Chase Craig

Who was Chase Craig?

Chase Craig was an American writer-cartoonist who worked on comic strips and comic books. From the mid-1940s to mid-1970s he was an editor and scripter for Western Publishing.

Born in Ennis, Texas, Craig studied in 1933-34 at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and then worked at The Christian Science Monitor in Boston, where he drew Little Chauncey. Relocating to Hollywood in 1935, he was employed as an animator for Leon Schlesinger and Walter Lantz in the 1930s, followed by work on comic strips, including Hollywood Hams and Mortimer Snerd and Charlie McCarthy. With Fred Fox, he did the Odd Bodkins comic strip for Esquire Features. He drew the Bugs Bunny comic strip for the first six weeks in 1942.

He signed on with the Navy in 1942, and during World War II, he worked as a training manual illustrator at Hollywood's Vine Street Pier. Craig married Mary Jane Green in 1943.

TV and comics scripter Mark Evanier summarized Craig's career:

Chase was born in Texas and moved to Los Angeles in the thirties to get into the animation business.