Number 958


Gray Morrow back-to-back


Gray Morrow was a terrific illustrator. I noticed his fine black line work in Creepy and Eerie in the '60s. Morrow was the artist who did the first non-Frazetta cover on Creepy, issue #8. I look at his moody painting and think how tough it must have been to follow Frazetta.

For Creepy #3, from 1965, Morrow did these two 6-page strips, which ran together in the issue. What fascinates me today is the same thing that fascinated me when I first saw them: he drew them with totally different techniques, both of which work exceptionally well with the material he's illustrating. These two stories are good examples of how versatile he was.

Sadly, because of illness Morrow took his own life in November 2001, reminding me of the tragedy two decades earlier of Wallace Wood, another artist whose physical disabilities kept him from earning a living at what he did best.

Steve Thompson has a fine blog, Shades of Gray, devoted to Morrow.

Number 835

Man Hunter of the North

Dell Comics licensed many popular animation characters, but when kids went to the movies and saw cartoons featuring their favorite characters in the movies and then read a Dell Comic they were often reading about a different character with the same name.

The publisher found out early they couldn't just reproduce animated cartoons. The characters got into adventures and stories unlike the movie cartoons. Even with that editorial policy the first issue of Woody Woodpecker, in Dell Four Color #169 from 1947, while entertaining enough, seems jarring. John Stanley, of Little Lulu fame, is credited with this issue. "Man Hunter," which is 29 pages long, seems like a stretched out 10-pager. There are jokes, even Stanley's "Yow!" to assure us he wrote it, but my feeling about this story is that it seems generic, that you could take Woody out, insert Bugs Bunny, Andy Panda or Porky Pig and they'd fit just fine.

I posted the second story from this issue--even more startling in its representation of Woody--in Pappy's #350, and a non-Stanley New Funnies story featuring Woody acting more like the zany character of the screen in Pappy's #577.

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The new Pappy's logo comes from one of my favorite covers, Man O' Mars #1, published by Israel Waldman's IW Comics in the late '50s. Flying saucers, aliens, half-dressed babe. Yep, that'll do it for me every time! It's a reprint of a Fiction House comic of the same name. I posted the story that goes with the cover in Pappy's #343.

As I said in my original posting, I believe the cover is drawn by Gray Morrow, an homage to Frank Frazetta's cover of Famous Funnies #212, from 1954, used as inspiration rather than a swipe.