EXTRACTS: The Art of Denis McLoughlin © 2013 The Book Palace (272 PAGES in Full edition)

10 this remarkable artist who obviously loved the AmericanWest with a passion and knew so much about its history. It would be a very long time before that wish came true. But came true it did. At the first British Comicon organised by Denis Gifford in 1978, I met the man himself. We got on famously. But it must be a very strange individual who didn’t get on with Denis McLoughlin for he was great company, the most friendly, outgo- ing and convivial of companions. We became firm friends. Unfor- tunately, because of the distance between his home in Bolton and mine in Harrow, we didn’t meet up as often as I would have liked but we made up for it by corresponding and telephoning each other regularly and frequently. When I at last got round to putting a little book together on Denis in 1994, his input was simply to be a sort of introduction and I asked him just to jot down a few words about himself, filling in his background and the important events of his life. Within days, however, I received almost ten thousand words, what amounts to a short autobiography. How he managed to write so much and so well in the middle of a very busy drawing schedule - he was at the time regularly producing a 64-page Commando Library for Thom- son’s every other month - I’ll never know. He said, “ If it’s too long, cut it down”, but it was so amusing and so racily written and gives such a vivid insight into the personality of the man that I had to keep it all in. Anyone interested in McLoughlin’s art will gain much from it and it is given here in its entirety.