I’ve always had a strange relationship with the art of Carmine Infantino throughout my comics-reading life.

I had been exposed to reprints of some of his 1950s Flash work and loved the streamlined look, straightforward storytelling and futuristic cityscapes. But around the same time (mid-to-late 1970s), Infantino was also drawing Marvel titles like Spider-Woman and Star Wars in a more abstract and challenging style that seemed almost diametrically opposed to the simpler and more innocent stylings he had delivered for DC in the 1950s. Even more baffling, there was his name in the small print of DC’s comics, saying Infantino was the publisher. As a young reader, it was all kind of confusing.

First and foremost I knew as a youth I didn’t care for the more extreme style Infantino developed when he returned to full-time penciling in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Everyone was blocky and angular and the layouts seemed very samey from title to title, character to character and publisher to publisher. Now I know why.

Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur (TwoMorrows) is a liberally-illustrated book-length interview with Infantino, and he is in full-disclosure mode, letting interviewer Jim Amash in on the nuts and bolts of his long and storied career, naming names and occasionally letting loose with some shocking factoids that demonstrate the cartoonist isn’t afraid to speak his mind. In fact, the one flaw of the book is that Amash occasionally fails to follow up on these bombshells, sticking instead to his list of questions. The interview is informative and entertaining, but a little more curiosity (or a little less of a desire to be polite?) could have provided much more depth and nuance to the story of Infantino’s career.

The most interesting thing about the book to me — and Infantino did so much in comics that almost any reader is bound to be fascinated by some aspect of it — is the story of how the man went from penciler to publisher of DC Comics, almost by accident. Infantino tells the tale of how he presented his fellow artists with the news that he was now their boss, and one gets the sense that he was as surprised by the turn of events as his former peers no doubt were. In his decade-long run as publisher, Infantino inaugurated a number of innovative changes at DC, really pumping some life and vitality into the staid and conservative company, and Amash lets him expound at length on the problems and triumphs Infantino had during that era.

There’s a palpable air of sadness when Infantino outlines how his days as publisher came to an end, and when asked if he tried to reconnect with his former artistic peers once he was relegated once more to the role of freelance artist, he tells Amash “No. I kept away from everybody in the business. I withdrew completely. I felt lost. It hurt so deeply to lose that job, I just can’t tell you.” It’s just another in the thousands of stories of people that the corporate comics industry has chewed up and spit out, but the book puts a human face on that endless cycle of tragedy, and that’s a valuable contribution to our understanding of the comics industry.

What follows that segment is a rundown of Infantino’s latter years as a freelancer and commission artist, and it’s clear that what the industry did to Infantino was take a man who in his youth was excited about comics and storytelling, and reduce him to an elderly man who lost all heart for his work and did it for the paycheck with no interest in the stories he was drawing, a late career spent working solely on craft. Amash points out to Infantino some of the artistic highlights that came even during that era, and Infantino doesn’t seem to see it, but the overall impression of the man’s approach to his art is that whether he was fully-engaged and loving it, or doing it merely to survive, he never approached the work with less than professional standards and a desire to deliver what he promised. That’s a lesson many of today’s “superstar” writers and artists at DC and Marvel would do well to learn.

As art book, there are many dozens of well-reproduced examples here of the man’s pages and panels from all eras of his career, and seeing it all in one place really made me reconsider what I thought of Infantino’s art in my younger years. Even in his late-period Marvel stuff, there’s a real energy and wonky excitement on the page, and as Infantino points out, he was treated to some of the best inking of his career in that era, by the likes of Steve Leialoha, Terry Austin and Klaus Janson.  As an oral history of one man’s career in the comics industry, Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur is essential stuff.

— Alan David Doane

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review. Buy Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur from Amazon.com.