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

7 foreword T he name Denis McLoughlin always makes me think of drawing pins. A dusty red box of  rusty pins fromWoolworth always seemed to have been around, from my childhood to my leaving home in the mid-60’s. When not in use, holding up paper-chains and jolly christ- mas decorations, they were pressed into service to pin up the work of my favourite artist. Yes, I confess, having devoured my birthday Buffalo Bill or Okay Adventure Annual , I would snip out the gorgeous colour plates depict- ing savage redskins or gun toting cowboys, and on my strangely yielding bedroom walls up they would go. We lived in a  prefab made mainly of asbestos! My elder brother, who shared the room, would rather have seen pictures of Brigitte Bardot or Joan Collins, but in my parochial East London world McLoughlin was King and Emperor. I later graduated to Steve Reeves and then, more healthily, to Julie Christie. I pretty much forgot about Denis, as no-one at Art School knew of him, or was interested in comics. I frequently saw his books at markets and jumble sales and I would always buy them. His style was unmistakable, chunky and rainbow-hued, much like my own work, oddly. Even odder, I wasn’t aware of the myriad crime and detec- tive book jackets he produced throughout his long life. These sinister and rather sexy illustrations, ape the seedy Hollywood ‘B’ pictures closely, but are somehow ineffably British. As British as Fish & Chips or Brown sauce. My career as an illustrator has been almost as long, hugely varied, very well-paid and centred in London. Denis’s life was none of these. Working from the North, in a domestic setting, strangely cut-off I would’ve thought, he plied his colourful trade diligently, well-known only to his clients and a host of small boys.  His death at 84 was suitably Western, by his own hand, with a Colt 45 which everyone had assumed was a prop. He was old, unwell and not at ease with the modern world. I wish he could have seen this wonderful tribute to a life’s work, still treasured by very many grown up ‘small boys’, and I hope, a whole legion of new admirers. Happy trails, Denis. Mick Brownfield, February 2012