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, 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

Christmas Cartoons by Eugene Craig (1916-1984)

Eugene Craig was born on September 5, 1916, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He graduated from high school at age seventeen and went to work first for a sign painter, then for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. He stayed with the Sentinel until 1951 when he took a job with the Brooklyn Eagle. From 1955 to 1981, Craig drew cartoons for the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.

Craig was known mostly for his editorial and political cartoons. From 1950 to 1962 he won six Freedoms Foundation awards for his cartooning. He also created the design for a U.S. postage stamp commemorating the Battle of Brooklyn (below). From 1961 to 1974, he drew a syndicated cartoon feature called Forever Female. Above is a sample from the Columbus Dispatch from December 14, 1969, fifty years ago this month. Eugene Craig deserves one more credit, an unusual one: he helped to introduce a young Gray Morrow (1934-2001) to the world of cartooning and comic art.

Eugene Craig died on March 18, 1984, in Winchester, Ohio.

Text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley