Aquaman #39 page 20 by Nick Cardy

Before he passed away, I sent Nick Cardy a gushing fan letter. I had lucked into getting a commission from him for my Shakespeare Project. (He drew Green Arrow and Black Canary cast in The Taming of the Shrew and it is one of my favorite commissions.) I wanted to thank him, but not just for agreeing to take my crazy little idea and putting pencil to paper. No, I wanted to thank him for a lifetime of entertainment.

I'd read interviews he gave and it always seemed to me that he never really knew just how much a kid like me enjoyed the comics he produced back then. The Saturday morning cartoons of the day probably had something to do with it (as it said on the cover of this comic back then, Aquaman was "King of the Sea and TV"), but his Aquaman & Teen Titans were some of the very first comics I bought when my father started handing me dimes and pennies and telling me to get whatever I wanted off the comic shelves at our local drug store.

In both cases, the stories were written by the mad genius, Bob Haney. In a Haney story, ANYTHING could happen and usually did. Though I couldn't tell so much when I first started reading them, Haney never let things like "plausibility" get in the way of a really good story idea.

The problem with a Haney story is that only the best of artists could hope to keep up with all the crazy twists and turns he could seemingly weave into a 36-page comic. Luckily, he had the good fortune of being paired often with Mr. Cardy, a man whose storytelling abilities were so acute that a four-year-old just learning how to read could easily follow any story that the man penciled and inked. >

This page is from the final issue of Cardy's run on Aquaman (he started with #1). Though the title hero only appears in a long shot in the first panel, the rest of the page ably displays the artist's creative (and in this case, fluid) layouts, clear storytelling, and attention to detail that made him an early favorite with me. Another plus is that the last panel has a pretty good page-turner image of Aqualad in dire straits.

Update, Dec. 11, 2019:
I originally acquired this page from the gracious Jeff Singh's wonderful collection back in 2011, but I reluctantly sold it last year to help me with my quest to acquire a Vess Sandman page from issue 19. However, it recently showed up on an auction site and, despite the fact that I was trying not to spend any money on art this year, I gave in and put in a bid. The bid price was for less than I received for it last year, but, with all the fees entailed in winning, it ended up costing a bit more.

Nevertheless, it is nice to have it back in the fold. It may not have been the most auspicious of Cardy pages, but my Silver Age collection just wasn't the same without it.