Dwight Graydon "Gray" Morrow (March 7, 1934 – November 6, 2001) 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, and 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 ..." 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." 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. drawing several supernatural-fantasy stories plus at least four Westerns and one war story on titles cover-dated July 1956 to June 1957.
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. 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." 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." 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). One of those, #W28, Whaling (Dec. 1960), resulted in unexpected controversy when he accurately depicted African-American whalers: