EXTRACTS: illustrators issue 2 © 2012 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition))

36 I first made carol day’s acquaintance in 2002 when David Roach’s article “The Best Artist You Don’t Know” was published in Comic Book Artist . For an American collector like myself, reading the article and looking at the sample art David Roach provided was an exciting and at the same time humbling moment. At the time I would have said I had at least a passing familiarity with the major UK and American comic strips. I’d been collecting strip tear-sheets and reprints since the 1960s and original comic art since the mid-1980s. I’d read the coffee table books and histories of comic strips. I thought of myself as a reasonably well-informed collector, no Bill Blackbeard by any means, but fairly knowledgeable. But I’d never heard of ‘Carol Day’, and it was readily apparent this was a huge gap in my knowledge of the field. Over the next few months I got a batch of late ‘Carol Day’ artwork from Geoff West at The Book Palace , and an early example from another collector. When the art came, I showed it to my wife and while she admired it, she wanted to know “What’s the strip about”? I had to confess, “I don’t really know. I don’t think anyone in the US has ever actually read a story”. Since ‘Carol Day’ had never appeared in America and had never been reprinted, I have to assume other US collectors had experiences similar to mine. Since then I’ve come to believe ‘Carol Day’ is the best story strip ever done, and the lack of awareness of it is a sad statement about how neglected David Wright’s achievement with this strip has been. How could a strip and an artist this good be so unknown? Infatuation For the next several years not much changed, and it seemed the strip would end up as nothing more than a nagging mystery in the back of my mind. I sold a few of the originals I had gotten and commiserated with a few other collectors about the lack of information on the strip, but that was about all. Then in the fall of 2007, everything changed. Out of the blue I received Carol Day Roger Clark Confesses All ABOVE: A typically atmospheric frame from ‘The Changeling’. Wright’s ability to invest his strip work with a cinematic sensibility, which in terms of lighting and staging carried with it a sense of Gothic unease, has rarely been equalled and never been bettered. My Affair With