Nick Cardy is about as fine a comic artist as has ever worked in the field and I gush all over him in the foreword to The Art of Nick Cardy, a superb work published a couple of years ago by John Coates. The print run sold out right away but Vanguard Press has brought it back into print. It's a loving biography and art book devoted to a lovely man who's done a lot of lovely comic book pages. Many of them are reproduced within and make the point far better than I can. As I said in the book, Nick was always topping himself. We thought his Aquaman was great until we saw his Teen Titans. Then we thought his Teen Titans was great until we saw his Bat Lash…and so on.
Bat Lash, which was co-written by my amigo, Sergio Aragonés, may have set some record for being the best-remembered comic with the fewest number of issues. It came and went in an instant — six or seven issues, I forget — due to reportedly low sales. (I am of the opinion that the comic book industry has often been too quick to cancel something new when it didn't catch on immediately.) In the case of Bat Lash, it looks like everyone who bought the book loved it, remembered it and — when Nick came out to be a guest of honor at the ComicCon International in San Diego — they all lined up to tell him how much they loved it. You probably can't find a complete set of Bat Lash — I have one and you don't, nyah nyah — but you can and should buy The Art of Nick Cardy.