SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) – Nick Cardy was an artist in the fledgling comic book industry in 1943 when a draft notice sent him to Europe as a tank driver, an assignment for which he was singularly unsuited.
In England recovering from pleurisy he contracted on the voyage across the Atlantic, he was assigned to the Third Armored Division.
“This man says, ‘I see here that you were in the motor pool, can you drive a tank?’ I said, I can’t even drive a truck. He said ‘OK.’
“And you know when people use a stamp in that humorous way? He was pounding paper with a stamp. ‘You are now in the Third Armored Division.’ The stamping sound, I felt like it was the lid to a coffin. I didn’t know anything about driving a tank, but they put me in a tank,” recalls Cardy.
The 93-year-old Cardy, who lives in a double-wide in a mobile home park in Sarasota, is still drawing.
His mobile home is filled with his paintings, copies of the comic books that earned him a place of honor in the comics world, a drafting table and light box where he continues to draw the impossibly buxom women and pumped-up men of the comics genre.
Oil paintings of his Italian parents, his former wife and a self-portrait of him as a dapper young dark-haired man look down on his work space, where coffee mugs are crammed full of the artist’s tools.
It’s a more lavish setup than the artist’s kit he took in his duffle bag to World War II after being drafted on April Fool’s Day.
An artist working for Eisner & Iger, comic book packagers in the early days of the art form, he kept with him half a dozen small sketch pads, a Waterman’s fountain pen and a tiny watercolor kit made from a converted Sucrets tin.
Awarded two Purple Hearts for his combat injuries in the war, Cardy experienced his share of wartime horrors; he saw his tank commander get his head blown off when they were ambushed by German troops with bazookas.
The dozens of 3-by-5-inch “pen and spit” sketches he did in his three years overseas show those harrowing episodes and the more mundane and even lighter-hearted parts of a soldier’s life.
Cardy’s sketchbooks have been disassembled and remade into a book, Nick Cardy: The Artist at War. The reproduced sketches and watercolors are augmented by Cardy’s narrative and photographs.
Cardy’s name may not be well known to the general population, but within the subset of the art and illustration world known as comic books, he’s legendary.
From 1950 to the mid 1970s, Cardy drew hundreds of comic-book covers and pages for DC Comics, including Batman, Teen Titans and Aquaman. He has drawn numerous movie-poster illustrations, including those for California Suite and Apocalypse Now. In 2005, he was inducted into the Will Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.
Cardy’s name—he shortened it when he was signing his drawings after the war—still carries enough recognition that organizers of the Florida Supercon, a giant comic book, animation and pop culture convention in July in Miami, are sending a chauffeur-driven car to pick Cardy up from his Sarasota home, drive him to the convention, pay him a four-figure honorarium to sign autographs (three per person free, additional signatures, $5 each) as one of three “guests of honor,” and bring him home.
“Nick’s work on the Batman and Teen Titan comics was some of the work that first drew me to DC,” said Stephen Saffel, a longtime comics fan and collector who is senior acquisitions editor for Titan Books, which published Cardy’s sketchbook. “His style, his polish, the moodiness he put into it, the energy and animation, all stood out. He was one of the best storytellers DC had to offer.”
Born in New York City in 1920 (“I was one of the few who got off Noah’s ark,” he said) as Nicholas Viscardi, he studied art mostly by walking 80 blocks north from his Third Street home to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he studied the great masters from as close a distance as the guards would permit.
“I was looking at the underpainting, to see what was underneath it,” he said.
Asked to paint a mural for his junior high at age 15, he was offered the chance to choose which classes to skip while painting.
“Arithmetic!” he said, still joyful at the memory almost 80 years later.
When he went to work for Eisner & Iger, he was getting “an astounding salary … $100 a week … I forget,” said Cardy, whose memory betrays his age even if his appearance does not. Still trim in twill slacks and a polo shirt, he wears glasses but no hearing aids. His storytelling style is roundabout: to get here, he points to an imaginary point above his head, he will go around that block plus a couple of extra streets.
His book says he made $25 a week before he moved to Fiction House for “twice the money” and $400 bonuses—a king’s ransom in the late ’30s.
But in 1943 Uncle Sam came knocking.
“The government sent me a little notice, we’re inviting you into the Army,” he said.
Basic training was at Camp Blanding in North Florida; from there he was assigned to the 66th Infantry Division, where he designed the division’s “Black Panther” shoulder insignia.
His artistic ability attracted the attention of higher-ups and he shuttled around the United States until being shipped overseas “with a bunch of other fellows that weren’t assigned to any other outfits.”
His sketchbooks show the dramatic contrasts between a serene time in recovery at the Queen Victoria Hospital, where a woman in an evening gown performs on the violin for the troops, and scenes of combat in Cologne, where his tank was part of a roadblock between blown-out buildings and civilians scavenging for whatever they could find.
A lighter sketch shows troops “liberating” bottles of liquor. The captions over the sketch reads: “5 March. Took Cologne, set up tank as roadblock, took turns at guard and liberated bottles, played Kraut Ellington records, got drunk.”
One sketch shows an officer sitting on the toilet; another shows men crouched over a latrine trench.
Drawing those commonplace moments in a war was necessary to his sanity. Incidents such as his tank commander being killed, or seeing cartloads of dead bodies, or opening a trap door to see dozens of scared faces looking up at him, are “something that you’d rather not know,” said Cardy. “I tried to focus on the lighter stuff.
“I had a policy after I got out of the Army. I was so tickled to get out of the Army alive, I was not gonna let anything bother me.”
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Information from: Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, www.heraldtribune.com
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-05-29-13 1926GMT
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