Tom Spurgeon has a good, long obit up for Dick Giordano. It's so good I hate to quibble with a couple of things, one being that Tom makes the same mistake I did. Dick was not hired at DC by new editorial director Carmine Infantino on his way in. He was hired by departing editorial director Irwin Donenfeld on his way out. Also, Tom cites Bat Lash and Deadman as the outstanding projects of Giordano's 1967-1971 editorial stint at DC. As far as I know, Dick had nothing at all to do with Bat Lash, which was edited by Joe Orlando.
Dick did at least edit Deadman for a short time. He was handed a feature on the road to cancellation and could do nothing to change that. The same was true of most of his assignments then: Secret Six, Beware the Creeper, Bomba the Jungle Boy, The Spectre, Blackhawk, etc. His revamps of Teen Titans and Aquaman were much-admired around the office and by the more vocal fans but the former only lasted two years after Dick left the editorial division and the latter ended when he departed. A revival of All-Star Western also did not endure long after Dick left. Only one book he launched — The Witching Hour — did. Hot Wheels was not a success, nor was The Hawk and the Dove.
Enumerated like this, it sounds like a pretty terrible batting average. What was interesting to me though was that, first of all, almost everyone thought that Dick had substantially improved the books he took over…and that their cancellations were in no way his fault. Just about everything new at DC during that period lasted six or less issues, a result of a declining marketplace, a dysfunctional distribution system and (I thought) a tendency to give up too quickly on a new comic that might have found an audience. There's a saying in the theater — "No one looks good in a flop." Dick came out of his "flops" looking pretty darn good…just as he'd looked good enough after the abrupt termination of his "action hero" line at Charlton for DC to grab him.
That was one impressive thing about Dick. Another was his rep for dealing squarely with talent. And yet another was his ability to find that talent in the first place. He really loved and understood the business and it showed.
Since I have you here, I'll tell a quick story about him. The first part of it occurred around 1983, give or take a year. I was at a distributors' conference at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas and I had to talk to Dick about an editorial-type matter relating to something I was then doing for DC. We left the conference room where retailers were arguing and went out into the casino and sat at the snack bar to have our own argument. This was not a good place for me since we were surrounded by very noisy slot machines and very noisy people playing them. In those surroundings, I had trouble making my case and I kept suggesting to Dick that we go somewhere quieter. He though kept saying, "Let's stay here and settle this."
I finally realized what he was doing. I knew and he knew that I knew. Though it was a bad arena for me, it was perfect for Dick. He was hard-of-hearing and he mainly read lips. "Conversing" there, he had the advantage. The ruckus didn't distract him one bit and he handily convinced me that he was right and I was wrong. I think I gave in, in part, because I realized I'd been outfoxed and I kinda admired that.
In 1991, we were at the Comic-Con in San Diego — also sometimes a noisy place — and we got to talking about Dick's hearing problems. "It's gotten so bad," he said, "that I can't understand three words in a row on television." I suggested he try adding a Closed Caption device to his set. This was back before that was a standard feature on all new TVs. You had to buy a standalone component and hook it up to get Closed Captioning. Dick said, "I've been meaning to try one of those but I can't figure out where to buy one." I told him I'd gotten my father one at Sears. My father had passed away a few months earlier but the apparatus had made his last few years more pleasant.
Suddenly, it dawned on me: My mother had recently had me take the Closed Caption device off the set in her living room and it was still in the trunk of my car, parked right outside the convention center. I went out, got it and gave it to Dick. He took it home and put it to good, happy use for a year or two…until he got a more modern set in his studio. And at one point, he sent me a lovely thank-you note with a lovely sketch of himself working at his drawing table and watching TV. It said, "If I'd been Closed-Captioned in Las Vegas, you would have won that argument."