Noel Sickles

Who was Noel Sickles?

Noel Douglas Sickles was an American commercial illustrator and cartoonist, best known 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.