Dwight Graydon "Gray" Morrow[1] (March 7, 1934 – November 6, 2001)[2] was an American illustrator of comics, magazine covers and paperback books. He was the co-creator of the Marvel Comics muck-monster the Man-Thing and of DC Comics Old West vigilante El Diablo.
Biography
Early life and career
Morrow was born March 7, 1934, in Fort Wayne, Indiana,[3][4] and he attended North Side High School.[5] He recalled in 1973 that, "Comic art was certainly the first artform I remember being impressed with ... [T]hose gorgeous gory newsstand spreads ..."[5] After serving as editor of his high-school yearbook, for which he did cartoons and illustration,[6] and working a number of odd jobs including "soda jerk, street repairman, tie designer, exercise boy on the race track circuit, etc.," he enrolled in the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, Illinois, in late summer 1954, studying two nights a week for three months under Jerry Warshaw for "the total of my entire formal art training."[5] His first formal commission "was something like a bank ad or a tie design when I was still in my teens."[7] He joined the city's Feldkamp-Malloy art studio, later being fired. Feeling encouraged by a meeting with comic-strip artist Allen Saunders, Morrow submitted strip samples to various syndicates with no luck.[5]
Undaunted, he moved to New York City in winter 1955 and by the following spring had met fellow young comics artists Al Williamson, Angelo Torres, and Wally Wood. He sold his first comic-book story, a romance tale, to Toby Press, which went out of business before it could be published. Morrow next did two stories for another company — a Western with original characters and an adaptation of pulp-fiction writer Robert E. Howard's "The Tower of the Elephant", but this company, too, went defunct. He then worked for Williamson and Wood[5] doing backgrounds and layouts, and through Williamson began contributing to Atlas Comics, the 1950s iteration of Marvel Comics,[8] drawing several supernatural-fantasy stories plus at least four Westerns and one war story on titles cover-dated July 1956 to June 1957.[9]
Morrow illustrated several stories for EC Comics in the 1950s, including horror, suspense and science fiction. He later did covers and stories for the company's New Trend comics and Picto-Fiction magazines.[9]
In late 1956, Morrow was drafted[8] into the U.S. Army.[10] Stationed at Incheon and Wolmido Island, South Korea, with Fox Company, he did "illustrations and paintings for the officers' club, day rooms, insignias on helmets for their parades ... you know, anything and everything. That was my official duty."[8] After being discharged in 1958, "My friend Angelo Torres took me around to a couple of his clients, one being 'Classics' [i.e., the Gilberton Company, publisher of the Classics Illustrated comic-book series of literary adaptations], and I was given a script. One thing led to another and I was soon working on a regular basis.[10]
Prior to his Gilberton stint, Morrow contributed to one of the first black-and-white horror-comics magazines, the Joe Simon-edited Eerie Tales #1 (Nov. 1959) from Hastings Associates, penciling and inking two four-page stories by an unknown writer, "The Stalker" and "Burn!"[9]
1960s to 1970s
In the early 1960s, Morrow anonymously[4] illustrated three literary adaptations for Classics Illustrated: The Octopus by Frank Norris (#159, Nov. 1960); Master of the World by Jules Verne (#163, July 1961); and The Queen's Necklace by Alexandre Dumas (#165, Jan. 1962),[11] which he said he penciled and inked at the rate of "eight pages a day ... as fast as I've ever been able to go" since "I'd moved to California and needed those checks badly."[12] Morrow also supplied drawings for chapters in Classics Illustrated Special Issue #159A, Rockets, Jets and Missiles (Dec. 1960), and in 13 World Around Us issues ranging from Prehistoric Animals (Nov. 1959) to Famous Teens (May 1961).[13] One of those, #W28, Whaling (Dec. 1960), resulted in unexpected controversy when he accurately depicted African-American whalers:
"[T]he page rate [at Gilberton in general] wasn't much for the accuracy and authenticity they expected, but it was a challenge to 'do it right.' Roberta and Len Cole were demanding but genial editors. One job I do remember ... something about whaling, got me in dutch [i.e. trouble] with Roberta. My research indicated that many of the whalers were black — so that's what I drew. She had a fit and insisted they all be redrawn to 'avoid controversy.'
Later career
In the 1980s, he wrote and drew Pacific Comics' three-issue Edge of Chaos (July 1983 - Jan. 1984), a science-fiction retelling of the story of the Greek gods. Through the decade he did sporadic but diverse work for Marvel and DC, ranging from stories of Lois Lane[25] to those of Mark Hazzard: Merc, as well as horror and science-fiction stories for Eclipse Comics; satirical humor for Cracked; "The Sex Vampires from Outer Space" and other stories for the same publisher's black-and-white comics magazine Monsters Attack; and Marvel Graphic Novel: Dreamwalker (1989), a 63-page superhero/espionage thriller written by actors Miguel Ferrer and Bill Mumy.[9] He drew the comics adaptations of the Sheena and Supergirl[26] movies in 1984. Morrow briefly drew DC's Spectre
Other work
Morrow worked in television animation, including on a Spider-Man TV series,[7] and was a member of The Animation Guild, I.A.T.S.E. Local 839.[28]
He painted or drew the theatrical one-sheet for the Al Adamson horror film Five Bloody Graves (1970), and drew the King Kong cover of the premiere issue of The Monster Times.[29]
Personal life
By 1973, when he was living in Brooklyn,[8] Morrow was married with a family that included adopted children.[30]
He was living in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania, and suffering from Parkinson's disease when he died November 6, 2001,[3][2] from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.[4] He was survived by his later wife, Pocho Morrow.[31]
Awards
Morrow was nominated for the Hugo Award for best professional artist in 1966,[32] 1967,[33] and 1968.[34] In 2005, he was posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma Cartoonists Associates Hall of Fame in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, located in the Toy and Action Figure Museum.[35][36]
Bibliography
Books
Comics
Alternative Comics
Further reading
External links
- (Requires scrolldown.)
- Gray Morrow at Mike's Amazing World of Comics
- Gray Morrow at the Unofficial Handbook of Marvel Comics Creators
References
- Jerry Bails, Hames Ware. Who's Who of American Comic Books 1928-1999 retrieved March 24, 2012^
- Gray Morrow at the Social Security Death Index. Retrieved March 24, 2012.^
- Aaron Applegate. Comic book legend and Kunkletown resident dies at 67