Art of Nick Cardy

by John Coates, Nick Cardy

Nick Cardy has been a cartoonist and illustrator for over 50 years. Spanning the Golden Age to the present, Cardy's career began in 1939 with the Eisner-Iger shop, which produced the "Spirit" newspaper supplement, "Plastic Man" comic books and more. Cardy went on to illustrate newspaper strips, including "Tarzan," and enjoyed a 25 year association with DC Comics before moving on to magazine and movie poster illustration. As well as being one of DC Comics' top Batman and Superman cover artists, fans remember that in the 1960s, Nick helped define comics' Silver Age with sequential artwork on "Aquaman", "Teen Titans", and "Bat Lash." The artist's contributions to the comic book industry earned him the prestigious "Ink Pot Award" for Outstanding achievement. Cardy did occasional non-comics illustration work throughout the decades in which he focused primarily on comic books and strips. But in 1975 the artist decided to focus on non-comics illustration, particularly movie and television work. Some of the properties he worked on include Bad News Bears, Return of the Pink Panther, Meatballs II, California Suite, and even Apocalypse Now. This Eisner Award-nominated volume offers an exploration of Cardy's art career.

Genres: Comics

176 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name on GR. This profile might contain books by multiple authors with this name.

Reviews

[Tim Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're familiar with the artist books published by Twomorrows then you can picture what this book is about. That said, this was published by Vanguard in 2001 before Twomorrows was publishing many books. It's essentially a long interview with Nick Cardy profusely illustrated with his artwork. And as such...what's not to like? Well...there are a couple of problems. One, which seems to be endemic to these types of books is that they lack depth of analysis of the work. The other is that this particular book isn't terribly well designed. The text kind of floats around the illustrations and it can be a bit of a chore to read. It's actually a bit odd because the book design was done by John B. Cooke, who is usually very good. I can only think this was pretty early work by him and he was still learning.

That said, it's a very nice long interview with Cardy, who comes across as very likeable.

[Brian Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always loved Nick Cardy cover artwork which is why I purchased this book. Now after reading this biography, I was surprised by a large number of comic book titles I began collecting solely on the basis of them having covers by Nick, and this was regardless of if there was any matching interior art by Nick. I enjoyed the breakdown by era for his work and the stories he related to working for editors, and other artists. Nick's professional work after comics with illustrations, advertising, and movie posters was all new to me and fun to see. I don't have too many "art of" books to compare against but I thought this one was put together very well, and appreciate the index of the artist's work. Of course now with resources like GCD (comics.org) searching for work produced by someone in the comics field is much much easier than when this book was produced but does not lower the value of this book in my library nearly 20 years later.

[Bob Ro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book with lots of great art. But the page layouts and typography detract from the material. Text is two-column on some pages, full-page on others and ragged right throughout; it made for confusion as to where to start reading.