THE BLIGHTED EYE: ORIGINAL COMIC ART
FROM THE GLENN BRAY COLLECTION

With Glenn Bray and Doug Harvey

All from the mind-boggling collection of Glenn Bray, The Blighted Eye is the most copious, most diverse, and most lavish compilation of original comic art ever published. An enthusiast of marginal and outsider American pop culture, he started to collect original comic art in 1965 - a time when very few people, including the artists themselves, truly valued the original art. Bray has over the last nearly fifty years amassed likely the most eclectic collection of original comic art in private hands. The Blighted Eye presents not only a staggering array of original art, but a testament to Bray's dogged and visionary commitment to preserving the work by the greatest artists working in an art form habitually sneered at by cultural gatekeepers throughout most of the 20th Century.

The book features work by a pantheon of cartooning masters, including Charles Addams, Carl Barks, Hans Bellmer, Charles Burns, Al Capp, Daniel Clowes, Jack Cole, Coop, R. Crumb, Jack Davis, Kim Deitch, Bill Elder, Al Feldstein, Virgil Finlay, Drew Friedman, Ernst Fuchs, Chester Gould, Justin Green, Rick Griffin, Bill Griffith, Matt Groening, Milt Gross, George Grosz, Rory Hayes, Jaime Hernandez, George Herriman, Alfred Hitchcock, Al Hirschfeld, Graham Ingels, Cameron Jamie, Bernard Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Travis Louie, Jay Lynch, Don Martin, Gary Panter, Virgil Partch, Savage Pencil, Peter Pontiac, Charles Rodrigues, Spain Rodriguez, Doreen "Weird Wanda" Ross, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Bud Sagendorf, Charles Schulz, Jim Shaw, Gilbert Shelton, Joost Swarte, Stanislav Szukalski, Irving Tripp, Jeffrey Vallance, Chris Ware, Robert Williams, Karl Wills, Gahan Wilson, S. Clay Wilson, Basil Wolverton, Wallace Wood, Jim Woodring, Art Young, Bob Zoell, and  - it should go without saying - many more.

With the increasing sophistication of comics over the last thirty years in the form of graphic novels, journalism, and memoirs, the cartoon form is finally taking its place alongside more traditional popular narrative media - novels, films, theatre - as an art form to reckon with, widely reviewed and embraced by a discriminating reading public. Simultaneous with this growing acceptance of comics as a literary form has been the recognition among museums and galleries that the artists' original drawings are art objects, and public exhibitions of original comics art has proliferated over the last decade with such shows as Masters of American Comics at LA's Hammer Museum and R. Crumb's Underground at Seattle's Frye Museum.