One of my favorite artists of all time is Nick Cardy. His name on the credits always meant a visually interesting comic book, and he drew one of my favorite comics of all time: the original Bat Lash, written by Sergio Aragones and Denny O’Neil.

DC Comics is doing me a huge favor this July by collecting the Bat Lash comics in a new trade-paperback, Showcase Presents: Bat Lash.

It’s a great example of Nick’s abilities and I’ve already pre-ordered my copy. The volume will include Bat Lash’s first appearance, Showcase #76, all 7 issues of his original series, plus the Bat Lash stories from DC Special Series #16, Jonah Hex #49, 51 and 52. It’s not an all-Cardy all-the-time collection - other artists represented in the book include Mike Sekowsky and Dan Spiegle - but it’s enough Nick for a solid fix. And Showcase #76 + Bat Lash #1-7 are enough to make it fanboy heaven. Cardy had a dynamic storytelling sense and was equally adept at drawing super-heroes (Aquaman), regular people, cowboys (Bat Lash) and Jungle Lords raised by Apes (Tarzan). He was part of the generation of comic book artists who also knew how to draw people with hats, and could draw a horse or a car with the same skill he could draw Aquaman riding a seahorse into an underwater battle with some guy made out of coral.

One of his great skills was as a cover artist and he was one of DC’s mainstays in the 1960s and 1970s. His bold, dynamic, and imaginative covers seemed to always scream: “Buy this issue! Now!”

Over on the eBay, there are some nice Nick Cardy cover originals to check out: Action Comics #423, Action Comics #436 and Wanted #7. The two Actions are going for well over $6,000 a pop. I’m not affiliated with any of these auctions, and this should not be interpreted as an endorsement either for the value of the art or the reputation of the sellers, but the art sure is nice stuff to look at.

You can read a lot more about Nick at The Quarter Bin and they say it so well that I’m just going to pull a quote to tease you like a Cardy cover used to tease me: “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.”

Mark Evanier interviewed Cardy at the 1998 Comic-Con International in San Diego, on a panel that included Colleen Doran, Marv Wolfman and Sergio Aragones. Mark has the transcript up in his archives.

The gang at Twomorrows put together, with Nick’s help, a great retrospective book of his career. You can order it at the Twomorrows website.

Vanguard Productions also put together a fun book called The Art of Nick Cardy back in 2001 that appears to still be in print.

And if you want to see a bunch of Cardy’s covers all lined up on one page in a way that’ll make your head pop, check out this Aquaman cover gallery.

The official Nick Cardy website hasn’t been updated in awhile, but there’s still some great stuff to see. One is a Lady Luck story that Nick drew. Another is a promotional strip about parallel parking – hey, it’s not all Aquaman and Batman – he did for Gulf Oil back in 1953. Did I mention that he draws great cars?

Nick has long since retired from comics and turns 89 later this year. At the 17th Annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, he was voted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. A very well-deserved honor for a terrific artist.

(Artwork: Cover to Bat Lash #7 by Nick Cardy, © DC Comics, Inc.)