Chase Craig, who edited as many great comics as anyone who ever lived, passed away last night at the age of 91. He was recuperating from an operation to correct injuries he had suffered in a fall three weeks earlier.
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. He was one of the creators of Magnus, Robot Fighter and worked over the years with an array of talent that included not only the above but also Michael Maltese, Alex Toth, Russ Manning, Dan Spiegle, Warren Tufts, Pete Alvarado, Mike Royer, Gaylord DuBois, Don Glut, Tony Strobl, Phil DeLara and so many more…
…including me. I've always said I had two great teachers in the comic book business — Chase Craig and Jack Kirby. Chase bought the first scripts I ever had published in this country and he taught me an awful lot about how to pace and structure a story. I wish I could remember a tenth of it…