don’t get it, don’t understand it. They think it’s antiquated! How can they see what’s really there? Alex: Well, they probably won’t, until maybe another 10 years of living and seeing: assessing things. Because their heads are filled with the hot artist in comic books, today. They can’t see beyond admiring [Jack] Kirby and [Neal] Adams and whoever else was the hotshot 30 years, 20 years, 10 years ago, that’s as far back as they go in time, and everybody keeps regurgitating Kirby/Adams! CBA: And Miller. Alex: And Miller… well, that’s another story. But Caniff, Sickles, etc., the syndicated strips’ best pastpasters’ works are quiet compared to comic book art, storytelling, characters and whatever. It’s unfortunate that because you like chocolate, you can’t like vanilla, that you can’t appreciate other things than what you happen to be very hot about at the moment. It’s a big blind spot that young people have about their favorite artists or whatever craze they’re locked into which turns them off and on! This tunnel-vision, which I find very strange. They see only that, and nothing else! “Don’t confuse me with facts, just let me do my thing, I love this type of art, and only that type of art.” When they’re older, more mature, if they’re lucky, they’ll come to appreciate a whole century of newspaper strip art, Sunday pages and dailies, to admire, to be entertained by, to just read… the funny stuff as well as the straight! CBA: And fine art, and photography. Alex: Of course! Yes! CBA: Sickles and Caniff are grouped together so often, can you distill the difference between them? Alex: The younger, Noel Sickles, was the teacher of the older, Milt Caniff. Illustrator/”reporter” is what Sickles was. He didn’t exaggerate. He didn’t cartoon things. He played it very straight. He was an illustrator! Period! He drew beautifully, had a great eye for perspective, aerial perspective, the whole ball of wax. What he did with figures and lighting and storytelling, the movie techniques he brought into his strip! Black-&-white photography, being 95% of movies in those days, excited him, and he adapted it into his work on Scorchy Smith, using one graytone in his b-&-w art to indicate patterns, light sources showing their effects, in snow scenes, night scenes… remarkable stuff. He was brilliant! Caniff, on the other hand, was more the
cartoonist, capable of the bigfoot stuff (although Sickles had that in him, too; both of them much appreciated Roy Crane from the getgo, admired what he could do with simple lines. But, also, that marvelous caricaturist/fantasy artist, T.S. Sullivant). What turned-on Sickles must’ve turned-on Caniff, re the works of certain artists, cartoonists, painters, because Sickles was keen about impressionists— Monet, Sisley, the political cartoonist David Low, who had lush, wonderful lines and spotting rich blacks, way of drawing and staging! His political cartoons were works of art! Sickles was strongly influenced by Sullivant’s distortions, realistic and fantastic, at once. Plus the influence of the Simplicissimus German artist-caricaturist-illustrator Thony and Blix, Gulbransen. He took it all in. Some of it infected Caniff’s work, echoes of that influence through Sickles. But Caniff was aware of self-promotion, and how important it would be for a strip, like Terry and the Pirates! I don’t know what he may have done to promote Dickie Dare for AP Features, ungenerous with its money or their own promotional material?! But he was helped by deep pockets of the Chicago Tribune/New York News Syndicate, when he got Terry, and they made the most of it. I’ve got clips from Mini-Cam Photography, a little slick magazine of World War II, and it’s spread with lots of photographs of Milt in Chinatown, New York, with his models for the Dragon Lady, Burma, and Pat Ryan. How he took his own photographs with his Rollie twin-lens reflex camera, at his High Torridge home in New City, New York. There was an issue of a fashion magazine, Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, a big spread. Some fashion designer had used Caniff’s drawings of evening-gowned women—from his strip, literally—made the gowns for models who looked like his characters! How Caniff drew them, and the gowned photo models! It was
Above: For Al Dellinges’ fondlyrecalled Near Mint magazine, Alex composed this tribute to the legendary influential cartoonist, Noel Sickles. Courtesy of Al Dellinges. ©2000 Alex Toth. Below: We confess to be featuring very little of Toth’s 1940s and ’50s artwork but we’d be loathe to forget his fine rendition of the Emerald Crusader in this panel from All-American Comics #92. ©2000 DC Comics.
Left: Alex labeled this drawing “The Cord that binds,” recalling both his devotion to aviation and the superbly designed 1937/38 Cord automobile (the latter so nicely celebrated by the artist in his opus, “The Case of the Curious Classic,” in Hot Wheels #5, a tale Alex also wrote). From the cover of APA #23. ©2000 Alex Toth. Jan. 2001
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