Dick Giordano passed away on 3-27-10. He's not quite the last of the old-time "blood and thunder" comics-creators, since people like Denny O'Neil, John Severin and Russ Heath are still kicking, but he was one of the best at pulp action, as this cover to SARGE STEEL.
A detailed obituary appears on Mark Evanier's site, but
mine is simply an appreciation for his talent as an artist in the "blood and thunder" style. I pattern my use of the term after that of Richard Slotkin's in REGENERATION AFTER VIOLENCE, using the term to portrary a host of "tough guy" writers ranging from Jack London to Raymond Chandler.
The influence of this school of pulp action on early comic books is hard to gauge. Both the costumed and non-costumed heroes of the late 30s were a little too "softboiled" to have belonged to any tough-guy clubs: that is, while physically tough their characters usually followed the pattern of eternal white knights like the Lone Ranger. One occasionally sees early comics playing with the hardboiled approach, as with an early Eisner experiment, "Muss 'Em Up Donovan," but in comic books the blood and thunder doesn't really get going until the late forties, with the rise of the crime genre and TWO-FISTED TALES. The approach probably reaching its last high point in mainstream comics with the Kanigher war books at DC Comics.
"Blood and thunder" didn't mean simply violence: any number of costumed heroes were as violent as the crime comics, which is probably why Frederic Wertham lumped them all together. But in the blood-and-thunder aesthetic there was usually a strong naturalistic vibe, a mood uncomfortable with the wild excesses of fantasy seen in the superheroes, the SF/horror books and even Conanesque fantasy.
Giordano perhaps had the misfortune to be one of the last advocates of this vibe. One notices that most of his Charlton "action heroes" eschewed most of the fantasy world-building one saw in contemporaneous costumed heroes at DC, Marvel and others. Pulp naturalism was clearly Giordano's orientation, as shown in his work at DC, from the remodeling of WONDER WOMAN into a superspy-type to one of his later projects, an adaptation of MODESTY BLAISE.
I don't imagine he ever really had much in common with the fans who loved the worlds of Jack Kirby and Gardner Fox, much less the virtual takeover of the superhero genre by the spawn of the X-Men. But for a time, his work provided an interesting contrast to the dominant superhero meme: a return to simpler days when casual buyers picked up comic books to read about tough detectives dueling it out with sexy temptresses, with not a ray-gun in sight or an angst-crisis in sight.
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