The Lost Art of Ray Willner: The Adventures of Robin Hood

Collected for the First Time All 14 Beautifully Restored Stories in an oversized format Ray Willner was a casualty of the culture wars. With a comics career dating to 1939, Willner produced impressive work for publishers small and large throughout the 1940s. By 1949 he landed one of the only steady gigs in his career for an unusual publisher: The Brown Shoe Company. While working initially on their Buster Brown Comic Book—a giveaway created to drum up business in stores selling Brown’s footwear for kids—Willner found a simpatico spirit in fellow artist Reed Crandall. Although their collaboration on the Brown Shoe Co. series The Adventures of Robin Hood lasted less than a year—cancelled in the wake of the scaremongering backlash against comics in the 1950s—the seven issues produced by Willner with Crandall represent a seldom seen high-water mark in comics art. They were the last comics Willner would ever draw. The Lost Art of Ray Willner collects all of those Robin Hood stories for the first time since their original publication in 1956 and includes an introductory essay on Willner’s life and career.