Nick Cardy
Part 2

by Mark Evanier

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 3/9/01
Comics Buyer's Guide

This is Part Two of a panel at the 1998 Comic-Con International in San Diego. On the dais are Marv Wolfman, Sergio Aragonés, Colleen Doran, your obedient moderator and Nick Cardy. The subject of the panel? Nick Cardy.

I think I'll shut up so that we can get more of the discussion in. As we rejoin the festivities, I'm asking a question of Ms. Doran, the superb creator of A Distant Soil and other treasures of comic art…


M.E.: Colleen, what of Nick's work first impressed you?

COLLEEN DORAN: Aquaman. These guys are all going "Hoot, hoot, hoot," over the girls, but I was going "Hoot, hoot, hoot" over Aquaman! [laughter] Babe-ilicious!

M.E.: [To Nick] The obvious question is, did you model your characters on real people?

NICK CARDY: When I used to draw women, it depended on what the women were in the story. If they were villainesses, I'd lean toward one way; if they were ideal women — like Madeline Carroll or Grace Kelly — I'd lean another. I'd give a heroine very straight features. If I wanted to draw a saucy girl — Susan Hayward with a little turned-up nose — I'd do it that way.

If I was drawing a woman who was part-villainess, part-heroine, I would go a little toward Ava Gardner and make her just a little meaner looking but with nice features. Pretty girls can be just as mean. Every time they showed a villain they always showed him ugly. I've known some ugly guys who are pretty good. Most of my friends are that way! [laughter] I studied girls a lot…

MARV WOLFMAN: So did we! [laughter]

CARDY: I mean artistically! I tried to pick up from the illustrators and the painters who had beautiful ways of displaying their women. The women were always in decent poses, even when they were running. I did learn from a lot of good illustrators — John Petty, a wonderful pin-up artist…John Gannon was a terrific illustrator of women…Colby Whitmore and all these illustrators did some really beautiful women.

I'd say, "The leg is a little longer from the thigh." Say you're drawing a figure and if you put a small head on it, it looks longer. But if you put on a larger head, that figure looks a lot shorter. So it used to be that the heads were in proportion but I'd make the necks a little longer and it would work. People have a certain form and grace to them when they move — women, especially — so that is what I tried to replicate.

M.E.: Colleen, what inspiration did you get from Nick's work?

DORAN: It's pretty amazing really. I was going through some of my old sketch books about a year ago and they're full of Nick Cardy swipes.

I still have the first issue of Teen Titans that I ever read. It had them all in a club and there's a wagon-wheel chandelier and Donna leaps up onto it and swings across the room. I have one picture and, I swear to God, there's at least six or seven sketches in my sketchbook of the shot which I did over and over and over, trying to understand what he was doing. It's page after page after page of me trying to draw like him.

CARDY: I'm sorry for you. [laughter]

DORAN: The forms were very solid and the people looked likeable. There's a likeability about your work that is very appealing to me. Your characters were very attractive and pretty, and even when they weren't, they weren't threatening to me as a little girl which I certainly appreciated. The guys were cute. And they actually looked like young people.

You get a lot of people who draw teenagers and they look like they're 35. I was at the World Science Fiction Convention last week and they actually had teenagers dressed as Wonder Girl and Superboy. It was so funny because they looked so young. [laughter]

WOLFMAN: Another thing that was being done at Marvel and DC at the time was to have teenagers look like they were eight years old, too. It was one way or the other. But Nick made them look the correct age. We were younger than the Teen Titans — but almost that age — when I was reading it, and all the other artists drew them to look nine years old. I knew that I didn't look like that at that age. So when you started to draw those characters, suddenly they looked like what teenagers should look like. Again, that was something that brought me into the book.

M.E.: Nick, how did you feel when a lot of the Teen Titans issues were being pencilled by other artists? Gil Kane, Neal Adams, George Tuska, Frank Springer, Artie Saaf….

CARDY: I think it was in transition. What happened was that they were getting ready to do Bat Lash and I was already doing Aquaman and Teen Titans, but then my schedule started getting a little crowded. I always penciled and inked my work. I always did that. But I would never pencil because when I penciled I did it very loose and I picked it out with my brush. It was easier in latter years because my work was looser, but at first I used to pencil very tight and I would erase a lot.

But after a while I got it to where I could just make the outline and pick it up with a brush. And if I gave anyone those pencils to ink, I would have driven them bananas because they couldn't have found the right line. I just did a lot of sketches, y'see, but when I got Neal Adams and Gil Kane, their work was so clean. But every job that I did for Teen Titans with Gil and Neal, I would always put my own personal touch on the brush. If they had eyes on a girl a certain way, I would put in my eyes in their eyes…the way I draw eyes.

M.E.: Did you find inking other artists restrictive? Did it challenge you as much artistically?

CARDY: I'll tell ya. Y'know, when you're doing your own work, you create, you design it, but then when you get somebody else's work, you don't have that much influence. What happens is, you just ink it as best and as quick as you can. But it's always interesting to see what it would be like inking Neal Adams or Gil Kane.

M.E.: Did you pick up anything from working with these people's work?

CARDY: Mike Sekowsky had a way of drawing an arm or a leg that was almost standard with almost everything he did. Mike was so fast that one time I ran into [DC editor] Murray Boltinoff's office and I was delivering a job. Mike was in with Murray who said, "Mike, this is an awful job! You were in a hurry. It's awful!"

So, Murray gave Mike another script and said, "Take your time." In the meanwhile, Mike had just been married and he invited me up to his house for dinner. There on the counter were the 24 pages, already finished. [laughter]

I said, "Is that the assignment you just picked up?"

He said, "Yeah, but Murray's worried so I'm holding it for an extra week." [laughter]

So then, when he brought it in, I was delivering a job at the same time, and he handed the job to Murray. Murray looks at it and says, "Now, Mike, isn't that a lot better?" [laughter, applause] Mike had a style. I inked quite a few things with Mike. He did a Witching Hour cover that was very effective that I liked inking and they did a nice color job on it.

M.E.: Let's get to Bat Lash. Sergio, what do you remember about the creation of Bat Lash and your involvement?

SERGIO ARAGONÉS: I was, by that time, living in New York and I was called by Joe Orlando and Carmine Infantino. We went to a restaurant next to DC Comics and they talked about new projects and stuff. They said they wanted to create a different western and they had the name, "Bat Lash." I said, "Don't say anymore. I'll bring you something."

So I went home and thought of a more European western. In those times, all the westerns were very, very aggressive with the cliché of the American Cowboy with very beautiful clothes and able to shoot guns out of other people's hands.

I have adored the western I brought in ideas and sketches and they liked what I did. They took it to Nick and said, "Go ahead!" It's very hard because I write the way I talk…pretty bad. [laughter] People don't understand so what I do to save time (and it's much easier for me because I'm more visual) I draw my scripts and put in very basic dialogue. I would put in notes to the artist saying, "Please don't use this as reference!" [laughter]

Instead of writing about a saucer, for instance, it was just as easy for me to draw a saucer. So I would do the scripts on 8-1/2" x 11" paper, divided into panels, and I would draw the story very crudely, but with no intention for the artist to follow the drawings. When I saw the first work that Nick did, I was so emotional.

I don't want to damn any other artist but the most human artist is Nick. He draws people like they are. There's a humanity in everything he draws. He understands people because he comes from illustration and the fine arts. He knows that underneath a person there is a skeleton and on it there's some muscles, but that person isn't always flexing-they're just people. When the comic came out, it was real. He was fantastic. [to Nick] The impression your work gave was that it was real. It was terrific and I loved it. In those days, for expediency, editors would assign other people's scripts so they could buy time and have their rear ends covered. So a couple of other stories were written by… [to Nick] one of them was by you?

CARDY: [chuckles] #2. I threw a little slapstick in that one.

ARAGONÉS: The thing is every villain looked like me in that issue. [laughter] You drew me as the villain!

CARDY: I drew you as the hero!

ARAGONÉS: Heroes are blond. When I saw the story, he had drawn me as the villain and called him "Sergio"! [laughter] I was the antagonist of the story!

CARDY: Y'know what it was? Orlando says, "If you can, make this guy look like Sergio." But I didn't want to make a copy of Sergio so I made this guy resemble Sergio though I didn't use his way of speech. Anyway, I didn't know how it affected you at all!

ARAGONÉS: But I was a handsome fellow back then… and the way you drew me… [laughter]

CARDY: Sergio and I would encounter each other in the hallway or in an elevator-as soon as we would see each other-and there was always a competition to see who was the quickest draw. [laughter] People used to think we were nuts.

M.E.: Nobody draws quicker than Sergio. [laughter]

CARDY: Sergio is a wonderful guy and I really love his work. I think he's a wonderful human being. He's one of the nice guys. [applause]

ARAGONÉS: We didn't go very far with Bat Lash because I was trying to take a chronological license. His era was not exactly the same time as the Mexican Revolution but it was close. But Bat Lash was a type of western very few people attempted then. It was set in the late 1800s.

So I had planned for Bat Lash to go to Mexico and make a long saga of it. Carmine told me he wanted Bat to have a brother so that it would have conflict and based on the landowner war going on with Mexico, I made it so he was raised by a Mexican family. Carmine wanted a gun strapped on the brother's leg…

CARDY: A shotgun. He was hunting Bat Lash.

ARAGONÉS: The name of their Priest was Don Pasquale, my father's name. [laughter] I loved that comic book because it was really as well-drawn as a western should be. Why didn't it last long?

CARDY: Carmine told me that it didn't do too well in the States but when he went to Europe, they were amazed that it stopped because they wanted more of it. They liked it better there.

ARAGONÉS: The Europeans love westerns. Today, you can still find incredibly well-drawn western comics in Europe. When Europeans come to the United States they rent a Cadillac and drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. [laughter] They cannot believe the distances and the desert! They drive around and go, "Yippee!" [laughter] They have this fascination.

M.E.: [To Nick] Is Bat Lash your favorite comic book?

CARDY: All comics come from a mold, but Bat Lash didn't fit into a mold. This was different. We were more or less free to do whatever we felt. In other words, the writer didn't constrict the artist; the artist didn't interfere with the writer. With Denny O'Neil and Sergio, we worked things out. We were rooting for the end product. How I drew it was something else, but there was a freedom and I enjoyed it. [to Sergio] Did you get one of my Bat Lash pages?

ARAGONÉS: I bought it from a collector.

CARDY: That was one of my better pages. It had a horse running with a nice, dark shadow. I think that was in the series that you were supposed to be in.

ARAGONÉS: That's correct.

CARDY: You and Bat Lash were fighting…no, not you! [laughter] They were fighting over the girl over the crypt. This girl was a villainess but she was beautiful, and she was making dopes out of Bat Lash and…what was his name?

ARAGONÉS: Sergio! [laughter]


And that's about all we have room for, because I wanted to credit Jon B. Cooke for the fine transcription job. Jon is the editor of Comic Book Artist, a superb publication wherein a longer version of this transcript appeared. Every issue is crammed full — sometimes, too full, I tell Jon — of fascinating and vital funnybook history, I'm still paging through #11, which is split between two important innovators…Sheldon Mayer and Alex Toth.

If you know those names, you'll want a copy. If you don't know those names…well, you should.