Died January 6, 2012. Born December 27, 1918.

American comic strip and comic book artist, best known for illustrating the Tarzan comic strip.

Celardo grew up on Staten Island and continued to live there most of his life. After a childhood in Mariners Harbor, he graduated from Port Richmond High School. Serving with the Army during World War II, he was assigned to duty in the European theater, where he rose to the rank of captain. Returning to Staten Island after WWII, he lived in Castleton Corners and eventually settled in Graniteville.

In addition to art study with the Federal School's correspondence course, his extensive art training was at New York's Art Students League, the School of Industrial Arts and the School of Visual Arts. He began his professional career doing sports cartoons for Street & Smith and then began drawing for comic books, including a job at the Eisner-Iger shop. During the 1940s, he was a major contributor to the Fiction House line. Over decades, he did work for a variety of publishers: American Comics Group, DC Comics, Gold Key, Quality, Standard. St. John and Whitman.

In the early 1950s, he succeeded Bob Lubbers as illustrator of the Tarzan comic strip. He began the Tarzan daily strip on January 18, 1954 and the Sunday strip on February 28, 1954, eventually drawing a total of 4350 daily strips and 724 Sunday strips. He continued on Tarzan until Russ Manning took it over in the 1960s. He then succeeded Joe Kubert on Tales of the Green Beret and worked on Buz Sawyer in the 1980s.

During the 1960s, he also did artwork for Topps Chewing Gum, including a comic strip on their Land of the Giants card series.