Saturday 19 February 2011

Carol Day - Fitzrovia Revisited

 I have raved on about the work of David Wright on previous postings but the fact that arguably the greatest UK newspaper strip barely registers on the consciousness of most comic aficionados bears mute testimony to it's status as a "lost treasure".

Anyone in any doubt as to why David Wright was the equal if not the peer of such greats as Alex Raymond, Jim Holdaway and other purveyors of exotic and glamorous newspaper strips need only check out the following pages scanned from one of the artist's many scrapbooks composed of proof sheets from this beautiful take on a young woman's increasingly doomed trysts set in the fog bound streets of post war London.

More of this story along with other tales can be found on Roger Clark's super Carol Day site.

One of these days someone will commit this to print!!!

Carol Day © Patrick Wright 2011









6 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting! And I agree, David Wright is on that same level with all the greats! It's puzzling that he doesn't get the recognition he so richly deserves especially over here in the US!

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  2. There are a few dedicated believers Urban and Roger Clark who is a US collector of impeccable taste has done a fantastic service in archiving so much of David Wright's output.

    His site is the only place where you can read the complete stories and he has access to fantastic source material.

    Now we're in the iPad generation perhaps the printed book isn't such a pressing need as we have Roger's site.

    But - dammit! I'd still like to see it in print.

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  3. There's a publisher in Crystal Palace who does this sort of thing....

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  4. This is an amazing strip, really unlike any other. What an incredible sense of atmosphere - the noirish lighting of the scenes, the pelting rain at the start, the cars, the way Wright evokes windows in the fog with that hatching technique. You can just see it as a 1950s British movie - ideally directed by Jules Dassin or Jacques Tourneur.

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  5. While I was doing research on newspaper comic strips I stumbled onto Wright's work. I loved it, and was shocked that nobody but my teacher and I knew about it in class. Though we never really covered his work either. Thanks for posting this though, good times.

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  6. A pleasure Pablo as you can see there's more to come.

    I think Dave's comment is spot on - 1950's British movie, black and white, with the directors he has nominated, produced by Gainsborough Studios.

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