Gray Morrow

60
Gray Morrow bigraphy, stories - Illustrator

Gray Morrow : biography

March 7, 1934 – November 6, 2001

Dwight Graydon "Gray" Morrow (March 7, 1934 – November 6, 2001) at the Social Security Death Index. Retrieved March 24, 2012. was an American illustrator of comics and paperback books. He is co-creator of the Marvel Comics muck-monster Man-Thing and of DC Comics Old West vigilante El Diablo.

Biography

Early life and career

Gray Morrow was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at the Lambiek Comiclopedia where he attended North Side High School. He recalled in 1973 that, "Comic art was certainly the first artform I remember being impressed with … [T]hose gorgeous gory newsstand spreads…." After serving as editor of his high-school yearbook, for which he did cartoons and illustration, 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." His first formal commission "was something like a bank ad or a tie design when I was still in my teens."The Collector, p. 41 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.

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 doing backgrounds and layouts, and through Williamson began contributing to Atlas Comics, the 1950s iteration of Marvel Comics,Roach, Cooke, p. drawing several supernatural-fantasy stories plus at least four Westerns and one war story on titles cover-dated July 1956 to June 1957. at the Grand Comics Database

In late 1956, Morrow was drafted into the U.S. Army. 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." 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.

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!"

1960s to 1970s

In the early 1960s, Morrow anonymously 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),Jones, pp. 333, 334. 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."Jones, p. . 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).Jones, pp. 343, 346-348. One of those, #W28, Whaling (Dec. 1960), resulted in unexpected controversy when he accurately depicted African-American whalers: