Dick Giordano, From The Heart, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #163

March 28, 2010 Mike Gold 8 Comments

It just occurred to me that if not for Dick Giordano, I might never have gotten into the comics racket.

Mind you, I wasn’t looking to. In the spring of 1976, I was midway through planning work on programming the first Chicago Comicon, to be held that August at the old Playboy Hotel. Jenette Kahn, who I knew from her tenure at Scholastic, had just been anointed publisher of DC Comics. I invited her to be co-guest of honor at our show along with Stan Lee and Harvey Kurtzman. She accepted, and that initiated a series of long telephone conversations about the nature of the comics industry and its relationship to the Bizarro World (weirder, but less square).

After a couple months of this, Jenette called and suggested I fly out to New York to have lunch with her and Neal Adams. She thought I would make a good business manager for Neal’s Continuity Associates art studio. The job was open because Dick Giordano left to return to freelancing.

I had no intention of taking the job. I got to know Neal some when he was working with Stuart Gordon and The Organic Theater; I liked the guy and loved his work, but that deadline thing sucked. However, the idea of having lunch at The 21 Club with Neal and Jenette was damn cool, and Jenette’s promised personal tour of DC Comics made my fanboy heart go pitter-pattern. Long story short: Neal cancelled after I got off the plane, and Jenette and I had an intense three hour conversation about the comics industry that disturbed the legitimate businessmen around us. The next day she called me and said to hell with Neal, she wanted me to work for her at DC.

From that point forward, Dick Giordano played a more direct role in my life. We met early on in my first tenure and became friends. We enjoyed each other’s sense of humor and shared an attitude towards creator’s rights and encouraging creators to take risks… editorially speaking. This was a great bond that only thickened after I started First Comics in 1981. Dick and I maintained our friendship by hanging out together at various conventions too numerous to mention, and he’d slip me some knowledge and encouragement that would help our efforts at First. He wanted us to succeed.

So in late 1985 when I grew dissatisfied with First’s management priorities (ain’t I polite?) the first person to call me was Dick Giordano. He wanted me at DC as senior editor. He pointed out DC pays their bills. He called several times. He knew how to work it.

I started working while still in Chicago. That was Dick’s idea. He was having a hard time getting the sequel to the original Crisis On Infinite Earths off the ground and thought the best way to birth it was from afar, outside the politics of the DC environment. I thought it over, suggested the title Legends and said it should have the opposite effect that Crisis had: it should broaden the DC Universe and get several characters and projects off the ground. He went for it, I recruited my First Comics pal John Ostrander and old-time friends Len Wein and John Byrne, and my second tenure at DC was off and running.

Dick left his staff position at DC shortly after I did, and that was no coincidence. Without Giordano at the tiller, DC was just a bureaucratic mess. I needed someone to take on management for me, and Dick was always more than willing. In fact, he was often pre-emptive: we got into four or five major fights (Dick could fight with the best of them; I was vastly outclassed) because Dick had seen a conflict coming and already fought with the powers-that-be, and he didn’t get his way. Then I would come in (he was waiting for it) to fight the fight that he already fought.

We often took the commuter train home together, talking about the medium or, just as frequently, talking politics or American illustration. Dick wore a hearing aid and read lips, but at that point in his life, my vocal range – if I projected a bit – fell within his range of hearing. Good grief, that couldn’t have been fun.

I worked for Dick Giordano, but he also worked for me. He inked about a million issues of Green Arrow and we did the Modesty Blaise graphic novel and a bunch of other projects. Most recently, Dick teamed up with his long-time buddy Frank McLaughlin and Frank’s daughter Erin Holroyd to do the graphic novel White Viper, serialized on ComicMix and soon to be published in trade paperback by IDW/ComicMix. It was one of Dick’s last major efforts.

This past weekend, I’d say about 85% of the entire American comics medium came to a halt, at least for a while. We’re telling the stories over and over – a lot of them will involve poker or bowling – and I suspect a few will tip a glass or two.

Really, all of this is simply preamble to one word. For all those great times, for all those great opportunities and all that great work, for friendship and for wonderful conversation, I say this to my late friend and co-worker Dick Giordano.

Thanks.

Media metaphysician and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point,www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed the following Thursdays at 10:00 PM Eastern. Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue. Mike will be appearing on a comics history panel at the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo on Saturday, April 17 at McCormick Place.