Chase Craig

Wingate Chase Craig (August 28, 1910 – December 2, 2001) was an American writer-cartoonist who worked principally on comic strips and comic books. From the mid-1940s to mid-1970s he was a prolific editor and scripter for Western Publishing Dell and Gold Key comics.

Born in Ennis, Texas, in 1933-34 Craig studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and then moved to Boston. There he worked at The Christian Science Monitor drawing Little Chauncey, which featured the antics of a rather precocious baby. Craig moved to Hollywood in 1935, where he became an animator for Leon Schlesinger and Walter Lantz. Craig left the animation field in 1939 and began working as a freelancer drawing several comic strips, including Hollywood Hams (for the Los Angeles Daily News) and Mortimer Snerd and Charlie McCarthy. He teamed up with Fred Fox, and drew the Odd Bodkins comic strip for Esquire Features (1941–42) as well as writing and drawing for the first six weeks in 1942 the Bugs Bunny comic Sunday pages and the first Bugs Bunny comic book.

In the early 1940s he joined Dell Publishing where he was one of the first artists to draw comic stories featuring "Bugs Bunny," "Porky Pig" and "Elmer Fudd." With the onslaught of World War II, Craig signed on with the Navy in 1942 and worked as a training manual illustrator at Hollywood's famed Vine Street Pier. He married Mary Jane Green in 1943.

TV and comics scripter Mark Evanier summarized several aspects of Craig's career: Chase was born in Texas and moved to Los Angeles in the thirties to get into the animation business. His fellow Texan, Tex Avery, gave him a job in the story unit at Warner Brothers, where he worked for some time without—for some reason—ever getting a screen credit. After a few years, he decided to turn his attention to print cartooning and left... only to be quickly tapped by Western Printing and Lithography to write and draw stories for its first Bugs Bunny comics. Chase produced over half of the first issue of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comics, issued under the Dell label, including the authorship of the Mary Jane & Sniffles strip. (Sniffles the Mouse had been a character in the cartoons, but Chase came up with the format for this long-running strip, naming the character of Mary Jane after his then-recent bride.) Western soon hired him as an editor and, through the mid-seventies, he worked out of their Los Angeles office, editing (at one point) a comic per day, at a time when it was not uncommon for one of their comics to sell over a million copies. He was the editor who kept Carl Barks producing Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories, and Paul Murry doing Mickey Mouse and so many others.

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