I feel like I need to ask your forgiveness for making this as personal as it's going to be…
I grew up — to the extent that I grew up at all — wanting to be a professional writer. From about age seven and beyond, that was my only answer to the question you get asked incessantly at that age, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I didn't know what I wanted to be a writer of because I didn't know what might be possible when I reached the age when I might be able to secure writing work…
But I was going to be a writer. I never doubted that for a moment.
Among the possibilities were the things I loved then: Comic books, comic strips, animated cartoons, non-animated TV shows, movies, novels, non-fiction books…maybe just plain, old-fashioned comedy in any form. I guess I figured that with all those possibilities, I could find an opening in one of them…and one was all I wanted or expected. I don't recall ever having a clear preference and I don't recall ever thinking I might be able to work in as many of those fields as I have.
In my teen years, I was kinda hoping for whichever field might have presented the greatest opportunity to meet cute girls. (If you've ever been a teenage boy, you might completely understand that.) Comic books didn't sound like they'd be that…and also, every interview I read with someone who worked for the New York comic book companies said that in order to work for them, you had to live near them. Living anywhere other than my native Los Angeles was — and still kinda is — a deal-breaker for me. I later turned down staff jobs at DC and Marvel because they required relocation.
For reasons I can't explain, it didn't dawn on me that there could be work writing for the Los Angeles office of Gold Key Comics — the Disney comics, the Warner Brothers comics, the Hanna-Barbera comics, etc. And for reasons I shouldn't have to explain, it didn't occur to me that Jack Kirby might move to Southern California and want to hire a couple of assistants. But by my eighteenth birthday, I was working with Jack and I was writing comics for Gold Key — for a gent there named Chase Craig.
I probably don't have to tell anyone who'd find their way to this blog what an extraordinary, wonderful man Jack Kirby was. We've cheapened the word "genius" down in this world by applying it at some point to just about anyone who can do anything, which is a shame. We should have preserved it for a guy like Jack who had more brilliant ideas than any twenty other people in the comic book industry combined and who certainly never acted like the "King" that everyone called him.
You don't need me to tell you how much he invented, how well he drew and how important he was to comics. Fortunately for me, I was in a position to be able to testify what a decent, honest and nice man he was. And if for any reason you don't want to believe me on that point, ask anyone else who had the privilege of knowing him. Anyone else.
Jack was one of the reasons I've spent my adult life as a professional writer. Chase Craig was another.
Chase worked for Western Publishing Company, creating and later editing Dell and Gold Key Comics from around 1942 (even he couldn't remember exactly when) until 1975. I was among the hundreds of people who worked for him on — in my case — the Gold Key books he edited in his last years there. Later, he briefly came out of retirement to run a comic book division for Hanna-Barbera. I was one of the first people he hired, I wound up writing everything the office produced for a while, and then Chase decided to retire again and turned it all over to me.
He was a benevolent, smart and very, very experienced editor. Given all the comics he'd supervised over the years, including those by Carl Barks, he kinda had to be. I learned from Kirby but I also learned from Craig…and if I had to be more specific, I think I learned whatever big things I managed to absorb came from Jack and the small — but still vital — things from Chase.
I'm about 95% certain the two men never met and if they had, I'm not sure what they would have said to each other. I'm pretty sure they never read each other's work. They might have had some discussions about how annoying that Evanier kid could be at times.
If they had met — which I'm pretty sure they didn't — it would have been at the 1982 Comic-Con in San Diego. I persuaded Chase to attend for a day and I persuaded the con to give him an Inkpot Award and to let me interview him for an hour. Chase was very pleased by the award and that there were fans there who attended that talk and knew who he was. There weren't many, I'm afraid…because, you know, he never worked on Batman or Spider-Man. Still, he was happy to meet anyone who knew what he'd done and he signed a number of issues of Disney comics, Tarzan comics and Magnus, Robot Fighter. He left us in 2001.
I've written tons of pieces about Jack but nearly not enough about Craig, to whom I will also be forever grateful. And in case you're wondering why I'm writing about these men today…well, today is August 28. Jack Kirby was born on August 28, 1917 and Chase Craig was born on August 28, 1910. Thanks to both of these Birthday Boys.