I love looking at concept art, pencil drawings, and preliminary sketches. I find the best ones can make the gears in my overly-caffeinated brain go: Yeah, I’d totally buy something that looked like that.

I like Gray Morrow’s art a lot. I thought he was an excellent draftsman who never really got the credit that a lot of his contemporaries did. He also did a lot of work for relatively low-profile companies, which while it paid the bills probably didn’t contribute to his fanboy cred. You don’t hear fans going “Man, I loved that Morrow run on Superman/Conan/Avengers!” like you do about other artists of his generation because he didn’t have long runs on the bigger titles of his day. Since he was also an in-demand commercial artist who painted tons of book covers, worked on newspaper strips like Tarzan, and did other illustration work, I assume he was too busy to do three years on Thor.

Pete Doree at Bronze Age of Blogs has a really nice appreciation of Morrow with some great art, including a complete strip from Heavy Metal that’s excellent reading (and looking). Morrow drew some spectacular hotties in addition to his other skills.

A friend of mine (thanks, Mike!) sent this Gray Morrow link to me and it’s definitely link-worthy. Maybe the world-at-large has seen this already dozens of times, and I’m late to the digital party, but I’m still going to show it off just the same. It’s a drawing done by Morrow back in 1992 of Batman as a retro James Bondian-type of character.

It’s kind of like What If Batman Were Drawn By Robert McGinnis (site has a couple of McGinnis images that are absolutely stunning, but may be NSFW). I love this Morrow drawing, and I would totally buy a mini-series that looked and read like the version I just created in my head while looking at the picture.

Over at Comic Link, you can see a much bigger version of the image, which also happens to be for sale (and may be a little NSFW when you see it full size). And no, I don’t get a commission, but I do like looking at great comic book art and this certainly qualifies.

Comic Retro, by the way, has a Morrow Zatanna story you can read, shot from the original black and white art. It was written by Len Wein and is a great example of Morrow’s style.

And Blog Catalog has a complete color story of Morrow’s from an issue of Red Circle/Archie’s Adventures In Sorcery #3, from 1973, that he wrote and drew.

Happy reading! It’s never too late to discover, or revisit, a great talent like Gray Morrow.

[Artwork: Illustration by Gray Morrow]