Adrian Dingle (artist)

John Adrian Darley Dingle (1911 – 22 December 1974), known professionally as Adrian Dingle, was a Cornish-Canadian artist. In the 1940s, he was a creator of comic books, including Nelvana of the Northern Lights.

Life and work
Born in Barmouth, Gwynedd, north Wales while his parents were travelling, he emigrated from his home in Cornwall to Canada when he was three years old. He had settled in the Toronto region, building a house in Erindale (now part of Mississauga) in the late 1940s, and working on a new house in Caledon prior to his death.

Adrian Dingle began his career in art in the early 1930s. In 1931, he studied with J. W. Beatty at the summer school of the Ontario College of Art, Toronto. From 1935 to 1937 he worked in England, employed as an illustrator for Stillwell & Darby, London, and studied at the Goldsmiths College of Art, London, with James Bateman and John Mansbridge. He exhibited with the London Portrait Society. After returning to Canada, he continued his work in illustration and taught at the Doon School of Fine Arts (Kitchener, Ontario) and the Etobicoke Community Art School. Dingle was well known for his landscapes, seascapes, portraits and figure studies. He painted landscapes from his travels to Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, the British Isles, Massachusetts, and Cape Breton Island. He was a prolific painter, mostly in oils, exhibiting frequently with the T. Eaton Fine Art Gallery. Currently, his paintings are sometimes available at auction.

Dingle was, in fact, a prolific painter who was widely respected as an illustrator, teacher, and landscape artist. One of his works, representative of his impressionistic style, At the Base of a Millrace, Streetsville, Ontario, is adventurous in that it attempts to create the illusion of stone and water in a novel way.

Dingle was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, the Ontario Society of Artists, the Ontario Institute of Painters, and was a Fellow of the International Institute of Arts & Letters.

Dingle has come to be well known for his work in the Canadian comic book industry. From August 1941 to 1947, he authored and illustrated the comic book series Nelvana of the Northern Lights. Nelvana was the first female Canadian superhero comic character whose debut was four months before that of Wonder Woman. Another of Dingle's comic characters was the suave tuxedo-clad masked detective "The Penguin", a Canadian superhero distinct from the well-known nemesis of Batman. To avoid conflicts with Batman's publishers, this character was renamed The Blue Raven to allow efforts to reach an American audience. The Penguin premiered in 1943. Other characters include "Nils Grant, Private Investigator". At the end of the 1940s the comics industry in Canada became untenable and Dingle returned to painting.

Dingle died at age 63 in Toronto at Wellesley Hospital due to complications from cancer treatment. He had three sons with his wife Patricia. He was posthumously inducted into the Joe Shuster Awards Hall of Fame in 2005.