Bob Haney and Nick Cardy: Past Masters (Part One)

Anything can be done well. Sometimes things can be done so well that they transcend the most ridiculous of artistic strictures.

A wonderful example is a 56-year old issue of Showcase, DC comics’ “tryout” book, in which new characters were introduced and, if sales were good, eventually given their own comics. Here, the characters were the Teen Titans — Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad and Wonder Girl. It only took two Showcase tryouts for the team to get their own book. It sold like hotcakes.

The writer was Bob Haney, the artist Nick Cardy. We’ll poke through the second tryout story. In its own way, “Return of the Teen Titans” was one of the most perfectly written and drawn comics of the 1960s.

I mentioned ridiculous artistic strictures. In this case, the artistic stricture was Haney himself. DC was getting clobbered by its archival Marvel, and the suits at DC thought perhaps the reason was that DC’s characters didn’t speak in a sufficiently “hip” fashion. So in writing this book about teenage superheroes, Haney was ordered to make them talk like beatniks.

Haney’s strong suit was never dialogue to begin with, and this was too much. His attempt at jive-talking renders the story unreadable.

Unreadable? No problem. This story doesn’t have to be read. It communicates on a far deeper level than that. Let’s take a peek.

The story, if you can call it a story, is about three teen rock sensations who call themselves The Flips: a motorcyclist, a surfer and a baton twirler. They’re the hottest music act in the country. And suddenly, they appear to be turning to crime as well.

No, just let’s not think about it, okay? Plenty of comics made sense, but not this one, so don’t let it bother you. Instead, just look at how Haney and Cardy stage this action sequence. Haney was a master of setpieces like this, as the action goes from horizontal to vertical to diagonal. And Nick Cardy drew the living bejeebers out of it.

Unlike most writers of the period, Haney wrote this story using the three-act structure beloved of screenwriting professors. This panel would be the close of Act One. The kids at Clarkston won’t get to see their heroes The Flips if something miraculous doesn’t happen.

In this case, our miracle workers are the Teen Titans, somehow convinced that The Flips are being railroaded.

Interesting that in these Comics Code Authority days, Wonder Girl sees fit to use the name of a famed lesbian poet as an expletive. I think Wonder Woman did the same thing.

More interesting still are the faces Cardy gives our four heroes. Or make that uninteresting. Cardy’s hero characters were generic, mannikins. A gorgeous girl, three stalwart boys, and the four are totally unbelievable. Superhero faces have always been idealized and formulaic, so it wouldn’t be so noticeable except for one thing:

The bit-players in a Cardy book were always much more interesting than the heroes, which is why those heroes looked like they were made of wax. Conversely, Mayor Turner and his coterie of middle aged townspeople are flesh and blood, and they’re fun. Comic book artists talk about “acting,” using expressions and body language on characters to help tell the story. Less commonly spoken of is “casting,” selecting physical types to play these parts. While Cardy’s hero casting is bland, the supporting players are damn near perfect.

And as for acting, the mayor was not only perfectly cast, but perfectly directed. A total square, whacking the teenager’s copy of the newspaper with his umbrella? Who’da thought of something like that? I wonder if the gesture was in Haney’s script? I would imagine not. The longer and more productively a writer and artist collaborate, the less the artist needs to be told what to do. (I lettered 100 Bullets, and by the time a couple of dozen issues had been done, Brian Azzarello’s art direction was minimal, sometimes nonexistent. And quite often, artist Eduardo Risso simply ignored it. He was as conversant with the story as Azzarello was, and he knew how he wanted to tell it. Similarly, after a few issues Brian gave me no direction about which words to make bold; he assumed I knew what I was doing, and left such choices to me. If there’s anything really terrific about working in comics, it’s in the relationships you forge with your collaborators. It’s always fun, but sometimes it’s magical.)

One trope of the fifties and sixties was that cops were dumb, as opposed to today’s myth that they’re evil. Here’s the local police chief, grooving on The Flips. I don’t know if police chiefs are elected or appointed in Clarkston, but if I had the opportunity, I’d vote for this guy in a heartbeat.

Comics featuring superhero teams are notoriously difficult to write. There were just four Titans, but this still was a bitch. How do you divide up action so each Titan has a chance to do his thing, or hers? Haney made it look easy, as The Flips appear to really be criminals, and our heroes have to chase after them. That motorcycle was a marvelous bit of visual business: yet again, the action goes abruptly from horizontal to vertical.

What the hey!! Jill — replete with her Elton John sunspecks — throwing her baton while doing a handstand, inches from the edge of a rooftop? Gravity, and vertigo, have always been a mainstay of comics. Long before a scene like the one above could be put on film, writers and artists like Haney and Cardy provided visual thrills like this.

When Delacroix saw a performance of Hamlet, he was so thrilled that he did a series of drawings and paintings depicting the play. He couldn’t understand a word of it, but the ideas in the play mesmerized him.

So it is here. Not that there are profound ideas or anything. There’s really nothing at all: no believable characters, no credible plot, and dialogue geared to wind up on the floor of a bird cage. But who cares if Haney couldn’t make characters even appear to talk like human beings? In the little universe Haney and Cardy concocted for these characters, words were superfluous. Ideas were superfluous. Plot was superfluous. We only wanted one thing for our twelve cents: adrenaline. And Haney and Cardy delivered it by the carload.

The writer and artist paced this thing like an express train, although they did provide us with a moment to catch our breath in the fourth panel. Look at the mayor and police chief approaching the crime scene, the chief on his tippy toes. Can’t you just hear Elmer Fudd? “We must be vewwy, vewwy quiet!”

Editor George Kashdan wasn’t high on the food chain at DC, and one result of this was the support personnel he didn’t get for his books. To the point, he never got DC’s superstar letterer Gaspar Saladino, who was the property of more assertive editors, Julie Schwartz and Bob Kanigher. He didn’t even get the second-tier guys, Milt Snappin or Ben Oda. He had to make do with Stan Quill. Quill’s work is crude. Yet it somehow works nicely here. It reinforces the message that Haney and Cardy hammered home, and that John Lennon would soon after enshrine in song: “Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.”

That baton gimmick worked nicely on Wonder Girl, so it’s a sure bet that it’ll take care of John Law here.

Does any of this make sense? Of course not. But it’s sure a fun ride, as we fast approach the end of Act Two, in which all appears to be lost. The teenagers of Clarkston aren’t going to get to see The Flips perform, because the grownups think they’re crooks. Never mind that if they could dream up special effects like this, or were really rock superstars, there’d be little need for them to rob banks. Don’t think about it, it’d just spoil the fun. Just turn the page for the big resolution:

Fast forward to the climax of Act Three, as our evil rock and roll trio are ready to make out with their booty. Suddenly the Flips are vanquished — by another set of Flips.

Did I mention how wonderfully Cardy cast the supporting players? Here’s another example, the faces he chose for his fake Flips. And look at the contrast between these three venal people and our three wholesome superheroes. After 56 years, I still have a crush on Wonder Girl.

Notice a little compositional trick Cardy uses. Obviously the two panels are reflections of each other. But somehow in between the two images, Aqualad and Kid Flash have changed places. The reason is simple enough: had Kid Flash stayed in the middle, the two figures in dark leather jackets — the fake Jack and Aqualad — would have formed a solid blob of black in the center of the first panel, making it tough to read.

Nobody could kick you through a story like Haney and Cardy. It’s like a lot of the lyrics in the songs Phil Spector produced; it didn’t have to make sense if you’d just move it fast enough.

Tomorrow I plan to post another set of pages from this artist-writer team. It’s one of the most visceral, and most beautifully paced, action sequences I’ve ever seen in a comic book. If it doesn’t hammer home the point, that these were two extremely talented people, then nothing will.

Bob Haney was a pro’s pro, who unfortunately never attended to the deficiencies of his work. No writer should be this bad at writing dialogue. But he was selling a gazillion comics, and helped make Irwin Donenfeld rich. There is a sad story, of when Haney met the twentysomething writer who was being eased into the choice assignments, which Haney was losing. “They tell me you’re a very good writer,” Haney told him. “They once told me I was a good writer, too.”

As for Cardy, he never fell out of fashion. He was just too damn good. At this point in his career he was pencilling and inking two regular books, plus their covers, plus whatever else came along. That translates into, at minimum, pencilling and inking 25 pages a month. You had to be incredibly fast to make a living in comics back then. Cardy just happened to also be incredibly good.