Schumer begins with Infantino, describing his work as the acme of streamlined, suburban modernity... Frankly, I call that damning with faint praise. Infantino was more than just Curt Swan/Murphy Anderson-squared! I'll admit that I'm prejudiced in this regard, and that I'm more familiar with the artist in his post-executive Spider-Woman/The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl/immortal "Trial of the Flash" phase, but I think Schumer is really overemphasizing the "slickness" of Infantino's work. Sure, the settings (even the ones in space!) are suburban, but these backgrounds are there precisely to play up the dynamism of the agents that move through them! That's how I see it, anyway (and I did have quite a few of the sixties Flash comics at one time...I loved them! even the "Flashgrams", which were a far cry from the Bullpen Bulletins, I'll tell ya!). To be fair, Schumer does allow Infantino to defend himself against the charges of gentility, by printing quotations like this one:
On covers, I felt that ... one way to irritate the eye is by creating negative space with shapes. You can put things off-angle. Or you can put a large object in with a tiny object, and that would force the eye to look. And it would offend it, it irritates it a bit, but it takes you in... once you get the person in, you hold them."
This sounds like Russian formalism. The aim of the artist is to defamiliarize. You take something the reader/viewer knows well (like 1950/60's suburbia!) and "make it strange"... To me that's a lot more interesting/challenging than taking a fantasy character like Green Lantern and rubbing his hyper-realistically rendered nose in squalor! Clearly, Schumer disagrees. Implicit in the structure of his book is an argument in favour of a qualitative progression (or, at least, a progression towards "seriousness") from Infantino to Adams...
Schumer gives Neal Adams the last word on the Silver Age, and I think most of us understand that the "promise" he speaks of was, in fact, more like a prophecy of doom, and the "road" leads right off a cliff, with Jim Lee at the wheel:
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