Mike Noble (1930-2018)

Mike Noble, one of the last surviving greats from the days of painted photogravure comics, died on Thursday, 15 November, aged 88. Bill Storie and I interviewed Mike back in 1993 for Comic World and the results were published in issue 15 (May 1993).

MIKE NOBLE: FROM A TO XL5

Although Mike Noble has worked in comics for 40 years, a new generation of fans will be seeing his work on 'Fireball XL5' for the first time in the pages of Thunderbirds: The Comic shortly, having already produced posters and covers for both Thunderbirds Poster Magazine and Stingray: The Comic, his first work in comics for some years. Steve Holland and Bill Storie take the opportunity of his return to look back over Mike's career.

Mike Noble’s work will be known to more collectors than they may realise. British anonymity may mean you don’t recognise the name but you will know his work; perhaps you remember ‘Timeslip’, ‘Follyfoot’, ‘The Tomorrow People’ or ‘Space 1999’ for Look-In in the 1970s, or ‘Fireball XL5’ or ‘Zero X’ for TV Century 21 in the 1960s? Perhaps even ‘The Lone Ranger’ for TV Comic or Express Weekly before that?

Mike Noble was amongst the group of artists who provided TV Century 21 with a stream of classic colour artwork during the 1960s, a master of hardware and airbrushed space-scapes, he was ranked alongside Ron Embleton and Eric Eden in the early issues, bringing Gerry Anderson’s space-faring marionettes to life. Having proved his mastery of science fiction, he was equally at home with the more down to earth drama of ‘Follyfoot’ and ‘Black Beauty’ – two of the most popular wonder-horse shows of the seventies.

Mike was educated at South West Essex Tech. & School of Art, and at St. Martin’s in London. "When I left, I worked in an advertising studio in Holborn prior to my compulsory Nation Service in 1949," he recalls. "I acquired a taste for illustration of a more adventurous kind whilst in the drawing office of the 8th Royal Tank Regiment and spent quite a bit of time drawing tanks and military hardware."

Returning to civilian life, he gained a position at the Billy Cooper Studio in Oxford Street which specialised in fashion drawing, cartooning and magazine illustration. "I worked under an artist called Leslie Caswell [a noted fashion illustrator who later drew strips for the Daily Herald] 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."

His first strip work was the half-page black & white ‘Simon and Sally’ in Robin and a regular weekly editorial illustration, ‘Life With Sally’, about a teenage girl, for Woman in 1953. In 1959 he began a two year run on ‘The Lone Ranger’ in Express Weekly, which later transferred to TV Comic. He continued to draw the strip for fifteen months before launching a new western adventure, ‘The Range Rider’ in 1961. He followed the latter with humorous strips for TV Comic which included ‘Popeye’ in full colour for the front cover and ‘Beetle Bailey’ in black & white.

But it is his association with TV Century 21 that showed Noble as a master of the space hardware strip. His work appeared within the first few issues, first adapting Gerry Anderson’s string-driven ‘Fireball XL5’, showing a natural ability to draw military and scientific spaceware and adding a dynamic and colourful realism to the sometimes static puppet faces. Noble used photographic reference constantly for Steve Zodiac and his crew: "I always endevoured to keep as close to the likeness of the characters as possible. For the Gerry Anderson series I gave the characters more realism that the puppets on TV, which the editor allowed - 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 if they were dark or fair, tall or short, fat or thin, this was enough for identification."

The emphasis placed these days on fully painted artwork ignores the fact that there were many great colour artists producing comic strips in the UK as early as the 1930s when photogravure printing was first used for Mickey Mouse Weekly. The gravure printing threw up its own problems: "I draw in pencil on CS10 (Bristol 4) board and finish in black indian ink," says Noble. "When I was drawing for TV 21 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. I did have a problem 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!"

Noble quickly developed a weekly routine for producing his richly coloured pages: "First I made sure that I had all the references I required for the particular episode I was working on. Then I would sketch out where each frame would go on the two pages, allowing for large, panoramic views in some, or facial close-ups in others, 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 all 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 airbrush 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 close-ups of the characters, then that was comparatively 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’m not the world’s quickest artist!"

During his time with TV 21, Noble would draw the adventures of ‘Zero X’; for those not familiar with the future envisaged by Gerry Anderson, the Zero X was the first manned spacecraft to land on Mars, as revealed in the 1966 movie, Thunderbirds Are Go!. On a later Zero X mission to Mars, SPECTRUM agent Captain Black mistakenly destroys a deserted alien city - only to precipitate an alien war-of-nerves, as seen in the series Captain Scarlet, which Mike also drew. When the later Joe 90 comic met with less success than its older companions (TV 21 and Lady Penelope were selling 1.3 million copies a week at their peak!), Noble appeared in the relaunched TV 21 & Joe 90 with a brief run on their 'Star Trek' strip before moving to the newly founded Look-In which featured adaptations of TV shows from Independent Television, and for whom Noble drew everything from ‘Follyfoot’ and ‘The Adventures of Black Beauty’ to ‘The Tomorrow People’, ‘Space 1999’ and ‘Worzel Gummidge’. Various family health problems hastened his decision to retire from comic strips in the 1980s, concentrating his efforts on more lucrative magazine covers and advertising.

Having drawn so many strips over the years, Mike finds it difficult to decide which is his favourite, saying "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 TV 21 and ‘Follyfoot’ and ‘Worzel Gummidge’ in Look-In – but I might change my mind tomorrow."

The regular weekly production schedule on British comics allowed little time for artists to meet up - and in many cases the usual anonymity of the strips meant that few artists knew who their contemporaries were anyway. Noble however rated two of his co-workers on TV Century 21 highly: "Ron Embleton and Frank Bellamy had an influence on my work. When I was younger I really admired Alex Raymond’s work on ‘Rip Kirby’ in the Daily Mail. I think many of us did."

Were their any strips he would have liked to have drawn?

"I rather fancied doing ‘Thunderbirds’ but I never got the opportunity." Until recently, that is, having now drawn covers and posters for the new Thunderbirds comic. American style superhero comics are, however, not such an attraction: "I don’t know if my style is robust enough for Superman! I have done a similar character for a Nat West Bank publication called Our World".

The return to Thunderbirds and his return to comic strips is unlikely to tempt him out of retirement full time, however: "I’m doing a little commission work just now," he says, "paintings of local landscapes, houses and such like, so I’ve not committed myself to anything specific yet, but I certainly won’t rule it out."

(* Mike Noble video interview by Chris Thompson, who has his own YouTube channel.)