Short of holding it in your hands, there’s no real way to fully absorb the awesomeness that is The Blighted Eye: Original Comic Art from the Glenn Bray Collection. You may notice the book online, see it priced at $100 ($60 on Amazon), and think: that’s a lot of cash for a book about comic book art. Then you actually get the thing, and realize you’ve underpaid.
Glenn Bray was born in 1948, and grew up in San Fernando, California. In his life he has loved (and this is a partial list): kids comic books like Donald Duck (created by the great artist Carl Barks); Mad magazine and EC horror comics, created by artists like Basil Wolverton, Jack Davis and Harvey Kurtzman; unclassifiable pop ephemera; kitschy record covers; R. Crumb, Charles Addams, Clay Wilson and other underground comic artists in the 1960s and 70s; wrestling magazines; 1980s alternative comic innovators such as Daniel Clowes and Jamie Hernandez; Drew Feldman and other comic artists who are at work today. (Bray was not interested in superheroes, which is another plus for The Blighted Eye. If you’re growing tired of or world of webs and caped crusaders, this is a bracing alternative.)
For most of his life, Bray has also done something that was once considered oddball: he collected original comic book and cartoon art. That is, he purchased original panels, strips and cover art from comic artists and cartoonists. They are collected in The Blighted Eye. It’s rare that I’ll quote a book’s dust jacket, but this one is accurate: “The Blighted Eye is the most ambitious, the most copious, the most diverse, and the most lavish collection of original comics and cartoon art ever published.” I spent about twenty minutes thinking and googling to try and disprove that claim. It can’t be done.
Again: this book is awesome. There’s simply no way to list all the artists and the diverse images collected here, the result of over fifty years of wildly eclectic and inspired collecting. Bray’s father owned a hardware store. Bray worked there, and on his days off he would go to comic shops, used bookstores and vintage shops looking for comics and art. When he was nine years old in 1957, Bray came across a copy of Mad magazine. The art, by Basil Wolverton, was cartoon grotesque, with characters with distorted, hanging eyes and floppy, drooling mouths. It depicted “the Mad reader” – the editors were actually making fun of their own readers. Bray loved it.
In the early years, no one understood why he was interested in such “junk.” Who cared about the original Harvey Kurtzman art for Mad #1? Eightball comic artist and writer Daniel Clowes is recognized as a great talent whose work can occasionally be seen on the cover of The New Yorker. But before The New Yorker, before Clowes’s stories were made into films such as Ghost World and Art School Confidential, he was an anonymous underground artist. Glenn Bray had a collector’s eye during those years, and has several Daniel Clowes originals – including the original opening page of “Immortal, Invisible,” which I consider Clowes’s greatest work.
Obviously, we now know that Glenn Bray was way ahead of the curve. Mad magazine and the underground comic artists of the 1950s and 60s inspired most of today’s pop culture: from Saturday Night Live to Late Night with David Letterman, from Murphy Brown (who had copies of Mad hanging in her office) and 30 Rock and the sarcastic cynicism of Jon Stewart. The horror and science fiction of the original EC Comics are now the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters.
Bray has said that he’s gotten offers for his collection, offers so large he could retire and move to Hawaii. But he won’t sell, because what motivates him now is the same as what did when he was a kid: he just plan loves this stuff. You can get a glimpse of some of The Blighted Eye here:
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