Martin Nodell
Martin Nodell was an American cartoonist and commercial artist, best known as the creator of the Golden Age superhero Green Lantern. Some of his work appeared under the pen name Mart Dellon.
Biography
Early life
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nodell was the son of Jewish immigrants. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago. When he was 18 years old, he moved to New York City, where he attended Pratt Institute. Nodell worked as an actor in both Chicago and New York, and began his drawing career by selling caricatures for theatrical publicity work before turning full time to comic book art.National Comics Publications
Nodell began his illustrating career in 1938, working first as a freelancer. In 1940, he provided some work for Sheldon Mayer, an editor at All-American Publications, one of three companies that ultimately merged to form National Comics Publications. Interested in gaining more steady employment, Nodell created designs for a new character that would become the Golden Age Green Lantern. The inspiration came in January 1940 at the 34th Street subway station in Manhattan. Nodell noticed a trainman waving a lantern along the darkened tracks. He coupled the imagery with elements from Richard Wagner's operatic Ring cycle as well as Chinese folklore and Greek mythology to create the hero.As Nodell himself described in 2000:
The first adventure, drawn by Nodell and written by Bill Finger, appeared in All-American Comics #16. Nodell continued to use the pseudonym through at least All Star Comics #2. He said in 2000 he had used the pen name since, "Comics were a forbidden literature, culturally unacceptable. It wasn't something you were proud of." Nodell penciled and virtually always self-inked Green Lantern stories in All-American and All Star until the character got his own title, the premiere issue cover-dated July 1941. He would continue with it through to #25, very rarely drawing the covers, before being succeeded by a variety of artists including Howard Purcell, Irwin Hasen, and Alex Toth.
Timely Comics
Nodell left All-American in 1947 and joined Timely Comics, the 1930s–40s forerunner of Marvel Comics, where he drew postwar stories of Captain America, the Human Torch, and the Sub-Mariner. His work there was rarely signed, making identification difficult, though comics historians have confirmed that Nodell drew two well-known covers: the first issue of Marvel Tales, Timely's horror-comics revamp of the company's flagship series Marvel Mystery Comics; and the penultimate issue of Captain America's book, which for its last two issues became the horror-oriented Captain America's Weird Tales.Post-1950s career
In 1950, Nodell left comics to work in advertising and later joined the Leo Burnett Agency in Chicago as an art director. In 1965, Nodell's design team developed the long-running flour-company mascot the Pillsbury Doughboy.His only known comics work in the interim are penciling the story "The Glistening Death" in the Avon Comics one-shot City of the Living Dead, reprinted two decades later in the Skywald horror-comics magazine Psycho #1 ; and "Master of the Dead" in Avon's Eerie #14, reprinted in Skywald's Nightmare #1.
Image:CaptainAmerica'sWeirdTales74.jpg|thumb|Captain America's Weird Tales #74. Cover art by Nodell.
In the 1980s, Nodell submitted new work to DC, which led to his being rediscovered by comic fans. His first pieces included drawing the Golden Age Harlequin in Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #10. His final two published pieces of Green Lantern art were a story starring Alan Scott and the Green Lantern Corps in the 50th-anniversary issue Green Lantern vol. 3, #19 and a one-page illustration of Scott and Superman in the one-shot Superman: The Man of Steel Gallery #1. At 80, Nodell penciled his final comic-book work, the whimsical, 10-page Harlan Ellison adaptation "Gnomebody", scripted by John Ostrander and Ellison and inked by Jedediah Hotchkiss, in Dark Horse Comics' Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor Quarterly #1.