The following are pics I took of the original art for Noel Sickles' January 22nd, 1936 Scorchy Smith daily, which was on display at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.
Cropping close sections of the art reveal the amazing craft Sickles put into the work on a daily basis, some of which could almost double for fine abstract paintings. Click on the art for a bigger look.
In comparison, I've included a printed version (minus the book spine bends in the last panel) of the same strip, from Dean Mullaney's book, Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles.
Quite simply, Noel Sickles' 1930s run on the comic strip Scorchy Smith is the ur-text of American adventure cartooning. Though Roy Crane's Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy led the way, Sickle's single-handed and seemingly off-handed advancement of using ink and brush-based chiaroscuro to define shadows, forms, figures, compositions and objects revolutionized and galvanized entire generations of cartoonists.
The first cartoonist who utilized Sickles' new technique was his friend and colleague Milton Caniff, who applied it to his Terry and the Pirates strip, with amazing and classic results (Caniff's writing and strip characters were better, so the graphic advancement in his strip brought the quality of comic strips to a whole new level). Nearly every major adventure cartoonist afterwards applied Sickles' new techniques to one extent or another, far too many than can be listed here: Jack Kirby, Carmine Infantino, Don Heck, Alex Toth, Lee Elias, Wally Wood, Will Eisner, Frazetta, Johnny Craig, Frank Robbins, George Tuska, Alex Raymond...
Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles reprints every Scorchy Smith strip Sickles drew, including strips before he started and after he left. That's only the second half of this very heavy and large, nearly 400-page book. The first half functions as an excellently researched biography by Bruce Canwell accompanied by hundreds of beautifully reproduced color and B&W illustrations, ads, paintings, sketches, comics and graphics
of all kind by Sickles through his long career. Jim Steranko wrote the introduction.
I cannot recommend this fine book enough; it's an essential, foundational reference and document for any serious reader of comics and scholar of the art of cartooning. The only small compaint I have is the binding developed for the book isn't adequitely strong enough for the weight of the pages the book holds.Though I was very careful, the end papers began to tear away from the book. A book which weighs 6 and a half pounds needs much stronger binding, especially at $50.
Currently reading: Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles. I'll be posting some thoughts on the book soon.
I'm not sure where this ('60s?) Sickles illustration first appeared (can anyone help me out?).
One thing that's clear, though, is that Sickles continued to grow both in technique and in influence as an artist.
Just as his loose, noirish, chiaroscuro-based style made its big impact on Milton Caniff in the '30s (culminating in the styles of Alex Toth, Frank Robbins, Lee Elias and so many others), so this '60s style predates and sets the stage for many of today's indie cartoonists of what could be called the Fantagraphics/New Yorker school, any one of whom could have drawn the figure at the top of Sickle's illo.
