The term "artist's artist" is woefully overused, a cold comfort to an artist who finds himself publicly praised by his better-known and wealthier peers -- in some cases, the source of that success being work created in or inspired by his style -- to no discernable improvement in his own fame and fortune. Noel Sickles (1910-1982) casts a long shadow. He wrote the first draft -- if not the final version -- of the book on the Milton Caniff school of adventure-comics art; an impressionistic approach to inking, sure-handed chiaroscuro and a cinematic eye for staging action, as well as an almost painterly approach to Zipatone. His never-ending artistic restlessness and the stinginess of newspaper syndicates drove Sickles out of the comics field and into magazine illustration at an early age, but his influence -- both direct and indirect -- continues to be felt today.

This conversation between Sickles, fellow artist's artist Gil Kane, historian Ron Goulart and cartoonist Dick Hodgins was taped on the evening of Sept. 6, 1973 at Kane's home in Wilton, Conn.

- Milo George

[The Journal would like thank Mr. Goulart for fact-checking this piece for publication, and Dylan Williams, Jean-Michel Blanc and San Millan for providing us with some greatly needed art.]

NOEL SICKLES: I found good friends in the feature writers. I had a ball with them and I got to do special assignments -- go out on trips, like a cruise to nowhere on a ship with broads and booze.

GIL KANE: That's unusual.

SICKLES: Oh, it was great. Well, they couldn't take a cameraman for a thing like that. And so I went and did sketches, and I went to the U.N. and did sketches there, when Khrushchev banged his shoe. Stuff like that. But now, on to the serious stuff.

KANE: Ron's been doing a series of hardcover books. He did one on the pulps. He's done one on --

RON GOULART: Well, two on the pulps, actually. This one's going to be a book just devoted to the adventure strip and particularly in the '30s [later published as The Adventurous Decade], and so obviously I want to have this section on your stuff.

SICKLES: Oh, I thought it was to get Dick Hodgins' stuff.

GOULART: Well, we're going to get some of your stuff, too.

SICKLES: I think you're interested in historical data as well, so if you want to establish some sort of situation where you ask specific questions --

GOULART: Yeah, if you don't mind. I don't know so much about your early life. Now, you were born in Dayton, Ohio. Did you study art formally anywhere, or --

SICKLES: In a library.

KANE: Milt Caniff told me once that, when he was working on a newspaper there, that you came up with samples and that he and the rest of the art department took a look at those samples and they almost fell off their chairs. And, in fact, when he found out that you were two years younger than he, he was just terribly dismayed. I think at the time he was 18 and you were 16. And he said he really was terribly upset by the quality of the material, because it was better than the top pros working.

SICKLES: Well, what I did wrong was first studying cartooning, but in the library -- Carnegie Library. But it was like a detective story; I tracked it down so that I studied not only American cartooning, but all over the world: European, particularly. I became acquainted with all of the various types of cartooning. I went back and studied Simplicissimus and Jugend [magazines] and so on, and that got me more and more into becoming aware of illustration. And I then did the same thing there. I went through, well, the entire background, as much as I could find.

GOULART: Was your initial impulse then to be a cartoonist? I mean, that's what got you started?

SICKLES: Oh, it still was, even though I studied illustration.

GOULART: I mean, did you envision doing a strip or a panel or --

SICKLES: No, just being a newspaper cartoonist, which I still think is a marvelous thing.

GOULART: This paper where you got together with Caniff, was that the Columbus Dispatch?

SICKLES: Well, Milt was at the Columbus Dispatch, and I had gone up, when I was a little kid. I was barefooted. I'd hitch rides up to Columbus, and go in and see Billy Ireland, and he gave me a great many pointers about my direction; what to do and so on. He didn't suggest the library, but that was the only thing available in a small town. So then I got to know Harold Keyes, who was the political cartoonist of the Columbus Citizen, a Scripps-Howard paper, and I admired his work very much. So, I didn't even try to get a job on the Dispatch. Harry Keyes offered me a job as soon as I graduated from high school.

KANE: Most of the illustration that was being done in the United States had a bravura quality to it, whether it was Charles Dana Gibson, James Montgomery Flagg or Leyendecker or ... There was really a larger-than-life quality about it all. Your stuff, from the first time I saw it, had such a conversational quality. People stood around in slack, causal, understated attitudes, that when you tell me this it really blows me over because ...

SICKLES: What does? Of having studied?

KANE: No, of coming out with these very true-to-life attitudes when American illustration was poised, like Winged Victory, where everything was --

SICKLES: Oh, very much.

KANE: Yeah. And here you had this style that was entirely different. Your whole approach, I remember a million shots in Scorchy Smith where they're walking, hands at sides, and hardly any gesturing at all. And everything's so understated, that from a period where overstatement was the general point-of-view, I'm very surprised to hear that you were that influenced by the illustration of the time. Because you didn't reflect that sort of thing.

SICKLES: When you study so many people as I did, you're influenced by all of them, but you cannot be influenced by any one. That is, overinfluenced by any one. You become more into yourself.

KANE: But still, there is a kind of naturalistic quality in your work, and most of the illustrators of that time were not naturalists.

SICKLES: Are you talking about the cartoonists here or the illustrators? Or both?

KANE: Well, I'm talking about both. I'm talking about people like Leyendecker, and --oh, Wyeth -- whoever the big illustrators were of the period, and even people like Gibson in black and white, and Lovell and --

SICKLES: Let me interrupt a moment. Just studying Gibson, I would notice what one man often would do. How he would go about his work, like a writer might. You study all of the good ones that you like, and you're influenced and pick up certain things from each one. From Gibson, for instance: Gibson was a master of attitudes, of what they did. But he also dramatized that in such a subtle way that you never even noticed it. For instance, head, hands, feet: Gibson would often do a head and he would do the two hands up near the head. That gives tremendous expression to do that. It calls attention to that head more than if it was just a head. It's a perfectly natural position. All of them are very natural. But it's not throwing up your hands or gesturing wildly or anything of that sort. You see, it's very natural, but at the same time, doing the job. Oh, there must be perhaps 15 or 20 different things that I noticed that a man like that taught. Donahey, a political cartoonist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, was a great master of pen and ink, but the technique never got in the way of what he was trying to say. This thing of drawing is highly underrated. It's underrated by writers and editors. Editors will never understand the appeal of drawings. Now, I mean, photographs have appeal. Life has out a new book of all the great Life photographs. It's a tremendous thing.

KANE: Fantastic.

SICKLES: You cannot tear yourself away from the photographs. They're fabulous in many ways. But everybody forgets how effective a drawing can be from the standpoint of reaching people's feelings, often far more than any photograph of anything, unless it just happens to be a very quick photograph. But I defend drawings because they are underrated by editors. Comic strips are vastly underrated by editors, even though poll after poll over how many years has shown that comic strips, and the editorial cartoons, out-poll everything else in the damn paper. But what do the writing people do, the word people? They keep cutting down on the pages. More and more they keep taking them. It's unconscious. It's not deliberate. They wouldn't be that stupid for their own welfare, but it's unconscious. They think those words are so much more important than those pictures are.

GOULART: As pointed out by the newspaper shortage now. Time has a piece where they've cut out the comic section.

SICKLES: You mean the paper shortage?

GOULART: Yeah, the newsprint shortage. And they cut out the comic strips in some of these papers and they cut down on the editorial page in another and they've asked all the writers to write a better story quickly.

SICKLES: Well, you know I was in Washington not long ago on a job. And it's the first time I've seen, since World War II, the Washington Post. I've seen Herblock's cartoon reprinted any number of places, but here I saw it for the first time in the Washington Post and I couldn't believe this: Here's a six-column newspaper, and they have squeezed this down, if it was ever any larger, to two columns. It shocked me because I think Herblock is as important as the two guys who discovered Watergate, you know. Or the editor, or the publisher, outside [of the fact that] she has the money to keep the thing going. But to squeeze that man's work down to that size, and to diminish its effectiveness is a crime. To themselves.

GOULART: The New York Post is a three-column paper, and they run Herblock.

SICKLES: Yeah. But they run it the size the Washington Post does, which is a six-column paper.

GOULART: Yeah, but Herblock's cartoon in the Post is two columns. In the New York Post, it's three columns, I believe. SICKLES: I know it's large on the editorial page. The New York Post is five columns, isn't it? Or four columns?

KANE: Well, they have a larger column size, Like Newsday. They run a slightly larger column size on the editorial page, I believe, and they have the editorial page divided into three sections. Herblock runs something like that middle third, no?

SICKLES: Whatever it is, it's too small.

KANE: Not to stray too far away from what we were talking about before. You were talking about drawing and to go back to Caniff's remark about seeing your work at that time. He was absolutely dumbfounded by the quality of the drawing, and what he said at the time was that you were spending time at the library. And he said that you were taking out, you were simply drawing everything that you saw. Once there, did you have some sort of a procedure, an approach, an attitude about drawing?

SICKLES: Only that I was hungry for it. Jesus. Hungry to learn. It's a helluva way to learn.

GOULART: Any family background, anyone in the family --

SICKLES: Yeah, my whole family. I have pictures by my father. I don't know if you ever saw those.

KANE: No. I never did.

SICKLES: Well, they're naive paintings. I've got about 50 of them, and every modern artist that looks at these things just goes nuts about them. They're very good naive paintings.

GOULART: But nobody in your family had any formal instruction? They were all ...

SICKLES: No. It was just a natural thing. Drawing, to me, is a great deal of mechanical ability. If you understand the construction of things, there's no problem in drawing. But you have to understand the construction first. And my family had that -- one brother was a highly skilled machinist. He made very delicate instruments, and so on; that sort of thing.

GOULART: That's what I was going to bring up later on. It seems to me in the '30s you were the master, the champion of the mechanical. Nobody was doing everything as thoroughly as you were -- planes and trains, and all this.

SICKLES: Yeah, but I never drew them mechanically.

KANE: But somehow or other you suggested a way of --

SICKLES: A sense of ... For instance, a railroad boiler is a boiler, you know. It goes back and it comes down like this, with the firebox and so on. Once you have that basic shape those six wheels underneath are ... you know, a child does that.

KANE: There's a comment that Caniff made that at one point you showed him something. He was having trouble doing it. You showed him how to use book-illustration techniques. To be able to do it and to do it fast. That you were some sort of turning point in the way he was approaching Terry in that, with the point of view that you gave him, somehow or other he was then able to do this ...

SICKLES: Is this Milt?

KANE: Yes. In the hardcover collection of the first two years of Terry. In the introduction, Caniff talked about it. In fact, I can even get out those books and show you the quote.

GOULART: One thing I'm curious about, when did you decide to use the brush, as opposed to the pen? Or did you always use both of them?

SICKLES: You mean, on the strips?

GOULART: Well, on the strip you did mostly brush, didn't you, after a certain point?

SICKLES: Well, there's a story about that if you've got time. Scorchy Smith was first done by John Terry.

GOULART: I brought some proofs of the early stuff. I assume that you took it over about then.

SICKLES: Oh, no. This was long after.

GOULART: Oh, really?

SICKLES: Well, not long after. My god.

GOULART: That's March of '34, so you were doing it before that?

SICKLES: Oh, yeah. I had a problem, a real problem with the Associated Press. I was doing their political cartooning and they gave me this strip to do. The reason was that John Terry had tuberculosis and was dying -- slowly, but dying. He couldn't carry on any longer. So they handed it to me. Have you ever seen John Terry's work?

GOULART: Yes. I have an original of his.

SICKLES: Well, I probably did those. It's possible. It depends on the date.

GOULART: No. I worked with his nephew, who was an animator. He'd gotten them from his uncle, so I assume he didn't ... How far back did you do it?

SICKLES: Well, it's difficult to remember just which year that that started (1934 or '35). I did John Terry's thing for six months until he died. I had to copy, I had to forget everything I learned about drawing -- absolutely everything -- because it was the worst drawing I had ever seen by anybody. Your children do better drawings than John Terry.

GOULART: Why? Did they want to make everyone think that John Terry was still doing it?

SICKLES: That was the whole idea, to continue it and also to give Terry the income until he died.

GOULART: And you were just doing it for nothing?

SICKLES: Oh no. I got a salary. I got $47.50.

GOULART: But you did this and other work at the same time for AP? You were doing the political stuff and the strip?

SICKLES: No. I had to give full time to the strip. But it took time to copy that horrible style, you know. I had to do it for six months, then he died. Then, for another six months I changed that so gradually that editors didn't notice, not a single paper dropped the strip. For another six months I had that chore of changing it so gradually, but within that six months time I had to decide how I wanted to draw it. So I didn't know much about comic strips at the time and I didn't care much about comic strips at the time. So I gradually worked that into the style I finally developed for Scorchy Smith. But my reason for deciding on that style, which was later copied by a hell of a lot of people, was that it would make it more real. It was an adventure story. And what I saw all around me at that time were outline and black, solid black. All the coats were black or sometimes everybody was light and the background was black. But what I wanted to do was to get more reality into the actual execution of things, the drawing of it. So that was the problem, to decide how I wanted to do a comic strip myself, to make it more real to the reader and also to bring it out on the page. At least enough to make the thing stand out.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #242.]

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