August, 1978. I’m eight years old, only a month away from my ninth birthday and the start of another school year. But that’s still weeks in the future, an eternity in kid time. For now, it’s summer vacation, it’s hot, and my days are my own in a way they never will be again. I pedal my candy-apple-red Schwinn bicycle — the one with the upswept handle bars and the banana seat — to the old Riverton Drug Store. Inside the cool, air-conditioned hush of the store, near the big front windows that look out on the town’s main drag (such as it is), I jangle the change in my pocket as I peruse the latest arrivals. I turn the wire spin-rack slowly, giving myself time to search, and to savor the quest. My eyes slide past the run-of-the-mill stuff: Superman, Batman, Richie Rich, Bugs Bunny, Casper the Lame-O Ghost. Those books are all fine, in their own ways, and I’ll buy plenty of them on other days, but today I’m after something in particular. I’ve been hanging on the edge of a cliff for a month now, and I’ve got to know what happens next. There’s a civil war about to explode on the water-planet Drexel, and Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are right smack in the middle of it… on opposite sides, naturally… And there it is! Issue number 14, “The Sound of Armageddon!” I have no idea what “armageddon” means — I’ll look it up in the family dictionary later — but the cover takes my breath away. All my star-warrior heroes and friends reunited again after a long period of separate, parallel storylines… blasterfire, tension, action, whatever those funky reddish-pink ray things in the background are supposed to be! I can tell already that I’m looking at a 32-page, four-color epic! I make my purchase from the kindly man at the counter, roll up the comic, and stuff it in my back pocket. (This is long before we worried about whether or not something was “collectible,” and there was no easier way to carry a comic or a paperback around.) Then I race for home, pumping my legs madly, closing the distance in a some kind of record time — my own personal little Kessel Run. Dropping my bike on the back lawn, I dash for my treehouse, my sanctum, the one place on the whole Bennion Compound where I can be certain I’ll be uninterrupted for a while, and, with the drowsy sounds of a stifling summer day in Utah pressing against my ear drums, I settle in to read my way back to that galaxy far, far away…

The death of legendary comic-book artist Carmine Infantino two weeks ago today — the same day as Roger Ebert — wasn’t quite the gut-punch that Ebert’s passing was, but it definitely gave me pause. Another of the creative minds who contributed so much richness to the flavor of my childhood… gone.

The official obituaries (typical example here) all seemed to focus on Infantino’s role in kicking off the so-called Silver Age of comics with his reinvention of The Flash — a character created in 1940 who’d fallen into obscurity by the late ’50s — as well as his updating of the venerable Batman, which some credit with leading to the classic Batman television series of the 1960s. The Silver Age was, of course, an immensely significant time in comic-book history. As I understand it (which admittedly might not be fully, because I’ve always been a comics dilettante, as opposed to a true fan), comic books had been very popular throughout the Depression and World War II, but sales plummeted in the years after the war. The simplistic storytelling and often crude artwork of the Golden Age lost its appeal as Modernism took hold, and the form seemed to be on the verge of dying out. (It probably didn’t help that this was also the time period when the comics industry came under attack by anti-communist witch-hunters and prudes like Frederic Wertham.) But the work of Infantino and others brought a new level of relative sophistication to the medium, and changes in the business side of the industry reinvigorated sales, especially of superhero titles, setting the stage for the decades of success and evolution comics have enjoyed since. So, yeah, that’s a big deal, and it’s entirely proper that the obits lead with all that stuff.

But for me personally — and I’m sure this won’t be the slightest surprise to anyone reading this blog — what really matters was Carmine Infantino’s work on the Star Wars comics of the late 1970s.

It’s probably hard to remember (or imagine, depending on your age) what it was like back then, during that strange interregnum between Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), when the world was not yet completely awash in Star Wars-branded merchandise and tie-in media. (You  know, that time when dinosaurs ruled the earth and we had to walk through the snow, uphill both ways, to get to school.) Back then, there was no Expanded Universe, no Internet forums or conventions, no animated spin-offs on TV. Darth Vader was not yet Luke Skywalker’s father (my own suspicion is that he wasn’t even Luke’s father in George Lucas’ mind, but that’s another blog entry). We knew next to nothing about the characters of Star Wars, or the Old Republic or the Jedi. Everything was open for speculation, because all we had to go on was a single, two-hour movie, which, let’s be honest, was pretty light on details. And we first-generation fanboys — girls too, although fannish tendencies in the ’70s were more pronounced in the male of the species than the female — were hungry for more. Hungry in a way I don’t think I’ve ever experienced since. We ached to know more about the backstory of our favorite movie, and to revisit the places and characters that had seized our young imaginations in a ferocious kung-fu grip. We wanted more Star Wars, more, more I say! More in any form we could get it… toys, games, posters… and most especially more stories. It was during this period that the Marvel Comics Group began publishing its officially licensed Star Wars monthly. For a long time, this was the only source of new SW adventures. Which means they loom very large in the memory and imagination of fans my age. Or at least in my memory and imagination.

The first six issues of the Marvel series were a straightforward adaptation of the movie, but starting with issue #7, the comics started offering up all-new storylines that saw our heroes swashbuckling their way through fantastic space-opera scenarios and settings. I’ve heard the Marvel writers were given no real guidelines on what they could or couldn’t do, other than a prohibition against Luke and Vader confronting each other directly (Lucas already knew that would have to happen in Empire). They were therefore free to invent pretty much anything they wanted… and they did, fleshing out a vast and diverse galactic civilization that, in retrospect, bears little resemblance to what we now understand as the Star Wars universe. But at the time, we star-kids accepted it all as gospel, from seven-foot-tall green humanoid rabbits to energy-sucking furrballs with human-sized intelligence and telepathic voices. I’ll be honest: even though the Marvel series has long been considered apocryphal by Lucasfilm and is generally dismissed as silly by modern fans, many of its details and events are every bit as “real” to me as anything we saw in the recent prequel movies.

The series endured until 1986, three years beyond the release of Return of the Jedi, and it eventually comprised 107 issues, plus three double-sized “annuals.” However, my own interest in it waned following the release of The Empire Strikes Back. The Marvel writers struggled to figure out how to handle Han Solo’s absence — remember, he was frozen in carbonite between the two movies, with an uncertain fate ahead of him — and the comics just weren’t the same without my favorite character in the mix. I never have gotten around to reading the later issues. But the issues published between the first two movies, in particular the story arcs involving the waterworld Drexel and a giant casino in space known as The Wheel, remain among my very favorite of all Star Wars stories. As it happens, this span coincides with the bulk of Carmine Infantino’s work on the series.

Infantino served as a penciler on the interior art, meaning he was responsible for the overall look of the comics he worked on. He also did quite a few of the covers, including the one pictured above, the one I remember being so excited about when I was eight. His style was somewhat peculiar — I remember one snarky letter-to-the-editor that asked if the artist used a T-square to draw everybody’s jawlines — but it was effective. His renditions of Our Heroes looked nothing like the actors who played them on screen,  but they did look like the characters, if that makes sense. At least they did to me. During that interminably long gap between the movies, his Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia were more vividly those characters in my mind than Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher were. I owe him a tremendous debt for helping to make that delay tolerable… and for giving me so many great images that I still carry with me today.

I had a really great childhood, when I think about it.

For more information on Carmine Infantino’s career and an analysis of his art, see this excellent piece from the LA Times. And until next time… Make Mine Marvel!