I didn’t know Dick Giordano. By the time DC Comics was negotiating to buy Malibu Comics, Dick had retired. My one encounter with him was so hysterically overwrought and requires so much useless backstory about marginal players that I can only tell it at convention bars over microbrews. But I do know – or think I know – a lot of things about him. He was responsible for a superhero renaissance at Charlton Comics back in the 1960s when he oversaw Ditko’s creation of The Question and his revival of The Blue Beetle and Captain Atom as well as a number of other superhero projects.

When he moved to DC, a number of his Charlton freelancers ended up there as well, including Denny O’Neil, Jim Aparo and Steve Skeates (and under Giordano’s stewardship, Aparo and Skeates had a remarkable run on Aquaman). He co-founded Continuity Studios with Neal Adams, providing an alternative business model (and freelance work) for artists working in corporate comic books. He could edit, write, pencil and ink – he drew some of the most beautiful long-legged women in comics.

He was a supporter of non-corporate comics – his Stephanie Starr strip (complete with the requisite nudity) appeared in an early issue of Mike Friedrich’s Star*Reach. He was – again, another great bar discussion – Neal Adams’ greatest inker and probably Irv Novick’s as well, and mentor to a couple of generations of inkers who traveled through Continuity and DC. He was in an executive position at DC during the time they altered their talent contracts to reflect more favorably on the talent, and he was also there during the time they published Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. By all accounts popping up on the internets this week, he seems like a good guy in an industry not known for many of them.

[Artwork: from the Amazon Archives website, the cover to Wonder Woman #202 by Dick Giordano, © DC Entertainment]