Monday, May 08, 2017

Washington Chiaroscuro

Monday Cartoon Day.

I may have shown some of these 1936/37 political cartoons by Noel Sickles before, but I found a new source for them and just got as many as I could. They show a completely different side to Sickles talent than his work as a comicstrip penciller and inker.

2 comments:

comicstripfan said...

These are wonderful panels! These are probably from, as you are aware, his Ohio State Journal/AP experience from the late ’20’s. For those who haven’t the Caniff biography “Meanwhile…” by R.C. Harvey, Sickle is quoted as saying: “There was always an editorial meeting to pick out a subject, but the content of the cartoon was my responsibility. After the meeting, I returned to my desk and worked out eight to twelve ideas. The first three or four were usually cliches. Ideas you had seen before and the like…I would follow a system. I started by looking at objects around the room. This stimulated me to build the cartoon idea in my mind. A fork might make me see [a labour leader] poking industry with a pitchfork.”

comicstripfan said...

To be more accurate, you can tell by looking at the subject matter of the cartoons, that several if not many of these are actually from well into the 1930's - Sickles was nothing if not prolific.