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Nick Cardy, Jack of the Medium

In these days of "New Comics" and "Post-New Comics" and Silver Age retro chic, one notes that the names of icons of that period appear, either as objects of homage or targets for diatribes. Arguments about the virtues (rather logically) often tend to float around a Lee-Kirby axis while forgetting about the vast array of supporting talent that could, in a way foreign to today's constricted, trendy, overstated, expensive, yet unrewarding comics market, nonetheless satisfy.

As the emptiness of many aspects of the current comics paradigm becomes clear, and we seek to identify the cardinal virtues of the medium, it becomes useful to analyze what people did right in the Silver Age. To this end, let us examine the work of a vastly underrated Silver Age luminary, Nick Cardy.

Cardy enjoyed a rare ability to handle a spectrum of material with finesse, but many remember him for his work on DC's covers. He, like Neal Adams, produced work that the company used as a tease. Buyers often found someone else altogether handling the interior art chores. However, when a book did enjoy the good fortune to contain his work, it showed the diversity of this man's talent; he could handle superhero comics, mystery tales, or westerns with a graceful flourish.

While Cardy did employ the occasional gimmick, he, like the better talents of his generation, could invent a gimmick as the situation demanded, rather than relying on one or two conventional attention grabbers typical of the comics of a later day; for instance, he frequently built a cover on a symmetrical theme of complementary elements, though he found a number of ways to vary this approach.

Golden Age Roots

Much of the talent of the Silver Age came from a generation born in the twenties. Gil Kane, Carmine Infantino, Marie Severin, John Buscema, and Stan Lee provide examples of this crop. Nick Cardy himself belongs to that generation, which saw the birth of the superhero comic during their own childhood.

Nick Viscardi attended the Art Students League, where he pursued eclectic interests that included painting and sculpture. He worked in comics as early as 1939, under his original name, for the Eisner-Iger shop. Eisner would employ a number of keen talents over the years, including, at various times, Jack Kirby (who called Eisner "boss" for the rest of his life after a stint working for him early in the history of superhero comics) and Wally Wood. One may suspect working with or for Eisner, particularly in that early day, would either inspire an aspirant to greatness or quickly cull out a journeyman artist with no real talent or prospects to recognizeable quality; in any case, the Eisner flag on a resume can serve as an indicator of a possible talent worth noticing.

While performing the art chores for Quicksilver stories in National Comics, he began signing his name as "Cardy." Cardy continued to use both the full and truncated versions of his name, but found the maturing of his reputation and talent while using the briefer form; for this reason, most who follow his career remember him as "Cardy" rather than "Viscardi." Had his early pieces such as his work on the title Lady Luck launched him to an early fame, we doubtless would recall him under the name Viscardi, under which he signed a number of projects.

Fiction House and the Birth of the "Cardy Babe"

One frequently hears Cardy's name in reference to his treatment of the female form. Cardy developed his ability to treat female subjects in his work for Fiction House, a publishing company that targeted soldiers and teen-aged boys with its comics. Fiction House therefore tended to include a number of scantily-clad women in its stories, either as the recurrent jungle heroine or in the more pulp-era position of victims strapped to tables for heroes to rescue.

While the cheesecake aspect of comics dates back to their inception, some talents and periods represent exemplars of the form. We may consider among the brightest talents of this specialty those artists who can inspire admiration without vulgarizing the subject matter; this involves straddling the line between what an adult might enjoy seeing and what a concerned parent could allow a child to see without concern. Cardy, in this aspect, ranks with the likes of Golden Age master Will Eisner, whose loving depictions of the female form still inspire admiration and imitation; and more contemporary figures like Dave Stevens, who can serve up cheesecake in any strength from almost-innocent to unmistakably risque.

Here Cardy also worked as Viscardi, and developed a number of his storytelling strengths, including clever layouts and a variety of dynamic treatments of human motion and action. Works like Fight Comics, Jumbo Comics, Jungle Comics, and Wings enjoyed his work here until the Second World War took Cardy away from the business in 1943.

DC and Diversification

Cardy's service in the armored cavalry earned him two Purple Hearts before he returned to the comics field in 1945. In this period, he began to work on more than adventure and superhero titles; and by 1952, his repertoire included crime comics, westerns, various jungle adventure subjects, war comics, and the superhero material that would eventually dominate the medium in America.

Cardy hired on at DC Comics in 1950, and would there do the work that would create his most enduring reputation. Titles like Congo Bill, Daniel Boone, and Tomahawk would represent the character of his DC work in the fifties, which centered on western and adventure titles, both comics forms that had grown in popularity after the great collapse of the Golden Age superhero between 1944 and 1951.

During Cardy's prime, however, the superhero would come into his own again, as a result of the creation of Marvel Comics from the ashes of Timely / Atlas and DC's rediscovery of Golden Age characters like the Flash and Green Lantern, whom it could recast in more contemporary forms. In 1961, Cardy participated in the revival of the Golden Age character Aquaman, and in 1965 he began work on the Teen Titans book, a title that dealt with the teen-aged sidekicks of Golden Age survivors Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, and Aquaman, and the refurbished Silver Age Flash. Cardy would thereafter do more and more superhero work, though even his latest comics pieces tended to attempt the more diverse comics that attempted to flourish in the seventies' explosion of horror, adventure, and western titles.

The Essential Cardy

Without too much exposure to other amateur comics historians, I would nonetheless expect that Cardyphiles tend to drift into camps about what constitutes his most essential body of work. One could argue that his essentail resume sits in an avalanche of cover art whereby DC Comics used his talent to sell comic books containing the work of other talents. Probably the most observers who remember his work can call to mind a cover before other work occurs to them.

Some of us who grew up at a certain time recall his interior work. In the sixties, his work on one of the ill-fated incarnations of the Aquaman title comes to mind; only Nick Cardy and, later, Jim Aparo seemed to have the proper feel for the character that could make his stories work. While I remember a small sample of Cardy's Aquaman work, I would tend to favor Teen Titans as the title that defined what Cardy could do with superheroes, since this title enjoyed a greater range of characters and situations, including one from Aquaman (Aqualad, known these days as "Tempest"). Cardy could depict the Teen Titans with a slick feel that well served the youthfulness of the subjects; the cheerfulness of his treatment gave his work an upbeat tone, but his demonstrable craftsmanship nonetheless allowed this work to elude the silliness and appeal to immaturity typical of the earliest Teen Titans stories.

Then again, Cardy enjoys another body of fans from his work in the early seventies on the western title Bat Lash. These pieces allowed him to work on subjects that had become increasingly rare in commercially viable American comics; the western comic came in the aftermath of the Great Dying of the Golden Age and died a lingering death after the superhero renaissance of the Silver Age. However, the international comics market enjoys more diverse tastes than the American, and supports forms that the American market has extinguished; along with the American underground comic (as evidenced by expatriates like Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb), the American western comic remains better-received in Europe. Cardy did some of the best western comic work to see print in the American mainstream, which makes it only fitting that the European market should grant him a recognition sadly lacking in the United States.

I speculate that his horror comic work would remain of one excellent piece with everything else Cardy chose to lay hands on. However, none of this really answers the question about which material to consider essential to creating a Cardy portfolio; perhaps any of it or all of it, since his work covers such a broad spectrum of tastes. By aesthetic standards, Cardy deserves some kind of anthologization; if we use this as a criterion, perhaps we can best argue that his western work provides a body of comics art that best connects the greatest number of readers to Cardy's talents.

DC's Official Cover Artist

Into the 1970s, Marvel sneered at DC's tradition of designating an official cover artist to do many of its glossy covers. The competition and some fans came to believe that this represented some kind of a fraud; in such cases as a customer bought a book thinking the cover art represented what it contained, then found only disappointment inside, perhaps we can view this with some truth.

However, DC's philosophy did not center around any kind of intent to defraud or some dubious bait-and-switch scheme. Back in the days when comics contained newsprint interiors wrapped in a glossy cover, the print schedules and deadlines for covers and interiors did not always mesh well. Printers might require the cover before management even decided on the artist for a book. The cover artist tradition serves to standardize the product's presentation in displays, much like a single Campbell's Soup label across dozens of varieties does. Nor should one look at a cover as a commitment to use the same talent for the interior; if it did, we would expect paperbacks with Boris Vallejo covers to contain Boris Vallejo prose.

In Cardy's day, when comics did not appear for sale pre-bagged, a customer need only open a comic to find out if it contained substandard art. This test remains one of the easiest and most reliable for consumer merchandise; a buyer might not discover bad literature until well into a story, and might not discover bad food until the middle of the night.

Apologistic ranting aside, however, let us return to Cardy's role as cover artist. Curt Swan had held that function in the early sixties, but his covers failed to enthrall, and DC experimented with more dynamic artists, like Carmine Infantino. When Neal Adams came to DC and shook up the standards for art in the industry, DC assigned him the role, but Adams did not spend his entire tenure in this role, since DC's philosophy recognized no upper limit on what they expected from their artists in terms of output. After Adams, DC shifted to Cardy, an excellent all-around choice, since, although he produced excellent covers, readers did not become surly after seeing Cardy on the outside and someone else inside. A Cardy cover seemed to go with anything, including a Cardy interior.

The Way out

An observer who examined Cardy's work might convince himself that such labor requires love and devotion; and, furthermore, such work must provide considerable satisfaction for the craftsman who so ably creates. How, one might ask, could these works emanate from the pencil and brush of an unhappy man? Such characterization, however, derives more from wishful thinking than from fact; by 1970, Cardy, then in his mid-forties, already wanted out of the company and possibly out of the business entirely.

Carmine Infantino described Cardy's unhappiness, mentioning that, just as Infantino took the editorial reigns of DC Comics, Cardy spoke to him about his desire to quit the business. Those who worked for Infantino in his early days as DC's ranking editor sometimes recall how the man seemed always able to pursuade his talent to add one more page, or one more cover, to an already bloated workload. According to Infantino himself, though, Cardy wanted to leave already, prior to this promotion.

Infantino had earned some respect from his peers as an innovative penciller, creating new elements to the superheroic idiom in his early work on Flash. He, if anyone, had the necessary qualifications to understand the sources of dissatisfaction that beset Cardy at the turn of the seventies. Perhaps such credentials inclined Cardy to cooperate for a span when he begged Cardy to stay at least through the personnel shakeup that brought Infantino to power.

Cardy stayed for a few more years after Infantino argued that he deserved at least the chance to run DC long enough for the talent to decide if they liked working for him or not. However, his feelings about the company and the business had not changed. Cardy soon began work for other companies (including some rare Marvel covers for black-and-white magazines) and abruptly left the industry altogether before the seventies had come very far along. Cardy disappeared from the industry so abruptly that rumors about his untimely death began to circulate, such as the one this author believed until reading about Cardy's recent appearance at a convention in 1997 (and the news that he lived made me too happy to regret his departure from comics).

Cardy turned to commercial art, under his original name (Viscardi) and pursued that profession for some years before he finally retired from that business. The frustrations of the management side of comics combined with pay scales that do not compete well for artists able to handle the demands of commercial art mean that commercial art will frequently provide a lure: this lure offers money and security comics did not provide in the past and do not even begin to provide in the present. Silver Age talents like Murphy Anderson, Jim Steranko, and Neal Adams all found a well-deserved prosperity through such channels, and whatever had haunted Cardy in comics, perhaps, let him be once he moved into other precincts.

Nick Cardy occasionally guests at comics conventions and sometimes demonstrates samples of his art. Those few fortunate enough to view his latter-day pieces confirm that Cardy has not lost what he built over his thirty years in comics, even if he remains officially, permanently retired from the medium.

Nor, evidently, has he lost the affection he holds for his fans. This last trait tells a great deal if we should decide to separate the sheep from the goats among the talents of comics. Regardless of the problems that invariably drive talent away from the corporate and management side of the business, the greats who deserve our attention love both the medium that inspired them to excellence and the fans who made their success possible.