Gray Morrow in Funky Winkerbean

It isn't often that a Hoosier cartoonist is named in a present-day newspaper comic strip, but that happened this summer. Read on . . .

The first comic strip about comic strips was probably Sam's Strip by Mort Walker and Jerry Dumas, syndicated in the nation's newspapers from 1961 to 1963. They didn't have fancy words back then. Now we call them metacomics--comics about comics. Metacomics have become increasingly common. It's rare now that a week or a month goes by in the comics in which there isn't a reference made in a comic strip to another comic strip.

The comic strip Funky Winkerbean has been around for a long time. An Ohioan named Tom Batiuk puts his name to the strip, but I have a feeling that at least some of the continuities are the work of a ghostwriter. And I have a feeling that I talked to that ghostwriter one day on the mezzanine of a hotel in Columbus, Ohio.

A long time ago, I was a regular reader of Funky Winkerbean. That's when it was about high school students. At some point it made a giant leap into the present. Now those students are old. One of the characters in the current Funky Winkerbean is a cartoonist. This summer, there was a sequence in which that cartoonist reminisced about his tryout to succeed Harold Foster (1892-1982) on the Sunday adventure strip Prince Valiant. The search for a new artist really happened. That was in 1970. Real-life tryout artists were Gray Morrow (1934-2001), Wally Wood (1927-1981), and John Cullen Murphy (1919-2004). Murphy got the job and drew Prince Valiant from 1971 to 2004.

Gray Morrow was a Hoosier. Born on March 7, 1934, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he enjoyed a long and varied career as a cartoonist, comic book artist, and illustrator. I like to think about how Prince Valiant would have looked had he become the regular artist. (Wally Wood, too.) There were other artists at that time who would have been well qualified to continue the adventures of Hal Foster's characters. The name John Severin (1921-2012) comes to mind.

In this summer's sequence, the cartoonist in Funky Winkerbean remembers his fictional (or perhaps only fictionalized) tryout for Prince Valiant and names the other artists who really did participate. The problem is that he misidentifies Gray Morrow as Gary Morrow. Funky Winkerbean is hand lettered, or appears to be. It may be that the letterer transposed two letters in Gray Morrow's name and turned him into Gary. It may be also that the scriptwriter made the error. In any case, if anybody should look out for cartoonists, it should be other cartoonists. In this case, that didn't happen. I don't know whether Tom Batiuk and his team ever issued a correction. And I guess there's a third possibility. See the caption below.

Funky Winkerbean by Tom Batiuk, July 19, 2022, a metacomic of a kind that mentions other cartoonists, Wally Wood, Gray Morrow--his name misspelled as Gary--and "a third artist whose last name started with 'M'," who was of course John Cullen Murphy. I sense that someone--either real or fictional--doesn't like very much that Murphy won the tryout and became the regular artist on Prince Valiant. Whatever the case may be, there's no reason why Morrow's name should be misspelled. Or maybe that's part of the gag, the fact that the cartoonist's memory is fading? I don't know. All I know is that I like and greatly admire Gray Morrow's work. He has been gone for some time now, but we shouldn't forget him. We should instead remember him and pay proper respect in remembering him.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley