Lunch With Carmine.

So, I just had lunch with Carmine Infantino thanks to the awesome Christopher Irving. He was interviewing him as part of a NY Comic Creator history book he's putting together and he invited me to tag along.

This is the artist responsible for creating the Flash (Silver Age/Barry Allen) and his entire Rogues Gallery. He also is responsible for helping artists get royalties on their work, getting their artwork returned to them, increasing their page rates, and more. A true unsung hero in not only DC Comics history, but also superheroes and comic book publishing.

He brought a design sensibility to comics and helped bring many major talented artists to DC Comics, even working on the script for the Superman films with Mario Puzo. He partied with Stan Lee and challenged legendary editor Julius Scwartz's storytelling. A creator of many of DC's secondary characters, and one time editor, publisher and president.

I asked him what advice he had regarding writing and he had two pieces of advice. One: write it visually, always be thinking of how it will look on the page. Two: situation, complication, and twist. He had me repeat this last bit a few times and I will be sure to really refine my scripts around this structure.

I long for the days when comics can again be written based around cover art showing some sort of cliffhanger, then leaving it to the writer to come up with some sort of story to really play up this insane idea. It seems the days where comic companies would playfully push each other to create better comics, where rivals would get together for drinks and party, might be long gone.

Let's try and bring this back.

K