Chase Craig is best known as a prolific editor and scriptwriter for Western Publishing during the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Ennis, Texas, Craig attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and began his career as an animator and scriptwriter for Warner Brothers and Walter Lantz in the second half of the 1930s. Near the end of the same decade he turned to newspaper comics, and created 'Hollywood Hams' and 'Mortimer Snerd and Charlie McCarthy' with Carl Buettner. The latter was based on Edgar Bergen's puppet characters. Shortly afterwards, around 1941, he joined Dell Publishing, where he was one of the first artists to draw comic stories with 'Bugs Bunny', 'Porky Pig' and 'Elmer Fudd'.
In addition, he worked on the daily 'Odd Bodkins' strip with Fred Fox for Esquire Features in 1941 and 1942. He also drew the 'Bugs Bunny' newspaper strip for the first 6 weeks in 1942. Craig's attention eventually shifted to scriptwriting. He wrote a great many scripts for Dell's Disney titles, and he is credited with the creation of characters like 'The Little Bad Wolf'. Other characters he worked with are 'Br'er Rabbit' ('Tales from Uncle Remus'), 'Bongo', 'Jose Carioca' and 'Donald Duck', and his scripts were illustrated by artists like Jack Bradbury, Gil Turner, Tony Strobl, Dick Moores, Paul Murry or his old partner, Carl Buettner.
Chase Craig eventually became the editor of Dell/Western's Disney titles, including Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Uncle Scrooge, Chip 'n' Dale and the many promotional books. Then in the 1960s, he served as Gold Key's editor on titles like 'Tarzan', 'Magnus Robot Fighter' and 'Korak, Son of Tarzan'. In the final stages of his career, in the late 1970s, he was writer and layout man for Marvel's Hanna-Barbera titles.
