Syd Nicholls

Sydney 'Syd' Wentworth Nicholls (20 December 18963 June 1977) was an Australian cartoonist and commercial artist, best known for the long-running comic strip Fatty Finn.

Biography Syd Nicholls was born in Frederick Henry Bay, Tasmania on 20 December 1896, the son of a watchmaker Hubert George Jordan and his wife Arabella Cluidunning, née Bartsche. He adopted his stepfather's surname when his mother remarried in 1907. The family moved to New Zealand and Nicholls attended a wide variety of schools in New Zealand and New South Wales Three coloured Fatty Finn Annuals were published during 1928–30. The strip survived the absorptions of the Sunday News into the Sunday Guardian (1930) and of the latter by the Sunday Sun (1931). Nicholls had twice tried, in 1928 and 1929, to introduce a dream sequence into Fatty Finn, involving pirates, cannibals and highwaymen, but was forced by Knox to return to his original comic style. Believing that there was public interest, Nicholls drew one of the world's first adventure strips, Middy Malone, but could find no publisher.

Death While in a state of mental depression, Syd Nicholls fell to his death from the balcony next door to his tenth-floor Potts Point apartment on 3 June 1977.