Noel Sickles

Noel Douglas Sickles (January 24, 1910 – October 3, 1982) was an American commercial illustrator and cartoonist most famous for the comic strip Scorchy Smith.

Sickles was born in Chillicothe, Ohio. Largely self-taught, his career began as a political cartoonist for the Ohio State Journal in the late 1920s. At that time he met and shared a studio with cartoonist Milton Caniff, then working for the Columbus Dispatch.

Sickles followed Caniff, creator of the Terry and the Pirates comic strip, to New York City in 1933, where both men initially worked as staff artists for the Associated Press. Sickles was assigned to the action/adventure comic Scorchy Smith, whose creator, John Terry, was suffering from tuberculosis.

Scorchy Smith, loosely modeled on Charles Lindbergh, was a pilot-for-hire who roved the U.S. and later the world having adventures. The series, which started in 1930, was heavily influenced by Roy Crane’s adventure comic, Wash Tubbs.

Sickles initially illustrated the strip as a "ghost artist", but was allowed to sign his own name to the strip 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 “chiaroscuro.” Sickles also proved to be adept at using the shading medium Zipatone.

Sickles and Caniff worked together for two years, sometimes writing and drawing each other's strips. Caniff acknowledged being heavily influenced by Sickles.

Sickles asked the newspaper syndicate for a salary raise in 1936 and when he was turned down he quit, becoming a successful commercial illustrator. In 1938 he designed Patsy for cartoonist Mell Graff, but otherwise the rest of his career was devoted to magazine illustration.

Sickles died in Tucson, Arizona October 3rd, 1982.