Turtel Onli was born on January 25, 1952 and passed away on January 15, 2025 at the age of 72.

Turtel attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Arts in Art Therapy.

In 1970, Turtel founded the Black Arts Guild, which featured touring art exhibitions and published work by its members. In 1974, in conjunction with BAG, he published Funk Book and a series of greeting cards. In 1980, he co-published a zine called PAPER with the Osun Center of the Arts. In the early 1980s he created five issues of another early comics zine, Future Funk.

Aside from these works, Turtel has illustrated for Playboy Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Avant Garde Magazine, McDonald's, Motown Productions, holt, Rinehart & Winston, MODE magazine, and Paris Metro Magazine.

Turtel has also been a visiting artist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He worked as an art therapist fro 1984 - 1989 with young people in Chicago's Robert Taylor homes, and as an art instructor in the Chicago Public Schools. He's taught at Columbia College Chiago and Harold Washington College as well.

He is known for coining the term "Rhythmism" to define and interpret his stylizations, which fuse both primitive and futuristic concepts.
Turtel was also very involved in the comics world. Throughout his career, he's created Afrocentric Rhythmistic-powered characters that represent his belief in the ideal of the powerful defending the weak.

In 1993, he spearheaded the inaugural Black Age of Comics convention at the Southside Community Arts Center in Chicago, where it was held for three years. Since then, it's been held in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia.

He received the Glyph Comics Awards Pioneer Award in 2006 for bringing positive, diverse images to the world of graphic novels and comic books.