Design and Art Australia Online

cartoonist, illustrator, painter and publisher, was born in Port Frederick Bay, Tas, son of Herbert Jordan, a watchmaker and jeweller, and his wife. After his parents divorced and his mother remarried (in 1908) Syd took his stepfather’s surname. Most of his youth was spent in King Country, New Zealand where his stepfather worked on the construction of railway tunnels.

After moving to Sydney Syd studied at the Royal Art Society until he was 21. His first published cartoon, an attack on Billy Hughes, appeared in the International Socialist in 1912, when he was sixteen. By the time he was eighteen he was having cartoons published in the Bulletin (contributor 1914-26) and in the IWW newspaper Direct Action. His most famous (if not best) cartoon War! What For? was used as the cover of the second issue of Direct Action (Sydney, 10 August 1914) (ill. Harris 227, King 101). He continued to contribute anti-war cartoons to the paper throughout WWI, including several powerful indictments of wartime politicians and profiteers. His most notorious cartoon was (The Commonwealth Government is floating a further £10,000,000 for the War Chest. The prospectus calls upon Investors to “show a patriotic spirit…especially as no sacrifice is entailed…the rate of interest being far higher than in normal times.”)/ FAT (intoxicated with “patriotism”: “LONG LIVE THE WAR! HIP, HIP, 'OORAY! FILL 'EM UP AGAIN.” Published in Direct Action on 4 December 1915, this attack – the culmination of a series of anti-profiteer war cartoons he drew for the paper (see file) – earned editor Tom Barker a sentence of twelve months hard labour under the War Precautions Act because it 'prejudiced national recruiting’. All his anti-war cartoons are (properly) rather gruesome, e.g. cartoon sympathetic to the returned soldier (maimed and unemployed), Bulletin 1 June 1922.

In 1918 Nicholls was employed to draw the titles and posters for Ray Longford’s film The Sentimental Bloke. In 1920 he went to the USA to study art title design for motion pictures. He returned in 1923 to become senior artist on Sydney's Evening Standard. In September he created the comic strip Fat and his Friends for the Sunday News to rival Bancks’s Ginger Meggs in the Sydney Sun; it was renamed Fatty Finn on 10 August 1924 and was for some time a real rival. Three Fatty Finn annuals were published in 1929-30, then the strip became a victim of the Great Depression.

Armed with his strip Middy Malone, a tale of piracy on the Spanish Main, Nicholls went to New York at the onset of the Depression in search of work. Nobody wanted his strip and he spent a couple of years drawing Little Orphan Annie for the Hearst Press before returning to Australia in 1933. When Middy Malone was finally self-published in book form during the 1940s it sold over 80,000 copies. More Middy Malone books followed.

A foundation member of the Society of Australian Black and White Artists in 1924, Nicholls contributed to the Society’s first publication along with the other 24 male founding members (see Harry Weston) – a book of cartoons commemorating the visit of the US Fleet in 1925. In 1934, with Stan Clements, he published Fatty Finn’s Weekly, a black and white eight-page tabloid with a spot colour cover considered to be Australia's first locally produced comic book (Sydney Morning Herald, 20 May 2002, 42).While continuing to draw cartoons, e.g. Smith’s Weekly 1940: “So you’ve lost your father little man? Don’t cry, we’ll find him – what’s he like?”/ “Aw, beer an’ 'orses!” Nicholls wrote and illustrated a reliable, detailed text on shipping, About Ships (1947).

In 1946 he attempted to fight increasing American syndication by establishing his own 'Fatty Finn Publications’. It published comic books using his own strips and some drawn by other Australian artists, including Keith Chatto and Monty Weld, but did not prove financially viable. He returned to freelance work in 1950, then joined the Sunday Herald (Sydney) where Fatty Finn appeared from December 1951 [Sun-Herald (Sydney) from October 1953] until Nicholls died in 1977, having fallen to his death from his Potts Point, NSW, apartment (having long been troubled by failing eyesight rather than suicide).

Many of his 1970s Fatty Finn strips were presented to the Mitchell Library c.1979 by the Fairfax family, proprietors of the Sydney Morning Herald and associated publications (Mitchell Library Pic Acc 3088). At the time of his death he was preparing a book of pencil drawings of Australian historic buildings, many of which had been previously published in the Teachers’ Federation Magazine, e.g. St James – Sydney (ill. Rae, 73).

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007