When The Flash artwork arrived from National Comics it was a revelation. First, it was huge. It was the old 2-up size, a size that truly allowed the artists to be artists. At that proportion, the art really made an impact and the detail was amazing. Second, the pages reeked of cigar smoke. I would later learn that this was probably Carmine’s doing, but it just made the pages even cooler. From there, the pages became a graduate course in comic book art production. You could see the underlying pencils, the beautiful feathering of Murphy Anderson’s brushwork, and, lo and behold, mistakes. There was one page where Murphy must have knocked the ink bottle over or something because a third of one of the panels was covered with white-out (So that’s how you fixed mistakes). These gods were human. They could make mistakes (And big ones!) just like I did. You have no idea what a relief it was to see that. Turn the pages over and there were more Carmine drawings, a great look behind the curtain at his pencils as he tried out new faces and room designs. Also on the back was the Comics Code stamp where someone had signed off on the page. One day down the road, I’d run into the Code head-on in my first attempt to gain some purchase in the comics field. To a budding comics artist, the pages were manna from heaven and, for once, the interminable wait between issues was made more than bearable.
