DC Comics Covergirls (2007) – The Cardy Women Addition

Art by Alex Ross

By Louise Simonson

I picked this book up – actually in its 2012 Barnes & Noble reprint edition – last weekend off B&N's bargain shelves. It's interesting – full of the various beautiful women of DC Comics as they have appeared on covers through the years – Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl, and so forth. Not just heroines – anti-heroines such as Catwoman, and even villainesses such as Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, get sections or at least notice thrown their way.  Many are oversized, full-page renditions.  There is plenty of commentary as well, sometimes humorous, putting the covers into their historical context both in comic-book and wider societal developments.

There is a glaring omission, however. Partly it arises from considerable bias toward the more recent period with only a relative few scattered from before the past couple of decades of DC Comics' now 75-plus-year history. And, partly, that's understandable. Artists such as Adam Hughes, who figures prominently and writes the foreword as well, have provided a great many cover images guaranteed to make any red-blooded male fan's eye linger a bit overlong. But I would say that there is at least one artist from several decades ago, mainly the late 1960s and early 1970s, who deserves more than the one or two examples that appear scattered through this book. For a period in the early 1970s Nick Cardy seems to have been DC's cover-artist of choice. And even before that, his renditions of Mera in the pages as well as on the covers of Aquaman as well as Donna Troy Wonder Girl in Teen Titans fed many pubescent fantasies of this Absent-Minded Professor-to-be. Donna Troy is given a few covers in the “Wonder Woman” section of this book. Poor Mera, however, is confined to one cover (p. 205) – unless I missed some more – and not even a single one by the great Nick Cardy, who made her look so perfectly luscious!

I consider this to be enough of an injustice that I have now spent considerable time collecting a fairly exhaustive gallery of cover images that I wish to present as sort of an unofficial addition to Simonson's DC Comics Covergirls volume. It is arranged somewhat along the same lines as the book, but Cardy's body of cover illustration does, in my mind, necessitate the addition of a couple of sections.  But within those sections, the freedom of the Internet allows for a more comprehensive presentation than the necessarily selective limitations imposed by the print medium.  So here are virtually all of the covers that Nick Cardy drew for DC Comics prominently featuring what have become known and admired as "Cardy Women."

First, a couple of links: The Wikipedia article (here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Cardy) gives a good quick overview of Cardy's life and career. A fan has created an homage website which can be found here: http://nickcardy.com/ .

Then for the actual "Cardy Women Addition," please go to my main blog here:  http://randomramblings-absentmindedprofessor.blogspot.com/2012/11/dc-comics-covergirls-2007-cardy-women.html .

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