Larry Blake (1952-2024)

Following is a tribute that I wrote for Larry Blake for the day and place of his graveside service, Saturday, April 20, 2024, Eden Cemetery, Reedsville, Ohio:

Larry Perrin Blake was born on October 18, 1952, in Greenfield, Ohio. His parents were Ervan Vinson Blake (1923-1975), a U.S. Army veteran of World War II, car mechanic, used car salesman, and operator of a taxi service, and (Edith) Lavonne Perrin Blake (1926-2007), a wife, mother, and homemaker. She was an artist, too. Larry grew up in Greenfield and Springfield, Ohio. He studied commercial art at Springfield-Clark County Joint Vocational School and graduated from Springfield High School in 1970. As an art student, he met Larry Nibert, who became a lifelong friend and collaborator.

Everyone who knew Larry knows that he was a talented, imaginative, and very creative artist. He began drawing comics in 1960 and first saw his work in print in 1973. From then until the end of his life, except when he was in ill health, Larry drew and drew, always with great energy and enthusiasm. He loved drawing comic books, but Larry was also a gag cartoonist, illustrator, and muralist, and he made many colorful and evocative paper collages. Over the years, he knew and collaborated with many other artists and writers who were and are involved in small press, amateur press, and alternative comics, including Jim Pack, Jim Main, Tim Corrigan, Mike Gustovich, Steve Keeter, Doug Phillips, Larry Johnson, Russ Ferryman, Gerry Lee, and Dale Sherman, among many, many others. In later years, Larry worked with Kevin Yong, Eric Jansen, Tom Ahearn, Gary Gibeaut, Jason Gibeaut, and Terence Hanley.

Larry attended comic book conventions and other pop-culture conventions beginning in the 1970s. In the 2000s, he was a regular at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and other events close to his home in Reedsville, Ohio. In 2009, Larry received a lifetime achievement award at the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo (S.P.A.C.E.), an event put on every year in Columbus, Ohio, by Bob Corby, also a longtime friend.

Larry was a great fan of rock 'n' roll music. Like the rest of America, he watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, but it was the Monkees television series in 1966-1968 that turned him into what he called "a foaming-at-the-mouth rock 'n' roll fanatic!" He began collecting records, magazines, and memorabilia about his favorite kind of music and his favorite bands. During the 1970s, he attended lots of rock concerts. If you wanted to find Larry at a convention or other event, you just had to follow the sound of the music.

In addition to the Beatles and the Monkees, Larry was a fan of Alice Cooper, the Ramones, and KISS. For years he had artwork in fan magazines such as KISS Crazy, and he learned to draw flawlessly and from memory the members of that band, as well as the Ramones. Larry knew everything there is to know about rock music--all of the bands, band members, singers, songwriters, and songs. He also knew all about television shows and old movies. "I loved going to drive-in movies with my family," he remembered. "We'd pile in the car with a grocery bag fill of bread, lunch meat, chips, bottles of soda pop! Great fun." Family meant a lot to Larry. In addition to his younger sister Rita, he had many cousins with whom he played and pretended when they were children.

The comic book titles on which Larry worked is long and varied. I'm not sure that there will ever be a complete catalog of his more than half-century's worth of work. Titles on which he worked or that he created himself include: Afterworld, Alpha-Omega, The Big Book of Christian Comics, Christianman, Comet Tales, Ditkomania, Facets (Harrison Ford fanzine), Fandom Teamup, Fanzine '77, Five Star Comics, Followers of the All, KISS Crazy, Mothman 'Toons, New Sons of Thunder, Skeet's Fab Forum and Review, Reeealy Comics Presents . . ., Rotgut Funnies, Silver Wolf, Spectrum, Tim Corrigan's Comics and Stories, and Zero Man. Larry also created a long-running comic book series called Kevin Kool, based on his own friends and experiences from high school and after. He began drawing Kevin Kool in 1966, the same year in which he discovered the Monkees.

Larry's most ambitious work--really his life's work, a sprawling and ambitious epic--is Psychozort, an anthology of his own characters and stories that ran for dozens of issues from the 1970s until the early 2000s. Larry first started working on the characters that would one day fill the pages of Psychozort when he was just eight years old. Like much of Larry's work, stories in Psychozort were based on his own life, its characters based on people he really knew. Paul Burden, sidekick of super heroine Nightstar, is Larry himself, while Nightstar was based on a young friend. The fact that Larry's characters were based on real people made them and their stories more authentic, interesting, and compelling. The story of Nightstar and Paul Burden will never be finished. Maybe that's just as well. As in John Keats' poem, addressed to the ageless figures on a Grecian urn, "For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!"

Larry was close to his paternal grandparents, Reverend Eldon Blake and Harriet "Hattie" Blake. "Grandpa was an amazing guy," Larry wrote, while his grandmother encouraged him to draw. "I'd give her drawings," Larry remembered, "and she'd keep them in a dresser drawer in her bedroom." Larry and his family visited with his grandparents a lot when he was a kid. In 1983, after a bout with serious illness, Larry returned to the Reedsville area and his mother's Meigs County home. He lived there for more than three decades after that, just down the road from his friends Dee and Jeff Kimes. In 2018, Larry moved to Boonville, Indiana, at the invitation of his friend Kim Hemmerlein. She and her son Gary became a home-away-from-home family for him, and it was Kim who helped look after Larry and took care of his affairs at the end. Larry spent the last years of his life in Boonville and passed away there on March 28, 2024, meaningfully, I think, during Holy Week and just three days before Easter Sunday. He was seventy-one years old.

Larry was smart and funny and generous. He was a talented and extremely prolific artist, his body of work numbering in the thousands of pages. What he wanted was for his art to survive him and for people to go on seeing it for a long time after he was gone. We will miss Larry, and though he might be departed now, his art remains. He remains in our memories, too, as a happy, cheerful, laughing, and funny guy. Larry was a Christian. In his last letter to me, he wrote, "PSYCH [his comic book Psychozort] is the ONLY reason I still wanta BE here! Actually what comes NEXT sounds much more interesting! A new body, reunions with all who went on before & the full-time ALL enveloping presence of GOD who is love!" We can take comfort knowing that Larry is in that presence now. Meanwhile, as they say in the comic books, we go on here.

Quotations are from an interview Larry did with D. Blake Werts, published in his mini-comic Copy This! #32, October 2016. Thank you, Blake. All other text is copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley.

The final panel in Larry Blake's first story of Nightstar, published in the initial issue of Psychozort, 1998. Everyone who knew Larry recognizes the male figure here as the artist himself. Note that Larry's autobiographical character is wearing a Rez t-shirt. Music from that band played at his graveside service. So, again, if you followed the music, you would find Larry.

Black Hoosier Cartoonists in Chicago

This year I added a unique and really interesting book to my library. The title is It's Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago, 1940-1980. It was compiled and edited by Dan Nadel and includes essays by Charles Johnson and Ronald Wimberly. It's Life as I See It was published in conjunction with an exhibit called "Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now," held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, June 19 to October 3, 2021. Cartoonists represented in the book are:

• Tom Floyd (1929-2011)

• Richard "Grass" Green (1939-2002)

• Seitu Hayden (b. 1953)

• Jay Jackson (1908-1954)

• Charles Johnson (b. 1948)

• Yaoundé Olu (b. 1945)

• Turtel Onli (b. 1952)

• Jackie Ormes (1911-1985)

• Morrie Turner (1923-2014)

Of these nine cartoonists, three are or were from Indiana, Tom Floyd, Grass Green, and Seitu Hayden. I have written about Tom Floyd before, on February 12, 2021. You can read about him by clicking here.

Richard Lee (later Edward) "Grass" Green was born on May 7, 1939, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Noah and Retta (Knight) Green, both of whom were from Alabama. Grass Green was active in comic book fandom and in what fans call small press and independent press. One of his most well-known creations is a superhero called Xal-Kor the Human Cat. Green aspired to work for Marvel Comics but made it only as far as Charlton Comics (in the 1960s) and underground comics (in the 1970s). He continued working in the comics field throughout his too-brief life. It's Life as I See It reprints a previously unpublished comic book story called "Smoke Power," from the 1990s. Grass Green died on August 5, 2002, in his native city.

Seitu Hayden was born William Eric Hayden on September 11, 1953, in Fort Wayne. Mr. Hayden worked with Grass Green as early as 1969, inking Green's comic strip "Lost Family." He later took the name "Seitu," which means "artist" in Swahili.

"Smoke Power" by Richard "Grass" Green, an unpublished comic book story from the 1990s. Ironically, Grass Green died of lung cancer at age sixty-three.

Text copyright 2022, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Gray Morrow (1934-2001)

The police are in the news. Or they were. Now it's people against the police who are getting all of the attention. A couple of years ago, I found an old comic book drawn by one of my favorite comic book artists, Gray Morrow. I had planned at the time to feature it in this space, but that little project slipped away from me. Now the time seems right . . . or wrong, depending on how you look at things. From one angle, you can see Gray Morrow's comic book The Super Cops as a piece of 1970s pop culture: a little cheesy, a little exploitative, but nothing at all serious. Some people will no doubt see it differently. That won't stop me from showing it, as I think Gray Morrow's cover for The Super Cops, published forty-six years ago this month, is a beautifully done piece of comic book art.

The Super Cops, published by Red Circle Comics in July 1974, was based on a movie of the same name released in March of that year. The Super Cops was directed by Gordon Parks (1912-2006), a man of extraordinary accomplishment who had previously directed Shaft (1971), now considered one of the first movies in the genre known as blaxploitation. By the way, Gordon Parks' second wife was the daughter of a cartoonist, E. Simms Campbell (1906-1971).

In 1975, American International Pictures released Friday Foster with Pam Grier in the title role playing an intrepid magazine photographer. She was supported by Yaphet Kotto, Eartha Kitt, Scatman Crothers, and Carl Weathers. (During his long and varied career, Gordon Parks was also a magazine photographer.) Friday Foster is considered a blaxploitation film. It was based on a comic strip, the first of the postwar era and the first widely syndicated comic strip with a black woman as its title character. (It was preceded by Torchy Brown in "Dixie to Harlem", which was drawn by Jackie Ormes [1911-1985] and syndicated in 1937-1938.) Friday Foster began on January 18, 1970, with Jim Lawrence as writer and Jorge Longarón (1933-2019) as artist. Longarón was with the strip for most of its run. Gray Morrow took over on December 24, 1973, and carried it through to its end on February 17, 1974. Below is an image of the daily from January 29, 1974. Note the artist's inscription under the last panel.

Dwight Graydon Morrow was born on March 7, 1934, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended North Side High School in his hometown and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he received the sum total of his formal art training in just three months under Jerry Warshaw (1929-2007). Recognizing Morrow's talent, Warshaw told his young student, "Pack your bags and get started," and that's what Morrow did.* In 1954, he moved to New York City and found enough work to keep himself from starving. Not long after arriving in the city, he decided to look up political cartoonist Eugene Craig (1916-1984), formerly of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel but by then with the Brooklyn Eagle. Craig took Morrow to a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) and introduced him to giants, including Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), and future giants, including Wally Wood (1927-1981). Morrow went on to work with Wood, as well as with Al Williamson (1931-2010) and Angelo Torres (b. 1932). That made his start as one of the great American cartoonists, comic book artists, and science fiction illustrators of the 1950s and after.

In 1956, Morrow got caught in the draft and spent two years in the U.S. Army, including service in South Korea. He returned to civilian life and his career as an artist in 1958. In the 1960s, he drew comic book stories for Classics Illustrated. In The Illustrated Story of Whaling, a title in the World Around Us series (#W28, Dec. 1960), Morrow depicted in his original artwork a number of black whalers in an attempt at historical accuracy. He later told of how his publisher, Roberta Strauss Feuerlight, made him change their features so as to avoid controversy. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of this comic book or any images of Morrow's artwork to show you.

In the mid-1960s, Morrow illustrated children's biographies of famous black Americans, Crispus Attucks: Black Leader of Colonial Patriots by Dharathula H. Millender (1965) and Frederick Douglass: Freedom Fighter by Lillie Patterson (1965). I have two images from these books:

An illustration by Morrow from Crispus Attucks: Black Leader of Colonial Patriots by Dharathula H. Millender (1965). Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dharathula H. "Dolly" Millender (1920-2015) was an author, educator, librarian, and local historian known as "Gary's Historian" for the northern Indiana city where she made her home. I should point out that Crispus Attacks was also at one time a whaler: in this case, Morrow was right in his research and in his art, and there should have been no controversy at all when he drew his comic book story for Whaling. Instead his art was bowdlerized. Today, with all of the smashing of statues, we see the same thing happening, though in a far worse way. What are artists and lovers of art to do in this age of violent, ruthless, aggressive iconoclasm, destructiveness, and culture of cancellation?

An illustration by Morrow from Frederick Douglass: Freedom Fighter by Lillie Patterson, a Discovery Book published by Garrard Publishing Company of Champaign, Illinois, in 1965. Lillie Griselda Patterson (1917-1999) was an author of children's books and a librarian in the Baltimore Public Schools. She also wrote about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Francis Scott Key, whose statue was knocked down recently in San Francisco. I wonder what Ms. Patterson, who was black and a creator and an educator, would have thought of that.

Update (July 6, 2020): Now comes word that a statue of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, has also been toppled. The date was July 5, 2020, the 168th anniversary of his famous speech, "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?" At this point, the question must be: what statue in America will stand?

You can read more about Gray Morrow on the Internet and in magazines and books, including Gray Morrow: Visionary, published in 2001 by Insight Studios Group. His work is characterized by flawless draftsmanship, an extraordinary ability to handle the human face and form, great skill at composition, and an excellent sense of color. His sense of aesthetics placed him above most comic book artists of his time and ours. Mr. Morrow died on November 6, 2001, in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania. May he rest in peace.

Dharathula H. Millender's biography of Crispus Attacks is part of the Childhood of Famous Americans series, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis. The image above is from the Aladdin edition of 1986. The cover artwork was not by Gray Morrow, but his interior illustrations remained.

On this Independence Day, we should all remember Crispus Attucks and the men and women who sacrificed so much so that we might have and enjoy our freedoms. We should also hold in contempt the people who want to take all of that away from us. And we should remember people like Gray Morrow, who sought the universal in the particular and looked past surfaces to see the truth in things, as good and great artists do.

Happy Independence Day, America!

*After leaving art school, Morrow worked for a Chicago art studio. He also met a fellow Hoosier, Allen Saunders (1899-1986), famed author of Mary Worth, Big Chief Wahoo, and Steve Roper, who encouraged him to get into the field of syndicated comic strips. Morrow gave it a try, but only later did he find success as a not-always-credited artist on such strips as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby, and Tarzan.

Text copyright 2020, 2024 Terence E. Hanley