Noel Sickles
Noel Sickles | |
|---|---|
| Born | Noel Douglas Sickles January 24, 1910 |
| Died | October 3, 1982 (aged 72) |
| Occupation | Cartoonist |
| Known for | Scorchy Smith |
| Awards | National Cartoonists Society's Advertising and Illustration Award, 1960 and 1962 Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame |
Noel Douglas Sickles (January 24, 1910 – October 3, 1982) was an American
.Sickles was born in
Scorchy Smith
Sickles was assigned to the action/adventure comic Scorchy Smith, whose creator, John Terry, was suffering from tuberculosis. Loosely modeled on Charles Lindbergh, Scorchy was a pilot-for-hire who flew into numerous high-octane globe-trotting adventures. The series, which started in 1930, was heavily influenced by Roy Crane’s adventure strip Wash Tubbs. Sickles initially illustrated the strip as a ghost artist, but he signed his own name after Terry's 1934 death.
Sickles' artwork was much admired and proved highly influential to other comic strip artists. His compositions were cinematic in style, and he had a brisk, impressionistic style of inking that he referred to as "
Acknowledging Sickles' influence on his own work, cartoonist Alex Toth described him as an "illustrator/reporter" who "didn't exaggerate. He didn't cartoon things. He played it straight!"[1]
John Romita also recognized the importance of Sickle's work: "Toth loosened everybody up and got everybody wide awake. They all discovered Scorchy Smith. They discovered Sickles because Toth maybe had 300 dailies of Noel Sickles in a stack of Photostats. People were copying from that stack of Photostats, and handing them out to each other. The whole industry was using those Scorchy Smith dailies. And that’s when I found out that Caniff and Sickles had developed that style together. We all sprang from that. I think it lit a fire under the whole industry."[2]
Magazine illustration
Sickles asked the Associated Press for a salary raise in 1936, and when he was turned down, he quit, becoming a successful commercial illustrator. He also ghosted the daily strip
Awards and reprints
He received the
In 1983, Sickles was posthumously inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.[4]
Death
Sickles died in
References
- ^ "A Talk with Alex Toth: CBA converses with a master of comic book art". Comic Book Artist. No. 11. January 2001. p. 13. Retrieved 2023-06-16 – via Issuu.
- ^ "An Interview with John Romita by Tom Spurgeon". The Comics Journal. 2023-06-14. Retrieved 2023-07-25.
- ^ Inkpot Award
- ^ "Noel Sickles – Society of Illustrators". Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. Retrieved 2023-06-16.
External links
- American Comic Archive
- NCS Awards
- The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum: Noel Sickles Collection guide
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