\n You can read more about Carmine Infantino’s life and works in his biography\u00a0The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino\u00a0(Amazon link)<\/a>. The book is also available\u00a0at Vanguard Publishing<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This was originally\u00a0published in May, 2007.\u00a0I feel I should note that some Filipino artists have given a different version of events regarding their working for DC. — Carmine Infantino is a legend in the comic industry. He’s best known for drawing\/co-creating the Silver Age Flash that first appeared in Showcase Comics #4, which gave birth to the Silver Age of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,130,36,32,100],"tags":[178,141,185,168,166,175,180,171,167,173,184,139,170,172,182,169,151,177,179,186,181,174,183,176],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collectortimes","category-creator-rights","category-creators","category-history","category-interview","tag-alex-nino","tag-bill-finger","tag-c-c-beck","tag-captain-marvel","tag-carmine-infantino","tag-cca","tag-direct-market","tag-eddie-harron","tag-j-david-spurlock","tag-jack-adler","tag-jack-potter","tag-jerry-siegel","tag-joe-kubert","tag-joe-shuster","tag-joe-simon","tag-julie-schwartz","tag-neal-adams","tag-nester-rodondo","tag-phil-suiling","tag-poison-ivy","tag-romance-comics","tag-tatjana-wood","tag-the-school-of-visual-arts","tag-tony-de-zuniga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jamiecoville.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.thecomicbooks.com\/misc\/InfantinoBio.jpg\")