Broken Frontier

Dick Giordano, July 20th 1932-March 27th 2010

Dick Giordano passed away yesterday at the age of 77. Dick’s is a name most comic fans over a certain age will recognize.  He was in the business for a phenomenally long time after all; he started out as a freelance artist back in 1952, and worked for several companies over the next four decades, including DC, Marvel and Warren. He was best known as an inker of course, setting a standard for others to follow, but he was also the editor who launched Charlton’s Action Heroes on the world, and later rose to be executive editor and Vice President of DC. This was a position he held for ten years until his retirement in 1993 following the death of his wife, Marie. Even then, he carried on drawing, wrote a book, and was in later years a director of The Hero Initiative, the comic industry charity. Some retirement.

But to many, if not most of us, he was the guy who wrote the monthly ‘Meanwhile’ news column at DC in the eighties, the guy who told us what was going on and what was coming up, in a chatty and informal style very far removed from the usual hard sell. He was the human face of DC back then, our window on the industry, though I doubt we ever really thought much about it at the time. You never notice what you’ve got until it’s gone. Dick, you’ll be missed. To echo that characteristic sign-off:

                                               Thank you, and good afternoon.