Gray Morrow
Dwight Graydon Gray Morrow was an American illustrator of comics and paperback books. He is cocreator of the Marvel Comics muckmonster the ManThing and of DC Comics Old West vigilante El Diablo.
Gray Morrow was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he attended North Side High School. He recalled in 1973 that, Comic art was certainly the first artform I remember being impressed with ... hose gorgeous gory newsstand spreads.... After serving as editor of his highschool yearbook, for which he did cartoons and illustration, 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. His first formal commission was something like a bank ad or a tie design when I was still in my teens. He joined the citys FeldkampMalloy art studio, later being fired. Feeling encouraged by a meeting with comicstrip artist Allen Saunders, Morrow submitted strip samples to various syndicates with no luck.
Source: Wikipedia