In 1971, I became a comic book fan at the age of eight. The comic that kicked off my lifelong passion was Flash #210. The cover featured the super-speedster hero reacting to the news displayed on a futuristic, rolling news-robot that President Abraham Lincoln had just been assassinated. “Impossible!” the Flash exclaims on the cover. “This is the year 2971!” What was not to love?
Once I got the issue home, I loved the lead story, but in the back of the comic was something really special. Under the header, “A Flash Classic,” was, “Invasion of the Cloud Creatures!” a tale reprinted from a 1960 issue of the Flash (three years before I was born!) that featured the Scarlet Speedster squaring off against a race of ancient sentient cloud beings who emerged from a volcano to wipe humanity from the face of the Earth.
Even though I was a total newbie to super-hero comics, I knew this story was something special. The new Flash story was drawn by Irv Novick and his artwork was attractive and perfectly serviceable, but the Flash in this “Classic” tale, drawn by Carmine Infantino, radiated a sense of speed and motion in every panel. Even the most cursory glance conveyed the illusion of animation. And the pages were filled with strange diagonals and long, skinny panels that defied the familiar logic of squares and rectangles that I knew from other comics. I couldn’t help but think, “Why isn’t this guy drawing the Flash full time?”
What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that he had drawn the Flash — from the reintroduction of the character in 1956 until 1967 when Infantino become art director for DC Comics, eventually working his way up to the position of publisher. But even though Infantino was no longer working at a drawing board, the early seventies were the golden age for reprints, and over the next few years, I eagerly grabbed up all the reprints of his work on the Flash, as well as discovering his artwork on the science fiction series “Adam Strange” and his successful run on the “new look” Batman comics of the 1960s.
