The following archive interview with artist Mike Noble is reproduced with permission from the pages of the British zine The Gopherville Argus Issue Three, edited and published by Bill Storie, with design work by Terry Doyle, in 1992…
Question: What do the following television series have in common? The Lone Ranger, Fireball XL5, Popeye, Star Trek, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Follyfoot, Timeslip, Freewheelers, Black Beauty, The Tomorrow People, Kung-Fu, The Famous Five, Into the Labyrinth, Space: 1999, Worzel Gummidge and Robin of Sherwood?
Give up? The answer is that they have all appeared in comic strip, created at one time or another by one of the great unsung heroes of the British comics industry, Mike Noble.
I have a confession to make here. Although I founded The Frank Bellamy Appreciation Society, I was not always a fan of Frank’s work. Way back in my childhood days, aged seven or eight, I fondly recall Saturday morning trips downtown to pick up my shiny new copy of TV21 – I can still remember the smell of the printing ink – and reading it cover to cover in the local coffee shop, as my mother chatted to her friends. But “Thunderbirds” was the last of the three colour strips I turned to. Why? Because I didn’t like the artwork!
Blame it on youthful ignorance – although even today I maintain that strip contained some of Frank’s worst art, possibly reflecting his boredom at so long a tenure on a strip he didn’t particularly like in the first place. No, the memories I carry of TV21 are those of Ron Embleton and, above all others, Mike Noble. It is testament to his artistic skills that I can still recall whole pages of Mike’s art in incredible detail, even though I haven’t seen most of it for nigh on 25 years, so I was particularly pleased when Mike agreed to this interview.
Sadly, Mike is now in semi-retirement from the pressure of regular strip work, but for more than 30 years his elegant, flawless illustrations have graced the pages of such venerable publications as Express Weekly, TV Comic, TV21 and Look-In giving him a world record for illustrating more TV adaptations than any other artist.
Bill Storie: I first became a fan of your work when you took over “Fireball XL5” in TV21 – round about issue4, I think, but you had been working in the industry for sane time prior to that…
Mike: Yes, I had been working for some years on a variety of papers. My first efforts were for a black and white kind half-page strip in Robin, a companion paper to EAGLE and GIRL. Also, an editorial single illustration called “Life with Sally” about a teenage girl for Woman – this was in the early 1950s. I then moved on to cowboy stories. First, “The Lone Ranger” in the Express Weekly and, later, “The Range Rider” in TV Comic – and, curiously enough, two cartoon strips in that title as well, “Popeye”, in full colour on the front, and “Beetle Bailey” in black and white inside.
How did you get started in the business and was this always an ambition?
Yes, I must admit that was my ambition. I don’t think I’m much good at anything else. I attended South West Essex Technical College and School of Art [later, Waltham Forest Technical College and School of Art – Ed], and St Martins in London, and when I left I worked in an advertising studio in Holborn, prior to my compulsory National Service in 1949. I acquired a taste for illustration of a more adventurous kind whilst I was in the drawing office of the 8th Royal Tank Regiment and I spent quite a bit of time drawing tanks and military hardware.
Returning to civilian life I managed to get a job in a studio in Oxford Street, which specialised in fashion drawing, cartoon work and magazine illustration. I worked under an artist called Leslie Caswell for about a year, learning the rudiments of strip illustration, and was able after a time to do my own artwork for publication, through contacts acquired by my employer, Billy Cooper.
Because so much of your work is TV related you have to pay particular attention to detail and likenesses, which must be very demanding. Almost anyone can draw a character like, say, Batman and get away with it, because the costume gives you the recognition, even if the rest of the art is off, but in many of your strips the characters have to be recognisable by their faces alone. Did this cause you any problems?
No, not really. I had photographic references, of course, which I kept in front of me at all times, and I always endeavoured to keep as close to the likeness of the characters as possible. For the Gerry Anderson series, I gave the characters more realism than the puppets on TV, which the editor wanted – after all, it was worth taking advantage of the flexibility of drawing over the constraints imposed by the TV screen. The smaller the figure, the easier the task became, because only the main features needed emphasising, and it they were dark or fair, tall or short, fat or thin, this was almost enough for identification.
How do you work and what materials do you use?
I draw in pencil on CS1O (Bristol 4) board and finish in black Indian ink. When drawing for TV21, I was obliged to use a set list of coloured inks, as the printers in those days required it for the gravure press. Nowadays, you can use more or less anything, but I continued to use coloured inks for many years, as they seemed to give the best results.
Presumably you drew the originals larger than the printed size?
Yes, I drew the page half up on the printed size.
Much of your work vas printed using the gravure presses – did this cause any problems?
It did on one occasion, when I first started “Fireball XL5”. The Indigo Ink which I used for the space background contained, unknown to me, an element of black in it which, when reproduced, turned into a nasty grey colour, like washing up water. Needless to say, I switched to Prussian Blue pretty quickly.
How long would a weekly instalment take you and could you go through your working routine from the time. you received the script?
First, I made sure that I had all the references I required for the particular episode that I was working on. Then I would sketch out where each size of frame would go on the two pages, allowing for large panoramic views in some, or facial closeups in others, then pencil in roughly the characters from the script frame by frame, working out where the speech balloons would go and whether I had room for everything that was required. When I was satisfied with that, I would do the detailed pencil drawing with shading and deep shadows up to finished standard.
Both pages being done, I would then ink in with black ink and rule the frames with a ruling pen. Any airgun spraying would be done next – space, skies if required and finally each frame would be coloured in separately, until the job was completed.
I would allow roughly two days for each stage of the work – pencilling, inking and colouring, but the length of time taken would often depend on whether the story had crowds of people in it, or lots of complicated-looking machinery or buildings to draw. Obviously, if the story one week depicted a spaceship and crew stranded in the desert, or on a bare planet with quite a few closeups of the characters, then that was relatively quick and easy. Six days would be the average for a double page spread and about four days for black and white. Often, the coloured inks required three or four coats to bring the colour up to the strength we wanted. Also, I am not the world’s quickest artist!
Do you have a favourite strip?
This is a difficult one to answer, as I tend to make the work on hand as enjoyable as possible, and hope that the readers enjoy it too. If pressed, I think it would be “Captain Scarlet” and “Zero X” in TV21 and “Follyfoot” and “Worzel Gummidge” in Look-In – but I might change my mind tomorrow.
Have you ever had to work on a strip you disliked?
I don’t think I could have put up with drawing a trip I didn’t like, week after week.
Did you ever get time to do any work purely tor your own pleasure?
No strip drawings, as I was really too busy earning a living. I have done a few paintings of landscapes around Sussex, but I have either sold them, or they are framed on the walls of my home.
The “Popeye” and “Beetle Bailey” strips are very different to your normal style – if you hadn’t told me that it was your work, I would never have recognised it,
Well, doing them seemed like a rest cure after the demands of serious drawing and I was grateful to TV Comic for the work, as there was a gap between the ending of my last cowboy series and the beginning of TV Century 21.
One strip I don’t envy you is “Star Trek” – William Shatner has such ‘elusive’ features and very few artists seem able to draw his likeness well. And the U.S.S. Enterprise must have been a nightmare to draw…
Well, I did have some good photographic references to help me, and I must admit I quite enjoyed drawing spaceships, so the Enterprise was no problem to me.
Do you have any favourite artists or influences?
If you mean contemporaries of mine in commercial work, Iwould rate Ron Embleton and Frank Bellamy highly, and they had an influence on my work. When much younger I really admired Alex Raymond‘s work on “Rip Kirby” in the Daily Mail. I think many of us did.
Is there any strip you have wanted to do, but never got the chance?
I rather fancied doing “Thunderbirds”, but never got the opportunity.
[Mike did draw a “Thunderbirds” strip for a local school around the year 2000, to show the process of producing artwork for a comic, which you can see here – Ed]
Did you ever fancy working on the US strips – Superman, etc?
I don’t know whether my style is robust enough for Superman! However, I have occasionally done a similar character for a NatWest bank publication called Our World.
Could you work with the American system where someone else inks over your pencils and someone else again does the colouring?
I have had someone else colour my work when I was working on the “Robin of Sherwood” series in Look-In. This was because I was nursing a sick parent for many years, and I only had time to do black and white work. I didn’t find it a very satisfactory way of working.
Did you ever get the chance to meet any of your fellow artists?
Not in on our TV21 – we all seemed to be no time beavering away in lour own corners, with no time for socialising, but I knew quite a few doing work for Look-In during the 1980s, when I joined the Society of Strip Illustration, and we had opportunities to meet from time to time.
How did you get on with your writers and did you ever get the chance to provide any input?
I think everything went well enough, I did quite a few strips for Alan Fennell, but it was Angus Allan who wrote the majority of my scripts. Like Alan, he was very good and had a visual imagination; and was kind enough to say he was very happy with the way I illustrated his stories. I’ve given writers synopses of stories from time to I time when I have had some ideas, but I haven’t written any scripts.
Have particular scripts ever caused you any problems?
When I was on the “Worzel Gummidge” strip for Look-In, Angus wrote in the opening frames of a new story a description of a consignment of ‘cattle cake’ being delivered to the farm which Worzel takes a liking to, much to the disgust of the cows. He gave a very detailed description of this “cattle cake” being great bales of fibrous material, almost the size of a bale of hay. Puzzled, I consulted a farmer friend of mine locally and he confirmed that the description was entirely wrong. There was no time to make any adjustments to the episode because of the printing schedule and the whole six-week story depended on these great chunks of cattle cake, so I had to draw them as described.
I sent about Angus a packet of the real stuff – small pellets about half an inch long – and poor old Angus nearly died of embarrassment because his family came from a long line of Scottish farmers!
You recently for did two beautiful posters of “Fireball XL5 and “Thunderbirds” posters for Fanderson, almost 20 of years after your last work for TV21. Was it hard to get back “in the swing”?
I had a few old references for “Thunderbirds”, but Fanderson sent me the original blueprints for XL5 from their archives.
• Mike Noble, born 17th September 1930, died 15th November 2018 | In memory of Mike donations can be made to the Sussex Heart Charity
• Creating Comics: Thunderbirds Step by Step, by Mike Noble
• Mike Noble’s work for Wide World – feature by Norman Boyd
• In Memoriam: Look-In and TV21 artist Mike Noble
• Read artist Lee Sullivan’s tribute to Mike Noble – “A True Inspiration”
• Lee Sullivan’s wonderful tribute to Mike Noble on the Anderson Entertainment YouTube
• Bear Alley – Mike Noble Obituary
• Chris Thompson’s Interview with Mike Noble
Further Reading
• Lambiek: Leslie Caswell Profile
Leslie’s eldest son, Hamilton Caswell, recalls here how Leslie Caswell illustrated medical books and much else from his home in Dorking, before he opened his Caswell Studio Ltd in Oxford Street, London in the mid 1950s and illustrated countless magazine stories, fashion advertising and two daily newspaper strips – “Keeping Up With The Joneses” for the Daily Mirror, and “Better Or Worse” (later retitled “Jack and Jill” in The Daily Herald, written by Peter O’Donnell – plus books etc.
“Before World War Two, he progressed from Soham Grammar to the prestigious Slade School of Art where he won the life-drawing prize,” Hamilton notes. “He began his war service in the Royal Artillery, but was slightly deafened by the 25 pounder guns under his command.
“He was reassigned as an official war artist in India recording the actions and personnel in the Burma campaign and also drew and painted many members of the British forces, African regiments, Gurkhas, Indian scenes, beggars, villagers, Mahrajas and beautiful Tibetan women.
“Upon returning home in 1946 he and my mother Grace became founder members of the Dorking Group of artists, which has grown and flourished to this day. Particularly known for his portraiture, he has painted Lord Mountbatten and the Duke of Edinburgh.”
• Norman Boyd has two posts here and here about the work of Leslie Caswell on Visual Rants
Our thanks to Bill Storie for permission to publish this interview here. TV Century 21 is © Rebellion Publishing; Fireball XL5, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet are © ITV Studios; Zero X © Anderson Entertainment
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The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He is currently editor of Star Trek Explorer, published by Titan – his third tour of duty on the title originally titled Star Trek Magazine.
Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Babylon 5 Magazine, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”.
He’s the writer of “Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies” for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.
Categories: Art and Illustration, British Comics, Comic Art, Comic Creator Interviews, Comics, Creating Comics, Features, Other Worlds
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