Alex Grand: [00:00:09] Well, welcome back to the Comic Book Historians Podcast. I’m with a very special guest author, graphic novelist, historian, Eisner winner, the list goes on. Jim Henson, Muppet, Imagineer, toy entrepreneur, inventor. Craig Yo, thank you for being here today.
Craig Yoe: [00:00:27] Oh, the pleasure is all mine. You know that, Alex. You have an advantage over me with this interview.
Alex Grand: [00:00:32] We’re celebrating. You know one, your life. Okay, it’s a biographical interview, but your graphic novel, Woman and man. Plus, I read it, I loved it, it is masterful blend of Doctor Seuss, Robert Crumb, the pathos of life, love, loss, hope and the pop cultural soup that defines, energizes and overwhelms us. It’s a wonderful work. It’s coming out really soon. Tell us about how this came about.
Yoe’s “Woman & Man+” book is available now wherever fine books are sold and from the publisher at https://tinyurl.com/mryrh5n8
Craig Yoe: [00:01:04] It wasn’t something I planned for or even hoped for. Because it was. I’ve been doodling around for. I’m 73 for most of my life, but I never had any long expanses of really seriously drawing comics, etc. I guess I needed some motivation, but the motivation wasn’t positive that it’s a visual, psychedelic dream diary of, uh, the pain and suffering I went through of of, uh, the heavy duty decision of leaving the United States. And then I went to Germany, uh, and got involved in the underground comics scene there. Uh, much to my delight, the rest of my family wasn’t gung ho about Berlin, and so I was open to moving to the Canary Islands owned by Spain. And so we took yet another journey. And, uh, soon after arriving on the island, I became an island. No man is an island, but yo man is an island. When my wife of, uh, uh, over three decades, uh, this made a decision that she wanted us to, uh, get divorced, uh, start over, remain best friends and co-workers on your books and, most importantly, co-parents. But, you know, my heart was broken. As for art therapy, I decided to, uh, start drawing again after many decades. And, uh, this book is the result of that. So through symbolism and psychedelia, it reveals what was going on in my life as far as, uh, losing my country, losing, uh, my love. And some people say losing my sanity. Uh, but, uh, it was therapeutic via art. And, uh, did help me through this very troubled time. This book reflects that, and also the hope I was trying to grasp and the new life I was trying to reinvent. So it’s all about that and more. And and it’s also about my love of comics, I think. And, and the form and everything like that. So I, I love the form. Uh, yet in some ways in the book, I destroy the form, uh, and just like some that’s a reflection of my life. I loved my life, I loved, loved, uh, my relationship. And, uh, somehow that was destroyed, and and now I’m trying to be born again.
Alex Grand: [00:03:48] I noticed when I read it that it seemed to bring up a lot of deep, visceral feelings coming from, you know, things you’re exposed to childhood wise. The the kind of the rise and fall of the love lust cycle.
Craig Yoe: [00:04:03] Yes.
Alex Grand: [00:04:04] First, was it painful getting that onto paper? And do you feel like you came out with a with a more refined sense of identity afterward?
Craig Yoe: [00:04:14] You know, I’m going through a physical therapy right now, and, uh, the physical therapist, you know, she’ll do a a movie or an action. She goes, does that hurt? And I, I say, it hurts so good. You know, so definitely this was a painful process. But doing the art did somewhat alleviate the alleviate the pain and help me get in touch with where I’m at. And, uh, you know, so it’s a mixed bag. You can’t have the joy without the pain or the pain without, you know, the joy or, you know, it’s all intermingled. So yes, it was painful, but yes, I think it was like I tell the therapist, it’s a good pain in that I was working through things in my life.
Alex Grand: [00:04:57] Now, you said losing country, love and insanity. So what is when you say losing country? What led you to leave America?
Craig Yoe: [00:05:07] My wife. Clizia Gussoni. She she. I met her at the Lucca comic convention in Lucca, Italy. And so she’s born and bred Italian. She’s from Rome. And and after decades of being together and in the United States, which I think she hopefully enjoyed both, uh, for that period and, but I think she had a hankering to go back to the United States, but I was I was totally up for it. I sounded like a wonderful adventure to me. And and, uh, for her and me, I mean, things that were going on in the United States, I think, made us think that maybe it’s not the best way, best place to to raise our kids. I mean, it was a great place for me to grow up during that that time in America, certainly as a as a young white guy, you know, but, uh, maybe not for everybody in America during the 50s and 60s. But it was great for me. I loved, I loved, loved America. I still have an affection, of course, and but I was I was ready for new adventures. And one of the a tipping point for us was, uh, the Sandy hook shootings, which was a number of minutes from our house and other, uh, shootings across America, made us think like, let’s get the hell out of here. And, and our kids were suffering from active shooter drills in school. You know, they were having nightmares. And it was a, you know, a living nightmare for us to see. Them have to go through this and think about this. So, uh, you know, we we were ready to move.
Alex Grand: [00:06:49] Losing love is kind of separating from your roots. Did that contribute to to that separation? What do you attribute to that?
Craig Yoe: [00:06:58] Wait a minute. Is this a marriage counseling, uh, call or.
Alex Grand: [00:07:03] I think that means that the answer lies in this book right here. And you can find the secret if you can unravel it hidden in these pages, which I loved, by the way, because I think there’s just certain emotions that were put on paper the way you did it, uh, linking it with pop culture figures, cartoon characters, etc. I feel like I know the answer, but it’s like from an emotional level. And I think that was your intention. And in some.
Craig Yoe: [00:07:31] Ways, I don’t even know my intentions. I had a friend ask me today, he wanted me to interpret every page and, you know, tell him, tell him what each page is about. And I told him like, it’s like having a dream and trying to interpret your dreams. I mean, it’s kind of guesswork, you know? I mean, I don’t know all the answers to what everything means in there. Certainly it was about, you know, I mean, it is about losing. Losing my country. And but it certainly is about the breakup of of my marriage and my long time relationship, in that sense, with my wife. Well, we’re going to continue to work together on books. And certainly, again, the priority is is taking care of our, our, you know, our beloved kids and as co-parents. Uh, but, you know, that’s that is what the book is about. It’s about all those things, this upheaval, this change, this the things I went through. And but it’s it I mean, it is autobiographical, but I would like to think that no matter what other people’s lives have been like and what they go through, that they will find a lot relatable. Maybe, hopefully they’re not relating to the divorce part or the, uh, or the, uh, existential angst that I often go through or this or that, but maybe they, you know, have their own kinds of struggles.
Craig Yoe: [00:08:55] And, uh, and certainly relationships can be difficult. Work can be difficult. And, uh, I don’t know, but you probably just have only a love for comics. I have a love hate for comics. So there’s probably some of that in there. And, and, uh, you know, it’s it’s like it’s like you said, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a gumbo. It’s a mixed soup kind of thing. But it touches on all those things and hopefully it’ll touch other people’s lives and, and see that, you know, how they might relate to the struggles and then also, uh, grasp on to some of the hope that’s, that’s in the book. I think that as much adversity as I was experiencing in dark thoughts, you know, uh, about, you know, what, should my life even continue? I mean, I was pretty invested Vested in the United States, having lived there for 70 years and pretty totally invested in my marriage. But, uh, so maybe it could have been more. Who knows? But I was invested in those things. Uh, so when I lost those things, uh, you know, I think the book, the book reflects that. But then I’m, you know, now I’m trying to build a new life, and. And the book hints at that, too, I think.
Alex Grand: [00:10:09] Now I want to go back. Right. If we could, um, almost get that, uh, Wizard of Oz, uh, tornado spiral effect, you know, going back to 1951.
Craig Yoe: [00:10:23] Talking about Mr. Peabody and Sherman’s Wayback Machine more than Wizard of Oz, even.
Alex Grand: [00:10:29] I think you’re right. I think you’re definitely right. And if I’m going to defer a pop culture reference that goes back, then I’m going to defer to you, that’s for sure. And this is also a trip to the wonderful, you know, wizard of yo, You know, kind of life. And so yo is a British name, I think.
Craig Yoe: [00:10:46] So I often say that my grandfather, who lived in Oklahoma, I have a feeling that maybe he was escaping out of home windows when he had romantic liaisons and when he jumped out the window as maybe the husband was coming home, he shouted yo to his romantic interest. And so that that’s how he became known as yoe. But it another alternative interpretation is it might have been yoe man, which was the respected middle class and and I deserve a little respect. It was the respected middle class in England. And, uh, and that’s, that’s where you get the phrase, uh, someone’s doing a yeoman’s work, you know? So good work. So, so maybe yo, from that It was shortened from yo, and the E and O were switched around a little bit and became yo. It’s worked out from a marketing viewpoint because yo, as you know, a joyful thing you say to your friend when you see him on the street, yo, I was once in Grand Central Station and I living in New York, New York. I got used to people saying yo, yo, yo all the time, and I didn’t pay any attention because it. But because I knew they weren’t talking about me. They were just hailing their friend. But someone kept persistently behind me going, yo, yo, yo and and, uh. Then. So I finally turned around and he goes, yo, you know, you dropped your satchel, you know, or you left it on the bus, whatever. A train. That’s what it was. So he said, yo. So he was, he was talking about me at that, that point. So yoe yoe yoe. Good for marketing.
Alex Grand: [00:12:36] It is. It’s very catchy. It grabs me by the, uh, by the hamstrings there.
Craig Yoe: [00:12:42] Oh, okay. Good. I didn’t know where to grab you by, but I’m glad. I’m just glad I grabbed you.
Alex Grand: [00:12:48] Now you’re born, uh, 1951, in the Midwest. Um, Iowa and Ohio are your origins. Your dad was a chemical engineer, uh, in a tire firm, if I understand that right. Yeah. Tell us about those Midwest beginnings.
Craig Yoe: [00:13:04] The Midwest was a great place to grow up. And. Yeah, I was born in Iowa, where the tall corn grows and born in a pigsty. And, uh, but my dad, uh, who was doing chemical as a chemical engineer, doing some work there, I can’t remember what company, but he eventually went to, uh, Akron, where all the rubber companies are, and he worked for nearly all of them. And, uh, as a chemical engineer and, uh, my favorite, uh, memory about my dad is, is, uh, you know, he was helping developing tires for for Goodyear. And he came up with the idea of of doing a triangular tire. And they say you can’t reinvent the wheel, but my dad damn sure tried. He he talked Goodyear into investing millions of dollars in 3 or 4 years of his time to work on this idea of a triangular tire. Now, it wasn’t totally crazy because his concept was that a triangular tire would have more grip in muddy fields and could be put on farmers tractors. And so I have a photo of myself sitting on my dad’s tractor with my dad’s invention on it. They had to wait for a muddy, a rainy day where the field would be muddy in the in the in Goodyear’s test farm in Pennsylvania. But I went there and sat on the tractor and they snapped a picture. And I don’t know if the picture was snapped before or after they tried to tire out on the muddy field, but it was a total failure.
Craig Yoe: [00:14:40] But I’m just thrilled that my dad had the balls to try to reinvent the wheel, you know? And so I’ve tried to emulate my dad in that sense. And like, like this book tries to reinvent comics and and I, you know, I tried to reinvent many things. You know, that’s part of the creative process. I think you’re you’re influenced by different popular. I’m influenced by different popular culture things. You know, I’m steeped deep in comics and also other kinds of art, but I try to reinvent those things in my own way, you know, and come up with something new. So that was that was good. But but I had a great childhood, you know, sandlot baseball and which I wasn’t so good at, but it was so it was fun. And, uh, riding the bicycle around for hours and making tree forts and all that kind of good stuff. So that was great. And then. And comic books. My mom got me a subscription. She said it was from my. From my Nana at Christmas time. And she got me a subscription to Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. So there was a little envelopes that said that I had that under, under in my stocking, along with as as there was every year. Sheldon Mayor Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer. Comic book comics were a big part of my life. I speaking of therapy, I, I think the the first psychologist I ever worked with, he wanted to know what was my most fond childhood memory.
Craig Yoe: [00:16:12] And at that time I said, just laying in bed by myself, reading, uh, Uncle Scrooge comic books. So, uh, I think maybe that was a period where I was feeling kind of antisocial and just wanted to curl up back into the womb and read comic books, I guess. And on special occasions when I’m going off to summer camp, my mom wanted to get me something else in addition, and so she got me a little Lulu comic books. And by the great John Stanley and I met barks and and when I did the book the Art of Mickey Mouse, I met him through that that. But John Stanley actually became a very close friend. When I moved to New York to work for the Muppets, I was looking around like, should I, you know, I didn’t want to be right in the city, so I wanted to be in the suburbs. So I was looking around Connecticut and New Jersey, and I kind of called John because I had corresponded with him for a long time, commissioned him for some work when I was an art director for kids Stuff in Chicago. And he said, oh, come on up. I have a real estate agent, uh, in Croton, uh, New York, that that, uh, Croton on Hudson that could maybe help you out. So I actually got a house, you know, down the street from from John. And so we were able to get even closer.
Alex Grand: [00:17:28] You were Boy Scout, is that right?
Craig Yoe: [00:17:30] That’s correct.
Alex Grand: [00:17:31] Did you do atomic drills in school?
Craig Yoe: [00:17:34] Oh. Oh, absolutely. We got under the desk with our hands over our head. Yes. I, I kind of like those. They were exciting. And I had a I had a fantasy each time, each month when we had to do them, that the Russians would drop the bomb and I would throw my myself on top of Kim friend. A fellow third grader. Because I was so infatuated with it, I would throw myself over her to to shield her from the carnage in in you know her, she maybe give me a kiss as I. I went onto my reward in heaven, you know.
Alex Grand: [00:18:12] That’s pretty wild.
Craig Yoe: [00:18:13] I like atomic bomb drills. Have they started up again there? They haven’t.
Alex Grand: [00:18:18] I was I mean, when you were talking about the shooter drills, it reminded me of the atomic bomb drills of the 50s. And that’s why I was asking.
Craig Yoe: [00:18:26] Yeah. I was so traumatized. I was intrigued, actually, but my kids were maybe smarter than me, and they were unfortunately traumatized. But realizing the gravity of the of the active shooters in schools.
Alex Grand: [00:18:42] Um, now your dad collected coins, came up with a way to display them. I think from what I understand, you guys started a business, and it kind of taught you in a way he cultivated in you an industriousness. Am I thinking about that? Right?
Craig Yoe: [00:18:59] Absolutely. It’s interesting because he subscribed to the news of Numismatic News, which means coin collector news, and he was collecting coins and being an inventor. He came up with these plastic things sort of like, what do you guys call those those tombs you put, uh, comic books in now, these days had two sides so you could see the front and back of the coin, you know, a comic book that’s entombed in between two to screwed in between two pieces of glass. You can’t read them, you know. Which is what? Uh, but this this did preserve the coins from getting scratched and made a nice display thing. So he invented those and sold them through the fans. The, you know, the Coin Collector fanzine, which looked like, you know, the Comic Buyer’s guide, uh, for for coin coin nerds. And, uh, uh, he sold these. I mean, he was always trying to start businesses and had new ideas and often used his inventiveness and creativity to infuse the businesses. So he came up with this invention, and he actually came up also with he would sell the containers themselves, but he came up with this tool that you would actually, uh, it was sort of like a fancy drill you held in your hand and turned around to make the holes for the different sized coins.
Craig Yoe: [00:20:17] And you’d send he’d send you pieces of plastic that then you would make your own holes with this tool that he had patented, and it was my job to put him in these little containers, along with this slip sheet about the tools and how to use them and help package them and send them out. So it was it was definitely a home, little home business. But he called the business Johann’s son. So that really, uh, that really made me feel good and made me feel part of the business. And I think I was all of like 8 or 9 years old or something, you know? So, uh, uh, you know, I felt pretty special in that way. It did teach me a lot about having business and fulfilling orders and and marketing and putting ads in, in newspapers. And I loved my dad. I still love him to this day. There’s not a day I don’t think of him. And he also.
Alex Grand: [00:21:09] Read comic strips to you from the Akron Beacon Journal like peanuts, Blondie, Dick Tracy, is that.
Craig Yoe: [00:21:16] Right? Absolutely. Yeah. You know, you know why? Yeah, I know I love curling up on Sunday mornings. You know, we’d wait and have breakfast, and then we’d keep our ear perked up and we’d hear the newspaper hit the porch. And it was, we’re still in our PJs, so it’s back to bed. My dad would read me the comics and he and I both deeply enjoyed it. It was a very intimate, fun, close, you know, father son experience. It was great.
Alex Grand: [00:21:45] Did you draw as a kid and did you make were you, like, creating designs even when you were a kid?
Craig Yoe: [00:21:51] Absolutely, yeah. My my mom. Uh, let’s not forget the power of my mom. She she definitely encouraged the art side, and she, you know, bought me, uh, you know, the 64 box of crayons was also under the Christmas tree. And I don’t know if you ever heard of putting a kid’s drawing on the refrigerator, but I don’t know if my mom invented that, but she certainly practiced it, you know, and and, uh, encouraged me greatly in my art and everything. So. And I always had, you know, words of praise and encouragement. So I love drawing. Yeah, for sure I do. I don’t, I don’t recall drawing the cartoon characters out of the newspaper. I was just kind of using my own imagination. Many cartoonists were copying the Blondie and Dagwood and Dick Tracy and stuff, but I just I just kind of sat there and and doodled it, you know, and stream of consciousness, like, just like my book, you know, that’s what it was about, though, you know, it’s interesting. We’re talking about psychology and analyzing your mind and stuff. Like, I just, I my, uh, first born daughter, Avril. I’m very proud of her. She, she, uh, uh, her college education was in art therapy, and, uh, now she works with special needs kids as a teacher, but she, uh, she she’s the one that turned me on about the art therapy aspect of things, but I and so I studied a little bit of art therapy, and she just turned me on to a new book. I’m reading about that. But I know that when you study and analyze kids drawings, you know you really can learn a lot.
Craig Yoe: [00:23:29] You know about. You ask them to draw their family and you can see what that looks like, but I must I must have had an assignment at school to draw my home. And so I drew my home and it really covered the paper and all kinds of colors. And the, the figures of my family were large and everything like that. And so I really I could see that, you know, an art therapist looking at that would see that I really loved my family and my home. And then at the same time, when I was going through some old papers on preparing for our move and found some other kid drawings, I found a picture of my school. And the school was like about, you know, this, this tall on the on the big piece of paper. And obviously I didn’t like school. I loved my home, but not school so much. I the regiment of school and the, you know, the teachers and all the rules and everything. Like, I really never totally warmed up to it, up to that. There was two school experiences, though, that did inform me as an artist, because in kindergarten, uh, they passed out papers which were like coloring book pages, which again, I don’t think that’s the most creative way to start with a kid, but that’s what they had. And so I was coloring away. I was enjoying the process, and the teacher was going around the room, and she came to me and she goes, oh, Craig, that’s really good. Which, you know, made me feel pretty darn good.
Craig Yoe: [00:24:51] And she says, but you colored outside the lines. And at that moment I knew two things to to this day, I almost think about this almost every day is that, number one, you know, I wanted to do good art and try to, you know, get a good feeling from that and affirmation. But I also wanted to color outside the damn lines, you know. So that’s I think that my work reflects that, you know, that that kindergarten experiencing experience. And then in fourth grade, I remember the teacher, Mrs. Leonard, whose whose daughter is now a cartoonist, Polly Leonard. Uh, she’s in the National Cartoonist Society. She, uh, she had us draw snowmen around the season, and she showed how to use three circles, and all the kids, uh, emulated her almost. Exactly. She put them all up on the wall, and she had mine last. So she went through all the ones, and she was complimentary about everything. She goes, but this is she got to mine. She goes, but this is my favorite. Because kids, do you see how he didn’t follow my, you know, the way I did it at all. But he, he I don’t know, she wasn’t using this phrase because it was still before the 60s, but she said something like he did his own thing. He brought his own approach. You know, he, he she was a fan of coloring outside the lines. So, uh, Mrs. Leonard was a great influence, too. But other than that, uh, I you know, I didn’t super enjoy the educational experience of of school.
Alex Grand: [00:26:28] It’s interesting because it sounds like whether the encouragement is positive or negative, you’re going outside the lines. That’s where you’re kind of inner compass was headed anyway, regardless. And that’s pretty cool.
Craig Yoe: [00:26:39] Yeah. Yeah, I think so. You know, I’ve done that in my art and I guess in my life too.
Alex Grand: [00:26:43] As far as absorbing TV from the 50s to the 60s, the stuff you’re watching, Mickey Mouse Club Ghoulardi, the hoary host of the early 60s, the Batman 66 TV show. Tell us about the TV you’re watching.
Craig Yoe: [00:26:58] Well, certainly. I ran home from school every day just to see Mickey Mouse before my mom kicked me out the door to go wander around the neighborhood in the woods that were next to us. So that was that was great seeing Mickey Mouse. And I’m like, Walt Disney. Walt Disney said he never loved a woman as much as he loved Mickey Mouse. Maybe that’s why I have two marriages that ended because I never loved a woman as much as I loved Mickey Mouse. Later on, you know, we got a color TV, and I loved Batman. That’s the best screen version of Batman, by the way. I want to interject that now. We’ve probably just lost a lot of your viewers. Alex, they just turned off, and they’re not getting to the end of the of of the video. So that’s not good for your ratings, but that’s telling it like it is, dude. Adam West eventually became a good friend of mine, and we worked together on a few different projects, but Ghoulardi certainly was a defining thing. There was two giant influences by the time I got to junior high. That was in all our lives. That was the Beatles and certainly John Lennon. The great cartoonist and also a musician. John Lennon was a big influence and I loved his cartoons, and his music was pretty good too. Uh, but Ghoulardi, when he started up as a, you know, a premier horror host on, uh, wjw-tv in Cleveland, Ohio, me and every kid in the greater Akron Cleveland area was tuning in on Friday nights, and he was just a total fascinating hoot to watch. You know, he took these old horror films that maybe people wouldn’t be watching it all anyway, but they got the syndicated right to.
Craig Yoe: [00:28:41] And he would like as a horror host, he would have all these like special effects that the screen turning around. And I just finished another comic book recently, and I actually made Ghoulardi the villain and inspired by him to make the villain for the more, uh, traditional comic book story. But anyway, Ghoulardi was, you know, making fun of the horror flicks, and he would interject himself in the middle of the things, and he was like saying rebellious kind of things and cool it with the boom booms and turn blue. Conniff and we’re just a couple of his catch words. And, you know, we were all just mesmerized. I remember the underground Palmer, who was a friend of mine, he’d sent in a picture of Ghoulardi and Ghoulardi showed it on the air. So he showed a lot of kids artwork. I never got around to sending artwork into Ghoulardi. Uh, but, uh, he certainly was a big influence. I, I, uh, my, my collection of Steve Ditko Gorgo stories. I dedicated that to Ghoulardi, you know, because he was such a I don’t know if he showed Gorgo on the on on his, on his show, but he certainly did like those kind of movies. He was terrific. He was a great inspiration every bit as much as the Beatles. I think he influenced kids in northeastern Ohio, you know, and inspired us, many, many of us artists. And his son is now is a production company. I guess he’s a quite highly esteemed film director, you know, and I’m I’m sure part of that was his own influence by Ghoulardi and his dad.
Alex Grand: [00:30:19] It’s interesting not everyone has the courage to venture outside the box and then interact and produce more pop culture with their heroes the way you did. So I think that’s really quite amazing. Not everyone can that’s that’s that’s hard to do. And I think that’s amazing that you did that in so many ways, hundreds of ways. Now in your teenage years, you know, after you kind of got the the kid comics a bit out of your system, you got more into the Marvel stuff. Ditko, Kirby, Ditko, I think, clicked the most.
Craig Yoe: [00:30:57] Ditko is the king of comics, right?
Alex Grand: [00:30:59] I think so, yes. Oh, yeah.
Craig Yoe: [00:31:01] Oh, good. Good. We’re in agreement on that. But the the few viewers we still had watching. Now they’ve left.
Alex Grand: [00:31:09] No, they’re staying around. I got I got an eclectic kind of clientele here.
Craig Yoe: [00:31:14] Okay. Good to hear. Hi, guys and gals. So, uh, well, I mean, during the Ghoulardi era, some kids at my junior high. Uh, when I say kids, it was boys, uh, secretly started collecting Marvel comics. And one of them, who I was especially close to, you know, took me aside and whispered in my ear about, I might enjoy these Marvel comics, because that was very secretive. Because you didn’t want girls at school to know you were just now becoming really interested in girls, and you didn’t want them to know that you were, you know, had arrested Development and were like, like some little kid still reading comic books. So we secretly started reading and collecting Marvel comics. And I think most of us, half a dozen guys. We all by going to old bookstores and flea markets. And so we eventually collected each of us collected a complete set of all the early marvels, and I just fell in love with them. And I, especially Spider-Man, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee Stanley’s a god. Oh, wait, we just lost your long your last viewer. But anyway, I love I love Stan Lee, you know, and what Ditko and and Lee and the other Marvel artists, including, you know, the incredible Jack Kirby, did, you know, just really turned us on.
Craig Yoe: [00:32:39] And we just became infatuated with the comics and collecting them. And all my friends, uh, they all stuck with Marvel Comics. I don’t I don’t think they bought any DC comics, and they didn’t buy any other type of comic material. But I quickly realized, like, hey, if these comics are so cool and fun and interesting, I’m interested in all the comics, you know, and all the not only all the comics, but cartoons. I became interested, you know, when I went to the old bookstores looking for if they might have gotten some comic books in. Uh, I also went to the humor section to get, you know, bound volumes of, uh, New Yorker cartoons and Peter Arno and and books about Thomas Nast, you know, America’s first great, uh, political cartoonist. And, you know, I was just influenced, inspired by and and passionate about learning and collecting all every form of comics and cartoons, you know? So I really, uh, had an eclectic wide net that I was casting, you know, from.
Alex Grand: [00:33:46] What I understand, you went through, you went to thrift stores, you found, you know, Milt Gross, Golden Age comics. You went back in time, comic wise, through thrift stores, reading Golden Age things as well as a lot of the strip cartoonists, things like that In the midst of all that, I have to ask, do you remember your favorite Steve Ditko story?
Craig Yoe: [00:34:07] They’re all favorites. They’re like my kids. They’re all.
Alex Grand: [00:34:10] Favorites. That’s a good answer. I mean, I agree, I love everything he’s done.
Craig Yoe: [00:34:15] Looking back, I, I am less interested in superheroes, much less. I mean, I don’t buy superheroes comics, but, uh, and and I really loved his early Charlton stuff. Yeah. Kind of the thicker line and the dark backgrounds and the and the variety of these horror fantasy stories. I mean, he later beautifully reflected that in the, you know, the early pre hero marvels too, obviously, that he did with, uh, uh, Lee Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber, the early Charlton’s. There’s something really magical about that, and I’ve collected the best of those in the in the three large format books we did and well, and then a fourth smaller one. So I just I just love that period of him. That was a very rich period, I think.
Alex Grand: [00:35:17] Oh yeah. His Charlton stuff was like atmospheric, beautiful. It was like Twilight Zone, you know, before there was Twilight Zone. I, I love that stuff. Now, you were also friends with Gene Simmons back then when you were kind of in comic fandom, is that right?
Craig Yoe: [00:35:32] No, no, no, not exactly right. We were in the same fanzines, though. Uh, I think my first, other than my own personal fanzine, which I started, uh, in that period, I contributed artwork. My first artwork and strip was in a fanzine called wonderment, and, uh, Gene Simmons was a co-contributor to that fanzine. I guess he tells the story that he was drawing Spider-Man and other other superheroes in different Ditko and mimeographed fanzines, but he, as many of us did, you know, saw the Beatles first appearance on Ed Sullivan. And he was not only taken by the Beatles appearance, he loved when the cameras spanned the audience and there was these screaming girls, you know, for the Beatles. And so he he instantly threw away his pens and pencils and, you know, went to Woolworths and bought a guitar. I guess he knew which direction he wanted to go. So, uh. Right. He came to that fork in the road and I took the wrong, the wrong road, and he took the right one.
Alex Grand: [00:36:45] But he’s a big Marvel guy from what I, I’ve read, I’ve seen in some of his interviews. Now, what issue of the rocket’s Blast comicollector like your first issue of that that you read. Do you remember the issue number or the number by chance?
Craig Yoe: [00:36:58] I believe it was number 42.
Alex Grand: [00:37:00] Bud plant and other friends, David Armstrong. They all will kind of almost identify each other with what issue number they entered fandom with Rocket Blast comic collectors. So yours is 42 that it’s good to know because I hear them. You know I’m number. You know I’m 55. I’m 38, you know. Oh, okay. Uh, it’s I find that so interesting.
Craig Yoe: [00:37:20] Yeah. My friend who turned me on to comics and a couple other guys who were reading and collecting comics, too. He he must have started, like, with 40 or 41, because he’s the one that told me, I think he got a rocket’s blast comicollector and told me about it. And so I instantly subscribed. And, you know, that certainly did open up again, a whole new world to see these old Golden Age comic books. You know, you could buy detective 27 with the first Batman story for five bucks, but I didn’t have five bucks. That was that was three lawn mowing jobs and then at $0.10 each, that was 50 other comic books I couldn’t buy, you know, so I didn’t bother getting that.
Alex Grand: [00:38:03] And then you were a member of Capa Alpha with Frank Miller and other comic fans when you were entering fandom.
Craig Yoe: [00:38:13] I was a member, and this was before Frank Miller. He came along later, I guess, but I was earlier on, I don’t know which issue I was in Capa Alpha, but Capa Alpha, as your viewers may or may not know, is a it was a fanzine compiled by a person called a Central Mailer. So everybody would send in their own little fanzine. And I think we had 40 members at that time. And then the central mailer would staple, he’d get all everybody’s fanzines, and then he would staple them all together into one big fanzine and, and then put a cover on it that said Capa Alpha and then send it back out. So I became a member of that, and that’s where I started doing my fancy. And I did a fanzine called Yoessarian, which was my name, and also, of course, maybe the name of the lead character in the Catch 22, Joseph Heller’s novel. A great anti-war novel, which again was a big influence on my life. And so I started doing Yoessarian, and I did that for a number of issues, and that was, that was that was big time, because my mom, again, of my encouraging mom, bought me a mimeograph machine, a used one from somebody from some PTA or something that was getting rid of it. And, uh, and so I started not only writing and drawing for and, and putting together these fanzines, but, uh, printing my own copies to send to the central mailer.
Craig Yoe: [00:39:46] And so Fred Patton in Los Angeles was the central mailer when I started, and Don and Maggie Thompson, God bless them. Uh, they became central mailers, uh, after, uh, Patten stepped down and they lived about an hour from me, and my encouraging mom drove me and my friend Chuck case, who again turned me on to comics. He they my mom drove us to their house, and my mom went off to do some shopping while we spent a couple of hours with the Thompsons and saw their amazing collection. And and I think we helped them collate their comic art fanzine on another visit. And, uh, so Don and Maggie became a huge influence on me. I mean, to have actual adults, a children’s librarian and a reporter for the Cleveland Press, you know, be into comics and be encouraging me, you know, was a they were huge role models. And I just worked with Maggie. She helped me edit, um, my latest book from Dark Horse, a collection of space Western comics and old Charlton Comics. Uh, that’s wacky and weird. And, uh, so, yeah, I’m still in touch, and I try to remind her every time I have any contact about what a big encouragement and inspiration she and Don were.
Alex Grand: [00:41:13] And so using a mimeograph to make the Yoessarian, that was basically your entry into kind of packaging and publishing, right?
Craig Yoe: [00:41:22] Yeah. And packaging and publishing and editing and writing and having an audience and having feedback. And, you know, my friend Chuck and I, we were, I think, maybe the youngest members of the group. So most of them were adults, Fred Patten and Thompson and these people from Australia and France. Here I am, you know, getting this. And Bill Blackbeard was another great encouragement. He loved my contributions, and he had super kind things to say about them and encouraged me. And so to get to get positive feedback from an esteemed person like Bill Blackbeard. And this was before he had started doing all his books and and selling his ginormous collection to Ohio State and, and all that kind of stuff. This is way before then. So we were all just kind of like, you know, had a small audience of 40 people, you know, for our work, you know, at that period in time, you know, uh, there was no Marvel movies and, and museums, you know, and, and institutions devoted to comics and things like that, you know, so we were all just kind of running on our own out of passion and, and a little ability that and, uh, but to have the example of these adults and who were taking me seriously and shared my love for comics, you know, that meant the world underground comics.
Alex Grand: [00:42:47] You know, you mentioned earlier that they’re a strong part of your foundation. And so when you started reading the underground stuff like zap comics with Robert Crumb, while also kind of toward the end of high school, incorporating hippie culture long hair. Tell us about that transformation.
Craig Yoe: [00:43:08] My dad had a business trip to Chicago, and so we went there and one of the things tourists did, they went down to, I wish I could remember the name of the street. There was one street that was, uh, had all kinds of hippie head shops and hippie clothing stores and cute, you know, cute little trendy restaurants and things like that. So, you know, as tourists, my dad, you know, got the a book and looked for, you know, what you should do in certain towns. So one of the things was go to this, this street. And so we went to that street. And while we were waiting for our food, I saw like one of those hippie head shops and I said, hey, can you know, while we’re waiting, can I run over to that store? So I did, and I saw a zap. The first issue of Zap Comix and also the Chicago Mirror, which was put together by Jay Lynch and and Skip Williamson and I, with my spending money for the vacation I spent, spent, spent it on that, I think I hid them down the back of my pants before I went back. And my parents said, did you find it? And I go, no, because I think these were pretty verboten, verboten material I wouldn’t want my mom and dad to see. But anyway, once I got to the hotel and had a private moment, I was reading Chicago Mirror and I saw a phone number for Jay Lynch, or at least his name, and I looked it up in the phone book.
Craig Yoe: [00:44:34] Yeah, that’s what it was. And I saw I called him and I said, I just I’m, you know, I’m a kid from Akron, Ohio, and I’m reading this and I love it and this is so cool. And I just want to call you and say hi or something. And but he. Years later, when I moved myself, moved to Chicago from Ohio and started working for a children’s, uh, publishing company there. I got back in touch with Jay and we became fast friends, and I used him as an artist for the kids magazines I was doing, and he turned me on me on to a lot more stuff. But he always said he remembered me calling him many years previously and and telling him how much I loved the Chicago Mirror. So that that was pretty cool. And then when I took the, the the, uh, the Zap Comix back, I was the first one to review Robert Crumb in in print, maybe, or at least in a fanzine. So because I, I had a little, uh, I don’t know, it was 2 or 3 or four sentence review of the zap about the zap of the zap comic book I found in Chicago in my Yoessarian Capa Alpha fanzine, so I kind of pride my self for my. I pat myself on the back. I don’t know if it’s worth worthy of a pat from anybody else, but I was maybe the first one to to review a Robert Crumb comic book in comics fandom.
Alex Grand: [00:45:56] Part of that the hippie movement was, of course, the anti-Vietnam War sentiment of the period. You you had an anti, if I understand this correctly, uh, your own antiwar high school newspaper, you’re a cartoonist in it. And some of these themes manifest in your later publications, the great anti-war cartoons, the unknown antiwar comics. There’s a sense of pacifism, if I’m understanding that correctly.
Craig Yoe: [00:46:25] Yes. I mean, I, I’m I try to be a pacifist to everybody who tries to be a pacifist, it’s very difficult. And that was certainly born from, you know, what was going on in the air in the 60s. And I Realizing how evil the Vietnam won and I felt all war was. And so I became very active in the anti-war movement. And I remember in art class drawing anti-war cartoons and and even in the Assyrian fanzine, I would for mimeograph you had to trace. Oh, there was a couple of different ways to reproduce cartoons, but one of the one of the ways back in that way, a cheaper way, was just to trace cartoons. I remember tracing anti-war cartoons I found from the past, uh, onto the covers of some of my yoessarian’s, which brought some criticism from some of the fellow members that, you know, they were just wanting articles about Marvel Comics. My first issue was about of Yoessarian was about cowboy comics. That’s how much I wanted to do something different. But I did bring an anti-war and hippie vibe into the pages of Yoessarian in junior high. We did have our high school student underground newspaper, and the official paper of Firestone High School was the Firestone Focus. You know, we as flower children, we named our underground newspaper that. And it was the first issue was started by Paul Mavrides and a couple other guys.
Craig Yoe: [00:47:53] And again, Palmer is a esteemed underground cartoonist who’s drawn for the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and does way cool, fine art and and has done Anarchy Comics. The Underground called that his art was inspired. He was way ahead of me in ability, but I did draw one anti-war cover for the Crocus with with Nixon as a lion, and I think I stole that line from an old issue of Harper Harper’s Weekly that I had found maybe probably from a Thomas Nast cartoon or something like that, got very involved in the antiwar movement. Then when I went on to college, I or helped I was one of the leaders of the anti-war movement there and help organize marches. We marched to the. The Selective Service office, uh, the draft board. In other words. And, uh. The night before I went with my friend’s mom, she was supportive of what we. Were doing. We went out to the to to the countryside outside of Akron and. Went to find some on some farm. We got a got a bucket of cows blood or something. And so we we so that we all of our marchers would have a cup of cows blood. We could at that time they had just passed a law. You could see your draft files. So, uh, we asked to see our draft files. And when they showed them to us, we poured.
Craig Yoe: [00:49:21] This blood on our our files and then gave them back to the clerk to to file away. You know, as part of our protest, in fact, the clerk who dealt with my file. Years later, I think I was doing some work for Nickelodeon, and I’d flown out to, uh, uh, when I when I was a creative director at Nickelodeon, I had flown out to Los Angeles for something. And on the on the flight back, there’s this old lady sitting next to me, and she goes, you look familiar. And I go, I don’t know. I don’t know what the connection might be. She goes, I know who you are. I used to work at the draft board, and you came in and asked to see your file on a protest day, and you poured blood on your file. I’ll never forget that. I go, oh, you know, thinking, oh, this is going to be a long ride home. Uh, but then she went on to tell me in her next breath that that inspired her to become part of the anti-war movement. And she’s now she was on a trip to Los Angeles for something because she’s now working as a for the Quakers in you know in their the pacifist, uh, anti-war, you know, division of that religion, you know. And so she that was the turning point for her.
Alex Grand: [00:50:45] That’s wild. Look at that. You’re you’re changing lives unknowingly.
Craig Yoe: [00:50:49] Yeah. That was, like, so crazy cool.
Alex Grand: [00:50:52] Now, did you have any experience with marijuana? Because you were part you’re hippie guy, but you don’t really strike me as a drugged out guy.
Craig Yoe: [00:51:02] The last year of high school got together with some friends, and I had an acid trip. And he, you know, the Reader’s Digest and such used to tout how acid was horrible. And, you know, you might have a bad trip and jump out a window or something. I had one of those bad trips. I didn’t jump out the window, but it was just like, scary. I felt like I was dying and everything happened three times, like in rapid succession, like a little segment of what was happening would repeat three times, and then I would touch my head and it would get like gooey and, you know, the skin would kind of goo off my head like gak or something. And, uh, and it lasted all night long, and I was terrified. And so I, I have smoked marijuana a couple times. Didn’t like Bill Clinton, never inhaled. That was my one acid trip, and it was terrifying. And I hated it. But I’m so glad it happened because it I think it really did change my art and changed my outlook on life. And so in a way, it had a positive effect.
Craig Yoe: [00:52:19] I mean, many things in life, just like my separation and divorce and everything has good, good and bad, right? And you try to minimize the bad and avoid the bad when you can. But something bad happens. You try to make the best of it. So anyway, that trip, I mean, I still, decades later, sometimes get flashbacks from that trip. There was a Neil Young song playing while that trip was going on, which repeated over and over again three times in a row. But every. If I’m riding in a car, driving even in a car, and I happen to touch my head and that song comes on, all of a sudden my head gets gooey and starts coming out again to this day. So it was quite impactful on my brain somehow. This crazy acid trip and I think, I think influential on my artwork. Do you think I mean, the back of the book says like, you know, animation said, my art is like Doctor Seuss, Seuss on acid, you know, So I think so. I’m thankful for that. Bad. The bad, that bad trip was good, although.
Alex Grand: [00:53:34] You didn’t really go back to doing that kind of stuff. No, but it had a positive effect.
Craig Yoe: [00:53:40] Once was enough.
Alex Grand: [00:53:41] How did you stay out of the draft?
Craig Yoe: [00:53:43] The draft system was that it was in tears. If you had a medical deferment, you could get out. Or if you were going to college, you could get out. If you couldn’t meet those criteria and you were still being drafted, you could register as a as a pacifist. So I did register as a pacifist and, you know, had to write an essay, had to get, uh, the minister from my church to write an essay, you know, and all that kind of stuff. But I was in college, so I had a college deferment. So, you know, unlike people whose parents didn’t have enough money to send them to college, I had that deferment and and, you know, and then a couple years later, before, while I was still in college, the, you know, the Vietnam War ended. So I thank God I wasn’t drafted. But if I if I had to drop out of college for some reason and I didn’t have a medical deferment then, then they would have reviewed my to prove that I was a pacifist and not necessarily avoid the war in Vietnam. Probably not. They would have sent me to the front lines as a medic, which would have probably been traumatic. And, uh, this and that too. But anyway, that’s how I got out of the draft.
Craig Yoe: [00:55:01] I also staged a protest on the Akron University campus, where we did street theater, and we had a baby, and we covered it with napalm and then burned it or something like that. And thousands of people showed up for this to beat me up because I had announced I was a cartoonist for the for the school newspaper, the Akron Book Delight, and I did a cartoon against after the shootings in Kent State. I did a cartoon about that. And I did that reviled the Governor Rhodes at the time. And then I would do antiwar cartoons, because the University of Akron was complicit in the war by having it was a big like my dad’s department. They had a big chemical engineer department. And, uh, you know, they were helping to develop things like napalm and stuff like that. So I did anti-war cartoons and anti-administration college administration cartoons. Uh, but we staged this protest. But, uh, a few years later, a, uh, an FBI agent who wanted me to start becoming an informant since I was so involved in the scene, and I turned him down, of course, but he showed me my FBI file, and they had photos of me in that street theater and leading the leading this protest and everything like that.
Alex Grand: [00:56:31] So that is crazy.
Craig Yoe: [00:56:33] I’m pretty proud that I have an FBI file.
Alex Grand: [00:56:35] Yeah, that is pretty cool. You don’t hear that every day. Person of interest. Craig. Yo. Now, you also got into sign painting and actually enjoyed it. Like painting signs. Tell us about that.
Craig Yoe: [00:56:47] Yes. Well, after after the first year of high school, I wanted a summer job, and so I, I, uh, I saw an ad in the paper. The city was looking for sewer workers, so I thought, well, you know, I might as well start at the bottom. And, uh, uh, so I went and applied for that, and, and I guess I fill out these papers and I met all the criteria. So the city kind of had to hire me or something. So. But I showed up in the office of the director of the sewer department, and he took one look at me and my long hippie hair, and he. He knew this was a recipe for disaster. Putting me in the sewers with these, you know, hardhat construction pro-vietnam guys and stuff. Probably wasn’t going to bid well for getting work done. And, uh, so he said, sit over there like, I gotta figure this out. And like, right after I sat down, this other gentleman came in and he goes in and said hi to his friend in the sewer department. He said, who’s that over there? And he goes, uh, that’s this, this guy, you know, he’s going to be working for me in the sewer department, but I’m trying to figure out. He goes, this guy came up to me. He goes, what? You look, you look, you look a little stranger. Are you an artist? I go, yeah. And he goes, well, I have an opening in the art department. He asked the sewer guy, hey, could I take him for the art department? He goes, oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes, Please take him. Take him. You know, he took me over there to the art department. I became his assistant. And he, you know, he painted lettering on the side of the police cars, you know, numbered car 54, you know, whatever. You know, on the side of that and signs for the soapbox derby and whatever the city needed. You know, as far as sign painting. Et cetera. You know. So I became his assistant. And.
Alex Grand: [00:58:42] Yeah, that’s just a cool, uh, skill to learn, because it’s a trade. But there’s some art behind it, too, so it’s just kind of interesting, you know, because, um, you would, you know, be official in publishing, um, all sorts of artistic things. I just find that such an interesting side thing. You did a little side hustle you did there.
Craig Yoe: [00:59:00] Well, you’ll see from my book. I have a love for lettering and sign painting is a actually a rich tradition related to cartooning, because a lot of the early cartoonists, maybe the most notable one, were sign painters, you know, before or during or maybe even after their cartooning careers, like the great cartoonist Eugene Zimmerman, whose name is Zim. His nickname was. And the way he signed his work was Zim. He was a sign painter. And he’s he’s always picturing sign painters in his in his cartoons and comics. And a lot of early cartoonists were their side hustle was sign painting, you know, and you can kind of see that the form and the shapes and the colors and and the and the lettering they put in, I mean, Winsor McCay started, uh, as a sign painter for, for, uh, uh, carnivals and circuses and stuff like that, you know, it. And he could do beautiful lettering. It’s it’s weird how he his the balloon lettering was kind of weird because it often runs outside of the balloons and stuff like that. But then the, the actual the typography of the logo, Little Nemo stuff. You can see what skills he had as a as a letterer, and he started as a sign painter.
Alex Grand: [01:00:19] Now, when you were at Akron University, uh, you were there during the Kent State massacre?
Craig Yoe: [01:00:24] Yes. That this was a spring initiative across the land of. And nearly every college had some an anti-war demonstration planned for May 4th that was, you know, a it was a planned thing. And so me and a couple others, we, we in, uh, my, my future first wife, we, we were on the four person committee to organize the antiwar demonstration on our campus. Somebody, though, had a trans in the middle of our rally on the football field across from the university. Somebody in the audience must have had a transistor radio. And we heard about the shootings at Kent State, which was 15, 20 minutes from our campus. We were like almost like a sister campus. We heard about the shooting and we the tone of our, you know, again, I was a pacifist, but the tone of our rally immediately changed because, like some weathermen types then took over the stage and, you know, changed the whole tone of the thing. And, and, uh, we the things were kind of upped on our campus, and we eventually shut down the school and took over the president’s office. And years later, when I was with the Muppets, Jane Henson, Jim’s wife, had me accompany her to a wedding of some friends in Akron. So I went back there from New York, and she and I drove out there and and she and we sat, uh, in the wedding. Little wedding party.
Craig Yoe: [01:02:01] And this guy across from me said, hi, who are you? And I said, I’m creative director at the Muppets. You know, I’m here with Jane. And he said, I said, what are you doing? He said he was the president of the university. University of Akron. I said, well, I occupied that office once, and I told him that, you know, about our anti-war protest. And I wish I would have followed up on this because he said, did you graduate? And I go, no. He goes, well, maybe we could look into you getting an honorary degree. And I really wish I would have followed up on that. So I would have been a nice thing to have in my resume, because I never did, because I got so involved in the antiwar movement. I didn’t I rarely attend classes, so I, I eventually had to I eventually dropped out to do something else, which we can talk about. But just the couple of days before the Kent State massacre, I, I went to the Kent State campus because, again, we were kind of sister campuses. And I heard, uh, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin talk. And Jerry especially was talking about how to be a true revolutionary. You have to be willing to kill your parents. And that’s when I really kind of got turned off to the more, not more, but quite violent, uh, side of the anti-war movement.
Alex Grand: [01:03:18] This is around the time when, you know, you marry your first wife and, you know, first set of kids. Um, so this so this is a very formative stage of time for you.
Craig Yoe: [01:03:30] Yes. We were converting an old shut up rundown light bar called the Avalon into a hippie nightclub. I dropped out of school, and, you know, we totally focused on that, and it was called the Avalon. And then we would advertise in the in the Akron University newspaper, the Avalon. So all the hippies that were going to the school would know about it. And so we started this nightclub and, you know, we’d have hippie folk singers and poets and, and a few rock n roll acts come down. And, uh, so some of the more popular bands that were from the Cleveland area, like, uh, came there and, you know, so we started this nightclub and it was a large building. So also we rented to a hippie head shop that had another location, and they started a location there. And then we opened up a another area of the building. We opened up a free school where hippie parents could have their kids drop out of school, and they have their own alternative school. So it was a kind of a whole hippie, uh, conclave, uh, community space. And so my then wife, Janet Mora, and I, uh, put that together.
Alex Grand: [01:04:51] So when this is all happening, you know, it’s the early 70s. How did you, you know, as a how did you come to terms? How did you come to terms with the end of the 60s? Jimi Hendrix dies, Janis Joplin, Joplin dies, Charlie Manson murders. The Symbionese Liberation Army’s happening. You know, Nixon, you know, pre Watergate was kind of becoming kind of mainstream. How are you dealing with that while also working on the on what you just talked about as far as the folk night club and, you know, drawing advertisement comics and in the university newspaper, underground newspapers. How how are you dealing with all that?
Craig Yoe: [01:05:36] I don’t think I was dissuaded from my own beliefs and my own. I wasn’t alone in, in, uh, not embracing the militant part of the, of the anti-war movement. And certainly I mourned the loss of Janis and Jimi and and Jim Morrison and but I, you know, I. What do you do? Just like even like today we have. There’s bad things, but you have to keep, uh, marching on. Am I marching? Isn’t the military type march. But it’s the protest march, you know? So I have to keep, uh, putting one foot in front of the other and keep on trucking.
Alex Grand: [01:06:24] That’s right. That’s totally it. And you’re right about that. Now you are also living. You were living communally as a member of the Jesus People hippie movement in the early 70s. There were prayer meetings, Bible studies. How did that all come about in the midst of all this?
Craig Yoe: [01:06:43] Well, it ties into the hippie nightclub because the hippie came down one night, uh, named Carlos Cerise. I think maybe he was with a couple of friends, but he was the lead songwriter and singer of this folk act, and he started playing this, like, angelic Type music, I mean. I mean, it didn’t sound religious and it sounded like folk music, but it. He and his songs glowed. There was something very special about him, and mystical and spiritual, and I was I was quite taken back by, you know, his, his, uh, his deep, beautiful songs and, uh, and I think I came up to him afterwards to the stage and said that I was, like, really special. I was really taken by that. And what’s, you know, what’s behind this? And he and he said, it’s, it’s Christ coming through me or something along that lines. And then he invited me to this old barn, uh, outside of Youngstown. Our nightclub was on a Saturday night. These hippies met at the barn on Sunday night. So I think the next night I went with him in an old, uh, hippie van. Maybe it was my van. I can’t remember how I got there, but it was an old hippie van. We were all in, and we go to the barn and Carlos is playing and another music, rock n roll musicians.
Craig Yoe: [01:08:04] And and then there’s these, like, old time Pentecostal people preaching and leading some of the sing alongs. And, you know, these large women with their beehive hairdos and, you know, it’s, you know, very straight. You know, people were mingled in with the hippies, you know, and, uh, and they were speaking in tongues. And it was, again, a mystical experience. And I felt a supernatural feeling around and with within me. And I felt at that moment, I mean, some people, this is not this dramatic, but I felt born in an instant. I felt born again. And, uh, so that changed my life. And, uh, I remained a hippie, but I was now a hippie Christian. And Carlos became a regular part of our nightclub leading songs there. And, and, uh, many of the people who attended our nightclub became hippie Christians, too. And, and we and we would continue to have the music on the weekends, sometimes with Carlos, sometimes with just our regular cast of musicians who didn’t maybe share the same spiritual beliefs. Uh, but then on Wednesday night, we did start prayer meetings and Bible studies and eventually the the Christian community aspect took over. And we in 3 or 4 times a week, we would have, uh, you know, you know, get togethers and services and, and go out in the streets and, and we started a hippie underground.
Craig Yoe: [01:09:46] Our acorn hippie newspaper changed into a which after about the seventh or eighth issue, we changed it, I think, uh, according to a paper called Jesus Loves You with a psychedelic logo and and everything. So it was a very much of an underground newspaper, but it was espousing, you know, the teachings of Jesus and how he can change your life. So and then we would pass out our newspaper on the streets and, and then invite people to, to our church and, and, you know, and then we helped other churches get started and at, at in Kent, you know, next to Kent State, we helped start a church there and, and, um, other places too. And then we started putting on big Christian rock concerts with the Christian musician fame. You know, the more notable Christian musicians at the time, Larry Norman and Andre Crouch. So that all and then and then we started renting houses next door to the church and living communally. We had a girls house and a guy’s house and then, Janet and I took people into our house a mile or so away. And so we lived communally, shared, shared everything. You know, most of us sold everything we had or extra cars and stuff to get money for the church.
Alex Grand: [01:11:10] And tell us about your friendship with Rick Griffin at this point.
Craig Yoe: [01:11:15] Well, I started doing Christian hippie newspapers, and I think I sent Rick one, and then I decided I wanted to do a, you know, a glorified comic book. And so I told Rick I wanted to come out there. So he invited me to come out. He picked me up in Los Angeles train station and then took me to his house in San Clemente, and I stayed with him for a while. And then he, you know, he made up a list of other, uh, hippie type artists who had become Christians. Other other than himself that he knew of. He had become a Christian, too. And he. So I went up and down the West Coast to visiting these different artists. Uh, to see if they wanted to contribute to this book. I also stopped in up around San Francisco to see Charles Schultz because he was he was a Christian. And and so I interviewed him and I don’t I don’t think I asked him to contribute to our book, but I just took the occasion to meet up with him, and, uh, he and I did other projects together later on. So, uh, Rick was definitely a big influence on me and, uh, his work and and his kindness and his wife’s kindness. Ida was a gifted artist and beautiful person, uh, and was deeply religious. She and Rick took me in, and and showed his art and how to do it. He told me secrets about how to do art that I never realized, you know. And he really encouraged my art. He liked my art. And, uh, we put together this book called Jubilee, which he did a stunning cover for. And this book that I was talking about, we we brought together all these hippie Christian artists that we put together this book. Rick doing the cover. And then he helped me, guided me on my own comic strip inside, and gave me tips on how to do it and the secrets of art, which I can’t reveal to you to this day.
Alex Grand: [01:13:32] Um, now, you had, uh, a pro-woman stance in the in your, uh, church that, if I’m understanding right, contributed to things breaking up and you going your own way. What happened?
Craig Yoe: [01:13:49] I gave a sermon once or twice a week, and I started peppering my sermons with things I was finding in the Bible how the, you know, the the, the last people Christ saw on the cross and the first people after his resurrection were women. And he he was, uh, you know, he was telling, telling the, the, the religious people not to throw stones at prostitutes and, and, uh, you know, he, he, he, he was very, I think pro women. And I found other biblical evidence for that. And also I was it’s interesting to me to think back now, but I was also encouraging that the people, you know, we kind of led an insulated life living together communally and all that kind of stuff. But I thought we should integrate the rest of the world, including maybe politics, because, you know, uh, you know, because I was against the military industrial still against the military industrial complex. I was, I was, I was, you know, that’s something I peppered my sermons with. And early on, a number, even the hippie Christians that were there, some of them like, took umbrage at that and felt I was headed the wrong direction. And they didn’t appreciate some of the things I was interjecting into the sermon. So they kind of fomented an insurrection, you know? And, uh, so the church, the church, as a result, the church fell apart. And I think many of those a number, not all, but a number of those people went on to, you know, become Christian nationalists, you know, which I’m very you know, I love these people. We’re even supposed to love our enemies. I don’t know if they’re my enemies, but I love try to love everybody. Uh, but I’m diametrically opposed to the whole idea of Christian nationalism and what we’re seeing by the evangelical right these days. Uh, and even in this interview, I hate to use I don’t use just the word Christian. I’d say hippie Christian. So you know that it’s something different than than what you might think of when you immediately think of Christians today.
Alex Grand: [01:16:16] It’s the mid 70s at this point, and I think you’re doing grocery store ads in newspapers, um, which kind of relates to the sign painting work and lettering that you did before, also doing posters for Christian rock concerts, kind of doing some eclectic stuff, utilizing your skills.
Craig Yoe: [01:16:34] I think when the church broke up, I mean, I was just eking out, I think I got like a salary of 400 a month and many times the offering plate didn’t yield that when we pass it around the amongst us poor hippies. In fact, we even had a policy. If you have money, put it into the offering plate. If you need money, take it out. You know, uh, so often we only be left with a few buttons or, uh. Train tokens or something. So I was eking out a living, and then it just totally. There was nothing. So I, I got a job as doing news, full page newspaper ads for a grocery store, small grocery store chain in Akron. And, and those ads were inspired by the sign painters who used to paint signs for store windows, you know, with their brushes with this kind of, you know, strong, stylish lettering, you know, uh, long green bananas, $0.39 a bunch or something. You know what I mean? But that was those were. Those were printed. They would paint those on the butcher paper from the butcher department of the store. They would, you know, paint these signs for old grocery stores, you know, early grocery stores, so that the ads that we were doing were in that style. They looked like sign painting. They were they were all the total ad for all the grocery items available that week on sale. We’re done with hand lettering. So that was my job, you know, to create these ads. And it was it was bad and good because I was not able to go as fast as the as they wanted. They wanted these done lickety split. But I, I did hone my lettering skills, but they did. They did kick my ass to the curb, uh, because I couldn’t do it fast enough. Uh, but but it was a great learning experience.
Alex Grand: [01:18:39] Yeah. And from 1975 to 1978, you worked, uh, at a Christian book like it was Christian book art for a midwestern publisher, David C Cook in Chicago, that made Bible and life picks kind of the Protestant, um, version of the the treasure chest stuff that was also coming out. And you did posters, other artistic material. You tell us about working there, getting work there. That’s so interesting.
Craig Yoe: [01:19:12] Yeah. No, it was fascinating. And, uh, so I still wasn’t making enough money even. Well, I lost a job at doing this. This the newspaper ads. So I was trying to figure out, you know, how can I make a living next. And this, uh, company, David C cook in Chicago contacted me. They knew my work with Christian newspapers. And, you know, which primarily appealed to youth so that they they were like a century old company. And picks may have even started also before, uh, treasure chest. But so they, you know, they they created Sunday school materials each week a kid through adult can nursery school through adults. Each age group would get a little magazine newspaper type pulled out thing. Uh, so, you know, they hired me to be in charge of the visual side of the of the kids magazines, and but the company did have this Bible and life picks, which you’re familiar with. Your viewers may not be. It’s it’s a comic book. And I think I think it was started during the, like a lot of giveaway comic books. I think of it as a giveaway comic. They were started because there was some Wertham in and the Anti-comics movement.
Craig Yoe: [01:20:40] The Senate investigations draw attention to how what a powerful, medium and engrossing medium comic books were. So they even people who weren’t doing comics like corporations and churches, and they started their own comic books because they realized this is a way of reaching people to reach people with a message or an advertisement. So David C cook started this comic book. Uh, they had a lot of different comic books in it. Comic stories in it. The the lead off was was written by, uh, are drawn by Andre LeBlanc, who was an assistant for Will Eisner, and he did work for, uh, Quality Comics. And, uh, so he did the Bible stories. And then there was all kinds of other stories, and they used artists like Lou Fine and, uh, uh, I, I used artists like Joe Kubert, John Stanley Little, the, you know, again, the guy who turned me on to, uh, who who’s little Lulu. I got turned on to and, uh, they, they at times had Charles Schultz in, in the pages of, uh, Bible and Life pix.
Alex Grand: [01:22:00] And I think you also used Gil Fox, Dick Rockwell, Alex Toth.
Craig Yoe: [01:22:07] Yes, yes, yes. And I think Stephen Bissette something for me, John Totleben. And, uh, again, Kubert had done a story for that before, before I arrived there and, uh, you know, so here’s a Jewish guy, one of the masters of, of comics art, you know, he did he did a story about a missionary named Helen Keller. Not the same blind, famous blind woman by that name. Yeah. So there was all kinds of great artwork in the Bible and life pix and great, great comic stories. Fascinating.
Alex Grand: [01:22:47] You kind of oversaw work with Joe Kubert and Alex Toth. Can you tell us the difference between working with the two guys?
Craig Yoe: [01:23:01] Well, yeah, I guess I kind of get what your interests might be. I mean, Joe was super to work with, like many of his assignments back then. He would say, now I’m going to have my students do do this and I’ll supervise them. But then he ended up just doing it himself. I for what reason, I don’t know, maybe he gave the students the same assignment, but he also did it and sent his in. So he did a beautiful, beautiful piece. I mean, it’s not, uh, it’s it’s not, it’s not Hawkman. It wasn’t a superhero. And, you know, something like that. But it was like, I remember it was like kids sitting around a picnic table or something, you know? But it was, uh, it was really a beautiful, beautiful drawing. And, uh, you know, I had John Stanley do a bunch of cute, cute kids and and Alex Toth, I can’t quite remember the scene. It’s probably something like, again, it’s a group of kids, but, uh, the editors, you know, like much of the publishing industry at the time, they. Yeah, art directors had some power and influence, but the editors had the final word, and the editors were the arbiters of what they thought was good and the final decision as to what should go in. And and they would if they didn’t like something, it would they would offer sharp criticism or if not sharp criticism, just like, well, let’s, you know, let’s have this little girl, uh, she should maybe be holding a Bible or and and this kid, uh, can you make make a nicer smile on his face? You know, they didn’t have a lot of input.
Craig Yoe: [01:24:41] And Alex took this input input with great umbrage, and he did not like changing his artwork. You know, he felt like what was done was done, and it looked great to him. And he didn’t appreciate the little editorial, you know, tweaks and things like that. So he did a finish and finished it up. And, uh, he and I corresponded for a long time, and I can’t remember if that was the incident or why, but eventually stopped responding, as he did with many, many, many correspondence. Many people have the same story. Alex at some point felt that, you know, he wasn’t getting the right response or respect or disagreed with something that somebody said or something. So anyway, I admire the hell out of him and one of the great stylists of innovators of comics, for sure. But I’m not the only one that found it a little hard to work with. And I think the editors were were happy when I worked with somebody else for the next assignment.
Alex Grand: [01:25:54] From what I understand, it was a pretty conservative place, but I think you had mentioned that one of the upper management people was a gay man who wanted to kind of give the the magazine some pizzazz, and that’s, that’s who hired you to kind of spice things up a little bit.
Craig Yoe: [01:26:13] Yes, absolutely. He, uh, I mean, I other people that were running the art department hired me, but he, he, he is the upper management gave the final consent, and he was a great guy and he wasn’t out at that time. But he certainly, you know, was supportive and, and, uh, all that good stuff. He, in fact, he gave me the original artwork to that Joe Kubert story because he knew I would like to have it. Yeah, I eventually I, I left David C cook to start working because they didn’t pay much. So I was, you know, after selling my house in Akron, I was running out of money. You know, that was running. I was supplementing my work at David C cook. Uh, so I kind of ran out of that. So I so I had started collecting antique toys, especially cartoon oriented kind of things and just wacky toys. And so I became interested in the toy industry. And so when I saw an ad for a toy company in Chicago, I applied there. And they were interested in getting into publishing in addition to their toys they were doing. So it was a perfect match. I wanted to get into toys and they wanted to get into publishing. So I started working for a diamond toy company. Sid diamond ran the company. And I hired Jay Lynch, the, you know, the underground cartoonist, to be one of our staff artists. And, uh, we started doing packaging for toys and designing little toys.
Alex Grand: [01:27:47] And you were an art director over there. And I think if I understand this right, they were the Star Wars. Star Wars first sticker license. Is that right?
Craig Yoe: [01:27:59] Yeah. I got the company started with Sid Diamond. He imported, uh, light up yo yos, you know, from from the Orient. And he would, you know, he was just a one man operation. He would get these light up yo yos, and then he would stand outside the Chicago Cubs stadium. And when people were exiting at dark, he would be standing there with his light up, yo yos going up and down, and people were fascinated by me. He sold a shitload of light up yo yos to start his, which was the start of his toy company. But he eventually, uh, he had the same guts, and he he flew himself to Los Angeles and I know, camped outside of, uh. George Lucas’s, uh, house or something, until he came away with a license to do stickers for Star Wars. He had a, uh, they sent all the licensees a signed photo of George Lucas, which he had on on the wall of his office. And the the first assignment on the first day that that he gave me was he called, he got on the intercom, called me into his office, and he said, see this picture by George signed by George Lucas? I go, yeah, that’s great. He goes, yeah, yeah, they sent it to me. He goes, but I would like it to say to my friend Sid, George Lucas wasn’t just enough to you. I go, yeah, so what? So what? What are you saying? Because. Yeah. Put in to my friend Sid Diamond.
Alex Grand: [01:29:42] Yeah. I like that person. Fbi person of interest. Craig Yoe. Uh, forging. Um.
Craig Yoe: [01:29:52] Counterfeit.
Alex Grand: [01:29:52] Friendship. Counterfeit George Lucas letters for his boss. That’s a really. I love that story. I think that’s so funny. And then you also had, um. What? Cabbage Patch kid stickers. Disney stickers. I mean, it sounds like there’s a lot of pop culture running through that place.
Craig Yoe: [01:30:10] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, it was during the height of Cabbage Patch when, like, mafia guys would pull up in their limousine and come in and shake down the toys r us owner to for for get some of the Cabbage Patch dolls that just came in because it was so hard to get the Cabbage Patch dolls back then. So Sid Sid was like printing money because, you know, they couldn’t get people, couldn’t get the dolls, but he was just printing their images on stickers, so that was easy. And he could just keep the presses running round the clock, you know, in the Orient and keep feeding the toy stores and stuff, you know? So it was like printing money. So he made a lot of money on those Cabbage Patch stickers we designed for him. And then, you know, we split it off into sticker books and all kinds of stuff. And we also had a muppet license. And, uh, so, uh, we were doing Muppet stickers and sticker books. So that was my first work on the on the Muppets. Uh. I have a funny story about that, but I don’t know if I should share it.
Alex Grand: [01:31:16] I think you should.
Craig Yoe: [01:31:18] Well, there was a guy that worked at Deloitte. He wasn’t the owner of the company, but I think he must have had a piece in it. But he was kind of a, uh, it wasn’t the most sophisticated guy when the Muppets came to visit us, when we were doing the stickers. I mean, they were New York sophisticates, so they took them to, like, for dinner. They took them not to, you know, one of the finest restaurants in Chicago. They took them to a Holiday Inn buffet. But the the Diamond Toy Company took him to there because, you know, they were kind of on the cheap. And, uh, so we’re getting a line of the buffet, uh, this guy, he went ahead of the people from the Muppets, and he he got his salad, and he stuck his finger in the salad dressing to taste it, to see if he liked it, because, yeah, that’s pretty good. I’m going to have that. I’m going to use the sophisticated Muppets standing at the Inn at the Holiday Inn buffet line. We’re seeing them. And they were. They were. Their jaws dropped when he did that. They were kind of aghast. Ha!
Alex Grand: [01:32:32] Um, no. That’s a great story. Now, you also worked on some Garbage Pail Kids with Jay Lynch. Is that right?
Craig Yoe: [01:32:39] It’s funny, because I was thinking, look at these. You know, we’re doing all these stickers, you know? And anyway, we’re working on Cabbage Patch stickers. And one day I came to Jay, I go look at the popularity of this Cabbage Patch Kids. We should do something satirical, because I knew he’d worked on bubble gum cards, you know, for Topps. And, you know, they did all this satirical kind of stuff. And I said, we should do some kind of knockoff, you know, mad magazine type send up of Cabbage Patch Kids and, you know, do some do a line of stickers and stuff, and maybe we should present it to the people at diamond. You know, uh, though I didn’t know if they want to compete with themselves, but he goes, well, uh, I’m actually kind of already working on something like that. And, you know, then he revealed a enough to know that he I knew he was doing, uh, Garbage Pail Kids for for Topps. So, uh, you know, that became a giant thing. And after I left diamond, after they fired my ass, Jay stayed on with diamond, and I got him work through at David C Cook and Diamond. And he. He asked me if I wanted to help him think up ideas for Garbage Pail Kid cards. So I did a few, actually, my daughter Alvaro, who I mentioned before, she came up with, uh, jail birth instead of jail bird. That was one of the Garbage Pail Kid cards. There was a cracked Craig, I think. Yeah. So we anonymously helped, moonlighted for for Jay when he was submitting ideas for. Garbage Pail Kids.
Alex Grand: [01:34:19] That’s cool. I loved Garbage Pail Kids. I collected, I think, the first four series of that back in fifth grade or fourth grade. I love that stuff. I still do now. What year did you leave diamond for the Marvin Glass and Associates job and why did you leave?
Craig Yoe: [01:34:39] Sid wanted to go to another direction, so I shown the door at Diamond Toy. And so then I applied at Marvin Glass, which is I still love this idea of working with toys, so I applied at this. I heard about this toy think tank called Marvin Glass, and all they did was think up toy ideas. It was the first toy think tank in the largest there. I know there must have been 60 or so employed designers there, and they hired me as a senior designer with my experience. And, uh, I started working for this famed toy think tank, uh, which had done Lite-brite and the operation game, which they stole. That idea I found in their library the Rube Goldberg book on his inventions. And they said, yeah, that’s where they got the idea for mousetrap. And, you know, they did all kinds of, uh, I don’t know, Chatty Cathy dolls and and the game Simon and, uh, uh, uh, Mr. Machine and and early on, they did a lot of, uh, which I liked, a lot of, uh, wacky novelty toys, like giant sunglasses. They invented those, and they invented the chattering teeth. And so it was like a famed, famed place, not only famed for their toy invention and their secrecy because, you know, you had to be very secretive about what you were working on. Be careful about the wastebasket. That’s all the content was, you know, destroyed before they put it out on the curb, you know, but they were also famous. There was a shooting there where some guy who I feel went crazy because of all the glue that we glued the toy prototypes together with. I think he went crazy from the glue, Krazy Glue, and he shot and killed four people. And I worked with a guy who was also in a wheelchair as a result of that shooting. So it was famous for that too.
Alex Grand: [01:36:41] Wow. That’s crazy. I didn’t expect that part of the story. That’s wild.
Craig Yoe: [01:36:45] It was across the street from Moody Bible Institute, you know, a Christian, very conservative Christian college, uh, where where Bettie Page used to attend.
Alex Grand: [01:36:57] Oh, wow. That’s cool.
Craig Yoe: [01:37:00] So it’s all. It all works together, Alex. It’s.
Alex Grand: [01:37:03] Yeah, it’s all connected. Especially you. You’re you’re in the midst of the milieu of all these things. And then it sounds like your dad’s kind of engineering trade rubbed off on you here because you designed toys, action figures. And I think you own patents from this experience.
Craig Yoe: [01:37:23] From working at Marvin Glass. When they submitted the patents to the U.S. Patent Office, they had to name the inventor on the application six patents in my name from toys I invented at that time. I invented toys for Mattel and Hasbro and Coleco. At the time, I was doing Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, and in Fisher-Price and all these different toy companies I invented toys for and had patents for. So I felt my dad, who died early, I maybe was looking down with pride from heaven on that.
Alex Grand: [01:37:55] And then you invented the game airhead for Mattel. Cool shades. Do you remember the action figures you made for Hasbro?
Craig Yoe: [01:38:06] There was a line that I was in, had the initial idea from. It was a line of like cops as superheroes. So I actually had come up with the idea. Another designer there had seen my storyboards, and then he went off and did his own version. So and he really took the lead. He and his other pals at the Toy think tank kind of took the lead on that. But, uh, I was more interested in dolls and games. I don’t play board games or action games, but I really had a feel for for coming up with them somehow. I really I really enjoyed the wacky plastic games, you know, in the tradition of Simon, when I came up with the airhead it was based on, I used to go to the department store in Akron, where they would just. They demonstrated punching balls. Do you remember those? They were balls with elastic band on them. You would just punch them. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. And then also they would take those balls and they would put it above a vacuum cleaner and the ball would float in the air.
Craig Yoe: [01:39:25] Now, I marveled at that. So that’s how I came up with that, that game where you would stack different hats with holes in them on top of this air head guy and a ball from inside him would float up. Every time you put on a new hat, the ball would float above the hat a little taller until maybe that the hats would fall over. Then you would lose. Which was also based in my idea on a game that my grandfather gave me for Christmas called blockhead. You would. You would stack these different pieces, these little blockhead guy figures on top of each other. And until one of them fell. And then you lost. And the other guy who had put the last one on it didn’t fall. He would win. But Chrome saw blockhead too, because he put blockhead in one of his his comics. But I was inspired. He was inspired to draw blockhead in a comic. I was inspired to kind of combine the punchball, you know, scientific physical effect of balls floating on this, you know, shooting out vacuum with, with the blockhead gameplay of something falling.
Alex Grand: [01:40:37] And when you were at, uh, Marvin Glass, you got a call from Jim Henson, who was looking for a creative director, mainly because he enjoyed your work with the Muppets stickers that you did for diamond. If I’m if I’m understanding that connection. Right. Yes. And tell us about that and your early talks with Jim Henson and the beginning of your professional relationship with him?
Craig Yoe: [01:41:06] Well, yeah. So they flew me to New York to interview at The Muppets. They were looking for a creative director, and the process was you had to first talk with all the different heads of the different departments the publishing department, the licensing department, the the puppet builders. And you had to talk with all these people because they, you know, they wanted everybody to like the candidate and feel that they could work together. And, you know, you often work together with the different departments and things like that in the, in the film department and the movie department and all that kind of good stuff. So it was interesting because I must have interviewed at least eight. Interviewed with at least eight people on your, as you know, in an interview, you’re trying to be on your best behavior. You’re trying to present yourself in a positive way. And and you’re also if you have a series of interviews like that, you’re trying to remember what you said to the last person. You know, you’re starting to tell something to the person you’re talking to at the time about your abilities and your careers and your goals. And so by the time I was on the fifth or sixth person, I couldn’t remember if it’s what I’m about to say, did I already tell it? Did I already tell this person I’m talking to this, or was that the last person I talked to? I was by that time, after jet lag and after a series of interviews, I was like, pretty wasted before I finally got to the top of the building and the top of the company, and the top of the decision makers, Jim Henson himself.
Craig Yoe: [01:42:44] And by the, you know, time I got to Jim, he said, oh, nice to meet you, Greg. And his best, you know Kermit voice. And I go, oh yes, yes. Mr. Henson and and, uh. So sit down and tell me about yourself, Greg. And then Bob. So my answer was Bebe, Bebe, Bebe, Bebe, Bebe. Basically, I didn’t know what the hell I was saying, but somehow he took a shine to me and he really liked my creativity. I showed him a lot of the toys I made, which were kind of muppety. There was this this bear I worked on that you you put your hand up his rectum and moved his mouth, just like you do with the Muppets. And you know, there was a electronic device in there that you would do this, and he would tell jokes or something like that, sort of like Fozzie Bear.
Craig Yoe: [01:43:31] So, uh, he really liked that. And he also this because of my background of doing products and toys and, uh, and publishing all that stuff. They were the company in general was kind of interested in me on that side of it. But he was saying, hey, are you interested in TV and and movies? I go, yeah, yeah, that that sounds like a lot of fun. And I remember even way back after my church broke up, being in my bedroom where we had our little TV and walking by it, and there was a show that came on with puppets and it was called The Muppets. And I’m thinking like, this is back in Akron, Ohio, years before now, I can I remember this to this day, like thinking like, well, not like that would be fun to do. I bet I could do, you know, work for a company like that, that I think I would have fun and not have something to offer, you know. And then I forgot about it, you know. But I always remember that how there must have been. I’m not a Baptist, but there must be some predestination there.
Alex Grand: [01:44:38] You worked on Muppet licensing. I mean, he was very wealthy guy, but also very connected to his inner child, his inner sense of creativity, wanting to make the world a better place. Yes. But you worked on a lot of Muppet licensing, some film and TV stuff coming up with ideas. Tell us about that stuff.
Craig Yoe: [01:44:57] Well, yeah, we did. We did a lot of, uh, Muppet licensing, and certainly that was a big revenue stream for the company, you know, especially when it was like maybe working on TV or movie productions. You know, this licensing stuff was important to for the cash flow. So we did a lot of that stuff. And, uh, a story I recall, it’s interesting, Alex, is that I remember Pepsi wanted to use the Muppets for their commercials, and he goes, um, no, I don’t think so. I, I think sodas are bad for kids, you know, it’s all sugar and. No, we’ll pass. And this was like a multi multi-million dollar deal, you know, big, big freaking Pepsi Cola, you know. But he was thumbs down, you know. And then the following week though there’s a little Marshmallow company, you know. Just a no name small marshmallow company from the Midwest or something. Not a big conglomerate or something. And they they wanted to do Muppet marshmallows. And so, you know, we were kind of obligated to tell them all the different opportunities. So we went to him and said, Jim, we have this opportunity to do Muppet marshmallows.
Craig Yoe: [01:46:13] And he goes, mm. I like marshmallows. Okay. That’s a good one. You know, so, you know, marshmallows, pure sugar for a couple thousand bucks or Pepsi with less sugar. And let’s turn down the million dollars. So he was you know, he certainly made a lot of money. He had homes around the world and ate it, ate at good restaurants, and, uh, but, uh, you know, his main interest was creativity. His main interest was making a better place. They once had a meeting in the conference room. Everyone gathered around the table, and that’s the day they came up with a Fraggle Rock. And it the idea wasn’t like, oh, let’s come up with, you know, characters that’ll be good for a Happy Meal premiums. It was like, let’s come up with a TV show concept that’ll bring peace to the world in our lifetime. Uh, so it didn’t quite do that, but maybe it made a contribution in a statement about, you know, working together and all that in with diversity and all that kind of good stuff.
Alex Grand: [01:47:27] What year did you start working for Jim Henson?
Craig Yoe: [01:47:31] I think it was 88 or 89.
Alex Grand: [01:47:34] So the Marvin Glass stuff was like kind of in the 80s then mid 80s, early 80s.
Craig Yoe: [01:47:39] Yeah.
Alex Grand: [01:47:41] How many years were you there?
Craig Yoe: [01:47:44] I think about five years maybe. Okay.
Alex Grand: [01:47:47] Yeah. So for a good.
Craig Yoe: [01:47:48] While it was an old Victorian townhouse, the Muppet headquarters, four story townhouse and, uh, the top story was just a little apartment conclave that, uh, for with a little bed for, like, maybe some guests or something, or somebody that wanted to take a nap. But I when I was waiting for Jim Henson to be ready, I went up. They sent me up to that top floor, which was just above his, the second to the top floor, which is where his office was. Uh, and I went up there and in the next to the bed was a bookcase filled with the Pogo books. Jim was a big fan of of of Pogo. And you can kind of see that in the Muppet cast. Pogo, Kermit, you know.
Alex Grand: [01:48:37] Yeah, totally.
Craig Yoe: [01:48:39] Even the principle of Pogo and and his cast and the Muppets and Pogo was kind of the most normal one. And but then there was all these crazy people around him. Kermit was the most normal one. And then there’s pigs and bears and animal and all these. Beaker and all these crazy people around him, you know. That’s a great, great. When you’re creating a cast of characters, that’s a great thing to have a central character that’s a little bit more on the normal side interacting with the. And Jim, I think, was maybe greatly inspired by, uh, Pogo. He loved Pogo, the parade magazine. I’m sorry. I’ll get back to your Steve question. Steve Ditko question. But another thing I remember about the Muppets is they came to me one day and said, parade magazine wants to do a feature on, uh, Jim Jim’s favorite comics. I go, oh, that’s nice, nice to hear. That’s great. They and they said, the publicity department said. Okay, so when can you have that for us? I go, well, don’t you want to ask Jim like, oh, you know, Jim’s too busy. He’s off in Los Angeles this week and you got you got it. They have a deadline. You gotta do it. So I, I had to I had to make a list of Jim’s favorite comics out of my own head. So Pogo was on the list. Calvin and Hobbes, Jules Feiffer, I think I asked Jane, his wife, what comics he liked, and she said he likes Jules Feiffer a lot. And then I think they were open to cartoon characters, too. So I said two Warner Brothers cartoons. So anyway, I’m the one that came up with Jim Henson’s favorite comics, but they were in line with what I knew about him and what he had told me. But basically it was my job to nail down which what his favorite comics were.
Alex Grand: [01:50:36] Yeah. That’s cool.
Craig Yoe: [01:50:37] Another good memory of the Muppets. When I we were working on puppets. Uh, we were creating a muppet theme park attraction for Disney World. It’s when Disney had wanted to buy us and they actually bought us. Then it fell through after Jim died. But, uh, we were creating a muppet theme park attraction, and we were creating these puppets and being in charge at that time of of the workshop that I led. I took Jim from our main office at the Victorian place to our, uh, puppet, uh, creature shop a couple blocks away, and we went up to see the new puppet that the puppet builders were working on, you know, and I would just started working with them. And there was this, this puppet laying on the table. And, you know, the puppet builder said over here, Jim and Craig, you know, here’s the new puppet. And to me it just looked like some fur and feathers and ping pong balls, you know, just kind of laying there inertly on the, on the table. But Jim looked at it and he put his hand in and he started, you know, talking with it and moving with it and making it come alive.
Craig Yoe: [01:51:56] And I just all of a sudden saw the magic Alex that he brought to these puppets. You know, he made them real. It’s wild. It was, you know, it just took my breath away and showed me what, you know, an incredible creator he was and how skilled and magical and wonderful he and. And the puppet builders and the stylists and everybody that worked there. There was the caliber of the personnel and their creativity and their and their, uh, craftsmanship was just beyond compare. I mean, that’s one of the things I took from Jim is that even working on my book, I would think about him almost every day when I was working on it, because he was all about keep refining and keep working and don’t worry about the deadline. Uh, and, you know, just keep making it better because you can’t go wrong with quality. And, uh, and that’s a big lesson I learned from him, and I’ve tried to put that into my own work, you know, just like, really, you know, really make it make it special and make it good. And and the craftsmanship is of vital importance in, in bringing it to life.
Alex Grand: [01:53:19] Tell us about when Steve Ditko visited Muppet headquarters. I mean, you became friends with him. Tell us about your friendship with him.
Craig Yoe: [01:53:25] You know, when I got to New York, I mean, I grew up in the Midwest and I corresponded with different cartoonists, but I had never met many. I met the Cleveland area cartoonists like Jim Barry and George Fett and the cartoons on the Akron Beacon Journal on this map, but so when I. I never thought I’d go to New York, but when the Muppets brought me there, I thought, oh, this is an opera, you know? And now I’m where where the home of cartoonists are. Back then, that was still where all the Marvel comic artists lived and many of the syndicated cartoonists and stuff. So I thought like, well, my my big hero, Steve Ditko, he he his studio is nearby. I want to give him a call. And his, as many people have said, his name was in the phone book. I called up Steve and invited him to come over and see the Muppet headquarters. And so, uh, he, you know, he and I buy him some lunch, so he he came over. I remember the on the intercom, they said, Craig, your your guest is here. And I went I went down the spiral staircase and he’s sitting in the lot. Steve is sitting in the lobby. This guy’s skinny, older gentleman and. But in the lobby, what we had was a row against one wall where you sat waiting for your meeting. There was a row of theater chairs. And so, Jim. So Steve was sitting there, and then right behind that row of the old theater’s chairs from an old theater, there was a, a painted backdrop of of all the Muppet characters sitting in the in, in the painting and sitting in rows of chairs behind him to watch a movie.
Craig Yoe: [01:55:16] You know what I mean? So here’s I wish I would have had a cell phone back then. We didn’t have them. Uh, or and I don’t even know if Steve would appreciate me doing. I would have had to get his permission. I wish I would have got a photo of that, because here’s Steve sitting in the front row of a theater with the whole Muppet cast right behind him. It was just a it was just such a great picture. It’s clear in my mind maybe I should draw a picture of it. So anyway, I took first. I took Steve to lunch, and, uh, I love Steve and I certainly crazy about his work, but it was he was a little bit difficult to talk with. He wasn’t very effervescent or, and, uh, and he, he wasn’t bombastic about it, but he could tell, you know, he had begun getting into Ayn Rand and he had very strong, sharp opinions about things. And so it was a little difficult. There’s the salt and pepper, like it’s either salt or pepper. There’s nothing in between. It’s black or white, you know what I mean? It’s kind of it’s kind of how the conversation went. Uh, but then I took him to the Muppet Workshop and where we created the puppets and, uh, which I eventually became in the director for the the workshop.
Craig Yoe: [01:56:37] But that’s where all the the puppets were created in. And you and I talk about our love for his old fantasy stories. This just seemed like one of these fantasy stories to be in this dark kind of puppet workshop with all these puppet parts hanging from the ceiling and all this, you know, it was very atmospheric. It was very much mold, amazing adult fantasy. And he really loosened up then and brightened up and was excited and had all kinds of he was very, uh, forthcoming asking different kinds of questions about how how the Muppet, the Muppets were put together and how it all worked and how how the concepts were conceived and all this kind of good stuff. So I took him to lunch, and I took him to the creature shop, and, uh, and then we went back to my office. My office? At that point, after Jim, maybe I was a creative director, but then he made me vice president, general manager slash creative director of the company. So my office moved from the basement design in our department up to right next to Jim’s office. There was two offices right next to each other on that floor, and mine was one of them right across from. So I would see people like Barbara Bush come in or, you know, or Stevie Wonder or whoever in and out of the doors, you know, sitting in my office, you know, uh, which was interesting because, you know, Barbara Bush might be coming out of the office and Stevie.
Craig Yoe: [01:58:13] Stephen, Stevie Wonder might be the next guy or somebody like that. Uh, but then I would before Stevie. Right? I’d say. Jim, do you have five minutes? I want to run an idea past you. So, like, you know, I’d give him, talk to him about some idea I had, and he would listen so intently. That was another thing. He was always so very open and, you know, and respectful and anxious to hear from people to, you know, especially if you’re talking about some creative concept, you know, and he always had his full attention, even though the bookends of your little meeting was these incredible celebrities. You know what I mean? So Steve, in my world was a celebrity. I brought him up to my office, and we knocked on Jim’s door across the little across the way there, and and Jim came out and I said, uh, Steve, this is Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets. And Jim, this is, uh, Steve Ditko, the creator, the, you know, the artist, creator of Spider-Man. And they both shook each other’s hands. And at that moment I thought, Holy fuck. You know, there’s Kermit the Frog’s hand and Doctor Strange’s hand, you know, shaking hands. It’s like my nerdy fanboy head is exploding. But for Jim, Steve, like, I don’t think Jim cared about Spider-Man and I don’t. I’m really not sure that Steve even knew who the Muppets were, but for me, it was one of the greatest moments of my life.
Alex Grand: [01:59:53] Yeah, like an inter-dimensional nexus. Yeah. When those fingers touched.
Craig Yoe: [01:59:58] Right.
Alex Grand: [01:59:59] In 1989, Muppets sold to Disney. You got promoted to VP, general manager, creative director at New York. And a lot’s happening. Could you tell that Jim Henson was kind of unhealthy at this time?
Craig Yoe: [02:00:16] No, not at all. He was he was totally healthy. And but having just come in charge of the Muppet work of the creature shop. He asked if we could have a lunch meeting because he wanted to tell me about his dreams and hopes for that, and more about his, you know, how he worked with him and everything. So? So I had lunch with him and it was a super rainy day, and I remember that I only had one umbrella. It was a Mickey mouse umbrella that I had bought down at Disney World, because Disney was in the process of buying us and actually had the deal in place. But not all the final papers were signed because there were some due diligence, but we were already starting to get our employee checks from Disney. But yet Jim was going to operate a separate unit based in New York, but so I was going to stay there for the creature shop and all. So we went out to have lunch with with one little umbrella and a torrential rain. And Jim, just like and I were, both got soaked by the time we got to the little, uh, restaurant a couple blocks away. And I noticed that he when we met at the Muppet headquarters, and I walk over, he was, like, really coughing. And then at lunch he was coughing a lot. And, uh, I said, what’s wrong? And he goes, oh, I think I have it.
Craig Yoe: [02:01:46] I think I have a touch of the flu, Greg. And so, uh, you know, I didn’t miss it. We all, you know, feel a little under the weather at times. Uh, but that that night, I got a a call from his secretary, you know, a couple hours, just as I was starting to get. Wake up from the night and get ready to go, go to work. And she said Jim had passed that night. And so I was like, one of the last people to see him. See him alive. And it’s during that lunch we had talked, you know, he was starting a new chapter in his life working with Disney and and not everybody at the Muppets was excited about that. But Jim and me and Bob Beecher, I believe his name was Who Put the deal together. We were all really excited about it. We thought it was good, but I think many of the Muppet people didn’t see it quite that way. They were used to the Muppets kind of being their own entity. Without a big corporation. The Disney Disney is being part of it. You can see their ambivalent ambivalence about it. But we talked about our dreams and hopes and future, and it turned out Jim wasn’t there for that. You know, he he passed on to them what I assume is a great reward.
Alex Grand: [02:03:09] In 1990, I think you did some originals, concept sketches for the dinosaurs TV show. Is that right?
Craig Yoe: [02:03:15] Yeah, I did the original sketches for them and another very talented guy. Eventually, uh, did a lot more Kirk Thatcher’s name, but I did the first concept sketches for that show, including the dinosaur character, teenage boy with his with his, uh, kind of spiky head. He kind of looked kind of punky and and, uh. Yeah. So, so I was part of the initial beginnings of the dinosaur show. That was a great show.
Alex Grand: [02:03:44] Tell us about in 1993, you put together the Art of Mickey Mouse book for Disney. Andy Warhol cover, John Stanley, Charles Schultz, Rick Griffin, Maurice Sendak, you know, a lot of contributors kind of doing this off kilter versions of Mickey Mouse that did really well. And I think you even mentioned once that it may have changed the licensing world because of of the way the higher ups liked the turnout of this book and wanted to do similar things.
Craig Yoe: [02:04:13] Yeah, and Jack Kirby was in that book, too, though he wasn’t the king of comics. I did ask the King, Steve Ditko if he wanted to do a Mickey, but Jack did a wonderful one and Jack was excited about it. I think he was, you know, to do something different than just his normal comic book world superhero kind of stuff. He found that very intriguing. He was. I saw him later at San Diego and he was telling me how much he loved it. He signed my book for me, but not at his table because he goes, you know, we got to get off to a secluded place to do this so I can do that for you. Correct. Because if all of a sudden you sign a book at his table, all of a sudden there’d be a line three, three miles long or something, you know? And I asked Steve Ditko to contribute to the art of Mickey Mouse, but he goes, mm, Mickey Mouse, I’m not familiar with that character. So. So he turned me down on that. But yeah, I got all these luminaries I used to doodle. When Disney started buying the Muppets. I used to doodle Mickey Mouse on a lot during a lot of our meetings with Jim and and the rest of the crew. You know I would. I often doodle during concept meetings.
Craig Yoe: [02:05:22] And so I was I was doodling a lot of Mickey Mouse’s. And I’ve always loved Mickey Mouse. So I collected an old Mickey Mouse, antique toys and stuff like that. I mean, I do I do love Mickey more than any woman I ever met. So when Jim died in the company changed direction and became much smaller. You know, I moved on and I, I, I thought like, well, I should do something with Mickey Mouse because I had all these connections with Disney. So I think I contacted somebody at Disney, like, I’d like to put together a book about Mickey Mouse as seen by artists from around the world. And they put and they put me in touch. There was a brand new company starting Disney Publishing. Uh, Disney was going to start, uh, publishing books, but they weren’t going to be Disney books. They weren’t going to be Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and friends. They were just going to be, you know, great, not great, you know, novels and, you know, popular novels and things like that. So they hired a guy from another big publishing company to head up this company. It was he was the only employee at that time. And I went to visit him, and but they said, this is the guy because we’re starting a new company. So take your idea to him.
Craig Yoe: [02:06:42] And it was in New York. I went over there and he was just like, he had an apartment about the size of a bat, I mean, a office about the size of the apartment. He was still had boxes that he hadn’t unpacked. And, uh, I told him about my idea and he said, that’s great. We’re not really planning on doing, uh, Disney Disney type books, but, you know, in a way, I don’t want to be known for Disney books because it’s supposed to be a general publishing company, but this is too good of an idea not to do. So. I put together the Art of Mickey Mouse. I got some of those luminaries that you mentioned. Artists from around the world. Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser and Peter Max and all these different people do their interpretation of Mickey Mouse. And I also got like, Michael Jackson. I called up Michael, and I said that they didn’t usually put people through, but they put me through to Michael, and he was very excited about it. And he had me follow up with his secretary, so I’d call her a couple of months. How’s Michael doing on that drawing of Mickey? And she goes, oh, he hasn’t done it yet, but we bought him some, what do you call them? Magic markers. And we bought him a pad of paper and he takes them wherever you go goes.
Craig Yoe: [02:07:57] He’s working on this new album called called bad. And so he’s busy with that. But he’s in the limo into the studio. He takes his pad of paper and his, what do you call them? Markers. And, you know, finally, after a couple of months, I said, okay, we’re at deadline time now. You know, we got to have this. They go, okay, we’ll tell them. And so, you know, the next day Fedex came and there was this drawing by Michael. And he didn’t he must have had his markers with it today because he just took ballpoint pen on a blank piece of typing paper. And he drew Mickey Mouse. But it’s the Mickey. It’s a Mickey mouse version of Michael on the bad album cover. Uh, so that’s what that was. We had to sign a contract saying that we wouldn’t. We wouldn’t, uh, promote Michael’s involvement in the book over any other of the artists in the book. The second New York magazine got Ahold of the book for review. They did a whole headlined article about how Michael Jackson drew Mickey Mouse. So that was out of our hands. But we got a lot of acclaim for credible artists. But, uh, there was Michael with his kind of ballpoint pen doodle. He got a lot of the attention.
Alex Grand: [02:09:12] Now, you also met some of the nine old men at Disney, is that right?
Craig Yoe: [02:09:16] Yeah. When I went to the Lucca comic convention, the most impressive, incredible, creative person I ever met, I met there, and that was Clizia Gussoni. And I was amazed by her artwork. She had a display of her artwork there and her demeanor and how creative and nice she was. And so that was my greatest takeaway from that convention. Clizia Gussoni, who I eventually married and had three wonderful children with, but I also that year was a Disney themed convention. And uh, so I met Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of the nine old men, and we became fast friends and, uh, the the old, the old guard of Disney. They loved my Mickey Mouse book because it broke all the rules. And they, you know, artists are rule breakers. But for most of their career, they were needing to follow model sheets, and Mickey’s Tale had to be just the right length, and his eyes had to be just the right shape, and his ears had just to be right on. And Red always had to be, you know, 185 red PMS color or whatever color system they used. So they it was all about, you know, especially when you’re working on an animation, you have to follow the form, you know what I mean? And the rules. So they really liked the idea that that my book broke the rules.
Craig Yoe: [02:10:47] So I became great friends with Frank and Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. And then I also met Ward Kimball, who, because I knew he was the biggest rule breaker, the artist, you know, behind Jiminy Cricket, he he also did a lot of wacky little shorts and things for Disney. I think he was close to Disney’s heart because they were both train collectors. When I went to meet and have dinner at the home of Ward Kimball and his wife behind his house. He had he had 4 or 5 real locomotive, caboose and train cars housed in a big barn behind his house, and both he and Walt were big fans of trains. You can see that at Disney World and at times in the in the cartoons. And Donald was always fooling around with trains and toy trains and things like that. So anyway, I met Mark Davis, you know, was the artist of the Snow White character. He and his wife took a shine to me, and whenever I went to LA, they insisted I stay at their house. They had a little house next to their bigger house in Hollywood, and so I always stayed with them out there, and it was a great privilege and honor to get to know those guys the Disney company wanted me to.
Craig Yoe: [02:12:08] Offered me a job as a vice president for their theme park. Since I had worked on the theme park, came up with theme park attraction and got to know the Imagineers there. They really liked me and I liked them and enjoyed working together. So they offered me a VP job there, but I turned that down. It’s still the corporate. The corporate aspect of Disney kind of bothered me a little bit, and I kind of wanted to do my own thing. So that’s when I opened up yo studio. Yoe studio with with Janet Mora, my then wife. And then after our my divorce with her and I met at Sony at, uh, in Lucca, Italy. Uh, she and I started yo studio and she, she’s probably more than 50% of the success of yo studio and all the toys and books and everything we did. She’s. Incredibly creative, and both my wives have been real creative stars and she really had a good business. Besides, her creativity had a good business sense and and people management sense. And so so we’re even though we’re separating it won’t be as parents and it won’t be as creative partners. So we’re going to continue your books together.
Alex Grand: [02:13:31] And what what year was that that you left Disney to create your studio?
Craig Yoe: [02:13:36] Early 90s.
Alex Grand: [02:13:38] Yeah, because the book the Art of Mickey Mouse was 93, I think.
Craig Yoe: [02:13:42] Oh, there you go. So you do know.
Alex Grand: [02:13:44] So it was that it was the same year.
Craig Yoe: [02:13:47] Who’s asking the questions to see if I know?
Alex Grand: [02:13:49] That’s right. This is a mental status exam at the same time. So then you so when you did your own studio work, you also kind of split your time as Nickelodeon’s art director as well, right?
Craig Yoe: [02:14:07] Well, when the studio started, I thought, like, well, Nickelodeon might be a good client. So I went over there and met the creative director, VP, creative director, Scott. You know, I had a really nice meeting with him. We kind of really hit it off. We both. He loves Marvel Comics and and Steve Ditko and all, and he liked my work a lot. And so and we had this interview. So then I thought, well, I’ll send him a follow up letter. So I sent him this like letters. Dear sir, I was a great pleasure meeting with you. And I think there’s we have a lot of Nick, you know, we’re we have a lot in common and can do excellent quality projects together. You know, it was it was very formal, you know, uh, combining my skills and yours or something like that. Very formal. But then I got some plastic vomit and glued the vomit, semi-transparent vomit so it could read what was underneath. But I glued that plastic vomit to the to the follow up letter, you know, to show that, you know, there’s a bunch of bullshit, but you want to work with me or not, you know, and I like wacky kid stuff, and I’m a I’m a bit of a rebel. I think that it was saying all that. So he the second he got the letter and opened it up with his plastic vomit on it, he called me.
Craig Yoe: [02:15:30] He goes, you know, you’re hired. You’re in. So your studio started doing I think they we guaranteed them 60 hours worth of work a week, and that lasted about three years or something like that, until they finally said I had an office down there, but I would wouldn’t go down there regularly because I was up, up, up, you know, 45 minutes away in Croton, New York, you know, doing the work. So I didn’t want to be bothered with the meetings. They even hated meetings. They they even they even started a rule down there that they couldn’t have meetings on Fridays because every day was just meetings, meetings, meetings at these companies. You know, you’re in meetings all the time when you’re supposed to be doing creative work. So they started a rule like no meetings on Fridays. So then people used to have their meetings out in the hall instead of the conference room. They would say, meet me out in the hall at, you know, 2:00, you know, and we’ll have a meeting. So meetings are inevitable if you’re there. So I had an office down there, but I did most of the work with, with a lot of employees. I hired, uh, about 45 minutes away.
Alex Grand: [02:16:40] You were doing both Nickelodeon and your studio.
Craig Yoe: [02:16:44] We were kind of a division out there of collodion, and and we were doing, you know, a lot of different stuff. I did the interstitial for the doing their own original animated cartoons. We know our Ren and Stimpy and Rugrats and Doug and stuff like that, but they hadn’t started them yet. But they were going to. So I got to design the opening and closing for the for their cartoon block. You know, just like Looney Tunes would have a closing with. That’s all, folks, you know. So I did an opening and closing for that and working with, uh, J.J. Sedelmaier studio because I didn’t know how to do animation, but. So they hooked me up with this very creative, gifted guy who ran a quite notable animation studio. And he was out in the suburbs, too. 15, 20 minutes from my house. So it was a great, great hookup. So I, I did the opening and closing for their Nicktoons Hour and designed the the logo for that too.
Alex Grand: [02:17:44] Yeah, the Nicktoons logo is is really famous. You also brainstormed some things for Nickelodeon Magazine.
Craig Yoe: [02:17:52] They didn’t have a magazine, so they wanted to start a magazine And, you know, so I was, uh, they asked me to come to the first concept meeting. So I went there and, uh, I suggested it. Will wasn’t, and other people were in on it, too, but that that they have a because I knew Lampoon had that comic strip section. So I thought like, well, that’s what Nickelodeon Magazine should have. So I suggested that. And the person who was going to be the editor, she was in on it too, you know, on concept too. And, and they didn’t really know any of the cartoonists or anything like that. So I drew up a list of artists. So all the original artists that were in Nickelodeon Magazine were based on, you know, my ideas, people I knew and people I admired. I didn’t have the time to can work on the staff of a magazine. I was still doing all this other kind of stuff for Nickelodeon and other clients. So they got very talented, gifted people to become in charge of of the comic book and stuff like that, and continued on what I helped start.
Alex Grand: [02:19:00] With your studio. When you talk about other work, other clients, you did designs for Marvel, DC, Mattel, Microsoft, Cartoon Network, McDonald’s, Pepsi, toys R us. I mean, there’s a long list IBM, Kraft, Warner Brothers. What kind of work were you doing for all of them?
Craig Yoe: [02:19:19] Our thing was doing stuff for kids. And so if some company, like even a straight laced company like IBM or a company that specialized in stuff for kids like toys R us, but they wanted somebody that really knew the chops about reaching and dealing with kids and engaging them, they they would come to us. So we did for both kid oriented companies and then other kinds of companies that wanted to have some some promotion that reached kids. They would come to your studio and me and your studio. So it was great. It was. We had a lot of fun and we did a lot of fascinating projects of all sorts, but it was all kid oriented, which was fun. And I think most artists, they have a, you know, they’re still kids at heart. So and we were no different. And when people saw that other people jumped in to and said, hey, we do kid stuff too. And there were, there was there was another company, I think it was called Blue Something. I’m ashamed that I don’t remember because they specialized in kids, but they were more for interstitials online kind of stuff. But we were doing all these marketing and promotion and style guides for like Powerpuff Girls and South Park. And I remember we had an employee that worked for us, very gifted guy, and he enjoyed working with us, but he wasn’t with us for long because finally a resume had sent into comedy. Next comedy, Comedy Central, uh, got a response and they hired him as, as a, you know, creative guy.
Craig Yoe: [02:21:18] And he called us up and said, you know, you guys specialize. I know from working there, you guys specialize in style, guys. Well, they just had this lightning hit called South Park. We need a style guide for that. And I said, okay, great. That’s fabulous. Bob, his name was Bob Shea. Very creative guy, now a children’s book author. And, uh, I said, okay, great. We’ll give you a budget. And what’s what’s the deadline on this? He goes, well, we need it like tomorrow. I go, well, Bob, you worked here long enough to know that style guides take months to do. You know, it goes well. If I tell them it’s going to take months, they’ll find someone else they’ll give the job to. And I go, well, I can say I’ll do it quicker, but it’s really not going to happen. He goes, just, just, just say you’ll do it right away and you’ll do it fast. I go, okay, I’m on, I’m on board, you know. So, you know, we got signed up to do this South Park style guide, and it took months and months and months. I mean, a lot. It took a long time. They wanted a big style guide with all kinds of product ideas and logos and everything you put into a style guide. And then they said, uh, but they never they never got approval from, you know, the two guys that that on the style guide. The two guys that did a created South Park and I went to a licensing show meeting breakfast with, uh, Comedy Central and all their licensees, and all these licenses come up to me and start yelling at me.
Craig Yoe: [02:23:04] We heard you’re the one that’s doing this. Why haven’t you done it? We’re incensed. You know, this property is super hot. You know, we have to have a style guide now or we can’t do product, you know? I go, it’s not my hands, you know. It hasn’t been approved. But it turned out that, uh, the two guys that created South Park were college. I don’t know if you know the story, but they were just college kids and somebody in Hollywood. Some actor got a hold of one of their cartoons and sent it to all his Hollywood friends. And that’s how the whole thing got started and signed up. But they just being two college kids, they had no power in the negotiations, so they got a really lousy deal with Comedy Central, but one of the things in their contract was that they had approval. Final approval. You know, they could sign off on the style guide. So they. So from what I learned, they were holding off on signing off on the style guide, trying to use that as leverage to renegotiate their contract. So finally, when the lawyers got their heads together and everybody agreed and they signed the contract and the style guide was approved like that, you know, but, you know, we were getting we were getting the blame for not finishing the style guide. But the real there was follow the money, you know. Yeah.
Alex Grand: [02:24:26] Legal tactics.
Craig Yoe: [02:24:28] The real issue was a legal tactic to renegotiate a better deal.
Alex Grand: [02:24:32] So your first artbooks, that was ARF with Gary Groth that’s dated 2008. How did that come about? And it sounds like a lot of the book stuff starts coming out of this, out of this venture.
Craig Yoe: [02:24:44] Yeah. I mean, I was running the studio doing all these projects, but my first love was. And fondest memory was being in the basement, you know, cranking out my comics, fanzines on my basement about cartoons and comics, you know. So I thought, like, well, I want to get back to that. So I haven’t, you know, I, I collect all these weird, obscure comics and super creative comics and maybe I’ll put them together in a book and I’ll call it a series called the RF series. So the first one was modern RF. And so I just, I somehow got a hold of Gary Gross email, sent it off to him a couple paragraphs about my idea, and he said, sure, let’s do it, you know? And so then I put together the first RF book. And in some ways those are I think there was 3 or 4 Ask Alex Grand how many there were. Uh, there were four. Do you have headphones on? He’s speaking into your.
Alex Grand: [02:25:46] Yeah. Alex Grant is right in here. That’s right. Yes.
Craig Yoe: [02:25:50] Good. All right, so we did the four art books, and those kind of reflect most of my interest in comics. It’s very eclectic, but super creative and a little rebellious and has a lot of artsy fartsy kind of things happening. I’m very proud of those books.
Alex Grand: [02:26:06] And then you did The Nights of Horror. Joe Shuster, The Secret Identity Book, a lot of critical acclaim. You researched and brought this story to basically mainstream. And there is, you know, you’re interviewed about it, periodicals, newspapers. It’s making news as you’re bringing to light this Superman fetish material. It sounds like that was really formative in where you were going to go as far as your next phase of your career. Tell us about how all that came about.
Craig Yoe: [02:26:38] You say the next part of my career was fetish.
Alex Grand: [02:26:42] Yeah. I mean, publishing the book and the history stuff and all that. Yeah.
Craig Yoe: [02:26:47] The story behind that is, I mean, I’ve always been interested in all kinds of cartoons, and I went to a vintage paperback show and some guy had a table, and on the back of the table he had this little cardboard box. And there was I could see there was this amateurishly printed fetish booklets. I was always keeping my eye open for weird stuff, and especially things that maybe cartoonists did outside the normal field, you know, of of their comic book or comic strip work, you know, what were they doing when they were moonlighting or for shits and giggles or something? So like I looked at it and in the covers had a little bit of a familiarity. And so I said, can I see what’s in that box? And he sheepishly pushed it forward, and I started looking through it. And there were these books called Nights of Horror, and I could tell in an instant that it was. The artwork was by Joe Schuster, who was unsigned, but I could tell it was Josh, not only from the art style, but many of the characters look like Clark Kent and Lois Lane and Lex Luthor and Jimmy Olsen. Yet they were all, you know, tied up half nude and were all nude and tied up in bondage gear and stuff. You know, the staff of the Daily Planet and their friends were were having fetish parties, you know. So I thought, well, jeez, there’s a book here. And I think I bought 4 or 5 from that guy.
Craig Yoe: [02:28:10] And then I started contacting erotica dealers from around the world trying to find if there’s any more. And it turned out there was 16 altogether. And I got them for $7.50, or at the most, some high falutin erotica dealer from Paris would ask 70 equivalent of 75 USD or something. But I eventually got them all. And and then I told Bill Blackbeard, the great comics historian and whose collection formed the basis for the wonderful Billy Ireland Museum at Ohio State. I knew Bill from my fanzine days from when I was a teenager. You know, I told Bill about, you know, these booklets and he said, well, it’s a good thing that Doctor Fredric Wertham never heard about what you’re telling me about, you know? I went home, shut the studio for the day, went home. And I thought about it that night, and I thought, like, the next day when I went to back to the studio where my computer was, I googled nights of horror and Doctor Fredric Wertham, and it came out, I learned about this court case where they had arrested the Brooklyn Thrill Killers, which was for Jewish Nazi teenagers who had killed bums and and whipped girls and bums in the park of Brooklyn. And I thought, and when they arrested them and they went to court, the judge had a doctor. Fredric Wertham, interviewed the leader, uh, Jack Koslov, in his jail cell. This teenager behind bars, uh, to see whether he was mentally ill or he could be, you know, or he could be tried.
Craig Yoe: [02:30:08] And, uh, Wertham concluded that, you know, he should be tried. And, you know, it’s collected information about the case and all all that kind of stuff. So I knew, like, wow, there’s quite a story here. You have Superman, you have Joe Shuster, you have Doctor Fredric Wertham, you have these teenagers who used to. Sieg heil! Sieg heil! During the Pledge of Allegiance Agents in at school, you know, they were Jewish teenage Nazis and they killed bums, which assorted awful thing. But and that story was huge throughout New York and across the country. It was in look magazine and life magazine and and on the airwaves and in and in all the New York papers, including New York Times, were covering this story. It was the buzz of the of the country, these Brooklyn thrill killers, you know. So it was it was quite a story in the 50s. And I thought it would make it quite, quite, uh, a story for our contemporary times. And the artwork was beautiful. Phooey on the people that think Joe’s artwork was primitive. Primitive, or he wasn’t great, or dismiss him and saying he couldn’t. He didn’t have good vision. Yeah, he was visually challenged, but he I just made him wear glasses thick as a Coke bottle or a Pepsi bottle, I should say, work very, you know, very, very close to the paper, you know.
Craig Yoe: [02:31:30] But he could he drew beautifully and you love the human figure. And I actually think he was kind of into this fetish material. It wasn’t just an assignment from, you know, the underworld, because these were distributed under the counter in New York Times bookstores and stuff, very limited editions. And the publisher was, by the way, he was a Jewish pornographer who was a mafia kind of type wannabe. He went to jail for publishing these booklets. Police seized his stash of the of the books, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court voted against the rights to publish these booklets. There goes freedom of the press out the window, and that law is still on the books. It’s greatly ignored these days, but it’s actually still on the books. If they wanted to use that law to enforce anti-pornography material, they they could. So this book was quite successful. I mean, we got the attention. It was comic art Abrams first book. I was interviewed on The Terry Gross Show on NPR for an hour, and it was in time magazine and Newsweek, and it was in Playboy. It was it was was in newspapers and magazines in in Holland and Australia and in the Orient. And it people loved the story, you know, of Superman’s artist drawing fetish material and all the crazy background about it. It’s it’s been optioned, uh, as a, as a, as a movie. So I’m, I’m waiting on that.
Alex Grand: [02:33:02] Greg Goldstein at IDW saw some of your work and hired you to bring your imprint to IDW. Is that essentially how your book starts?
Craig Yoe: [02:33:13] Absolutely. That’s it. Alex would know. He’s I think he’s he’s got it down perfect.
Alex Grand: [02:33:20] But how did those conversations start and how was working with IDW?
Craig Yoe: [02:33:24] Well, Greg Goldstein, I knew him from the licensing Some industry. So we, you know, every couple of months we have licensing show party or at the license, I mean a licensing industry get together. You know, we exchange business cards and have drinks and nibbles and stuff, or I assume at the licensing show where we had a booth every year advertising your studio. I knew Greg from that, and he saw the claim and what he thought was the quality of his book. And so he called me up and said, why don’t you know, he had just been recently hired at IDW and he said, why don’t, why don’t you do a line of your books? He goes, I know you got a big collection and ability to put these books together, and why don’t you do a line of books for us? So that’s when that started, and I’m grateful to him for that. And, uh, you know, I became a great admirer of, of Ted Adams and, and Robbie, who started the IDW imprint with a couple other guys, and I’m still working with Ted and Robby to this day. My Man and Woman book was published by their company, so I’m great friends with them and value that that friendship and that that working relationship. So, uh, Greg got that started and we did over a, I think, 100 books with IDW of different sorts, collections of horror comics or, or Dan DeCarlo funny comic books or a collection of kids comics. And there’s a lot.
Alex Grand: [02:35:02] Of those great comic reprints with historical background, context, huge resource for a lot of people, including myself, because I’ve read through a lot of those when I was researching my book too. Mhm. And then, you know, you got Eisner’s for, uh, Walt Kelly’s Fairy Tales, uh, Invisible Man by Ken Quattro, and know, you’ve put together a crazy eclectic historical, you know, it’s an extension of when you were a kid looking through the thrift stores and seeing all these different elements of comics, all these different branches. And it sounds like you’ve managed to bring different branches of your interests out to the public.
Speaker3: [02:35:47] Yes.
Craig Yoe: [02:35:48] That’s right. You are right, sir.
Alex Grand: [02:35:53] Um, I moonlight as a biographer. I don’t know if you know that.
Speaker3: [02:35:58] It’s great.
Craig Yoe: [02:35:59] How’s. How’s the pay?
Alex Grand: [02:36:01] It doesn’t pay. Doesn’t pay anything. But that’s okay. I do it for the love of the game.
Speaker3: [02:36:06] Uh.
Alex Grand: [02:36:06] And, uh, but you’ve worked with other publishers too, right? Uh, like you said, Clover press, dark horse, Simon and Schuster, Abrams, Fantagraphics. So this this Yoe books. Imprint It means a lot to a lot of people, and you’re showing people material that very likely they would never have seen. Does that come with a feeling of pride? Is there kind of like this high that comes with it and you want more? Is there a Zen feeling with it? How does it feel having achieved this kind of comic history? Celestial status?
Craig Yoe: [02:36:51] It’s lonely at the top. Well, I love books, you know. I mean, I love this. I loved the smell of them. I love the feel of them. And I love comics. So doing books about. And I love comics history. So doing the these books about comics history, we’ve also done a number of contemporary graphic novels, which I’m very interested in doing more of, and very proud of the ones we’ve done. And uh, and some of the books have a social. Social conscience component to them, and some of them are just wacky fun. And and I enjoy the people I work with, working with and alongside her. And and I love it. It’s it’s greatly gratifying. And by the way, you mentioned Dark Horse. We we are no longer doing our line of a line of books for IDW. I mean, I’d be happy to think about maybe that if something like that would happen, but really, we’re in bed in a big way with with Mike Richardson and Dark Horse and our great, uh, editor there, Philip Simon. And we really enjoy that. And, and the publicity team is fabulous.
Craig Yoe: [02:38:09] So we’re really in bed in a big way with, with Dark Horse. We’ve got we’ve had a handful of books come out and we’ve got a lot more in the works. And we just had one click in the wacky space Western comics as obscure title from the 1950s that showed that low rent publisher Charlton put out, and it’s also got a Frazetta Williamson crinkle story in there, too. Along with that, that small genre of of cowboys and aliens and, uh, and and Nazis and dinosaurs. All in all, these all these wacky elements in those stories. So we’re doing a lot we’re really excited about doing books with Dark Horse. But we I continue to to, you know, do work for other companies too. And, and uh, Yoe books does have a main publisher. They’re, they’re part of. And that’s Dark Horse now, but it’s not an exclusive. So we’re working on some projects with some other publishers too. It’s like that old phrase. And I think somebody used it as a title of a graphic novel. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.
Alex Grand: [02:39:22] And tell us about the School of Five, Captain Domestos and Super Dentists.
Craig Yoe: [02:39:28] Oh, I’m glad you asked about that. That’s one of the things I’m certainly most proud of. Uh, so. During the earlier days of, uh, yo studio, I was asked, in being known as an expert, a thought of as an expert, any way of reaching kids, uh, through different media and promotions and things. I, I used to speak all over the world on on how to reach kids. So I was asked to chair a conference in Singapore on kids marketing. I was thrilled to do it, and I was giving my big talk at the end of the the keynote speech about that, and a woman sneaked in the back door of the small auditorium and listened to my talk. And it turned out she’s an incredible person. Miriam is. And, uh, she she listened to my talk and she worked for Unilever. And primarily her work was was related to handwashing because, uh, millions of kids every year, 5 million, I think, is the number I recall, die from diseases related to lack of washing your hands. Good. You know, they get diarrhea and waste away. You know, so many, you know, well-known brands is Lifebuoy soap.
Craig Yoe: [02:41:02] So Lifebuoy wanted to sponsor a promotion to kids to educate them about the importance of handwashing and potentially saving millions of lives a year. So Miriam heard my talk and said, you’re you’re an expert on on reaching kids. So I’d like to work on a program with you and we’ll start it in South Africa or Africa and then continue it from there. So we worked actually on ideas for like, I think almost two years or something, and nothing quite hit or logistically was didn’t, wouldn’t work out or because, you know, it’s their program was quite ambitious to, to to reach millions of kids in, in a number of different countries. It was quite the undertaking and it had a lot of, uh, logistical aspects to it. And you had to have just the right approach. So we at the time we were doing big boy comics, and that’s something Alex Rand maybe doesn’t know about because he didn’t ask me about it. So he knows so much, but he doesn’t know everything. I guess.
Speaker3: [02:42:06] That’s true. You’re right.
Craig Yoe: [02:42:08] So we’re doing that giveaway. So I thought like, well, why don’t we run the idea across to Miriam and Unilever about doing a comic, a giveaway comic book, and she really liked the idea. So we created a comic book and these characters called The School of Five, and they’re kind of based on the X-Men because they they have a school. Also, there’s a little bit of Huey, Dewey, and Louie in there because the head of the school, a woman of color named sparkle, main teacher of the school. And then there’s the three kids instead of Huey, Dewey, and Louie. I named them, you know, because of my love for comics, I named them bam and POW. And when I say I. All this was together with Cleo and also a writer and an artist who who we worked with before and a writer and an artist we worked with and loved with on Big Boy. Craig Boldman helped us on the writing, and Luke McDonnell, who did a lot of work like on an Iron Man for Marvel and stuff. He was our staff artist at yo studio, so he worked with us on the artwork. Well, these comic books are in 25 countries and in 22 languages, and there’s millions and millions and millions of copies. I don’t know how you do the counting or adding up, but I think it might be the largest circulated comic book in the world.
Craig Yoe: [02:43:36] They think it’s saving like 5000 lives a year or something. These, these comic books and got all kinds of nice awards. And then we went on to do other comic books for Unilever and other companies. We did one called Captain Domestos. I think you mentioned he was because there’s a big problem in, in these third world countries that the school bathrooms are for a horrible mess. And in many countries, girls drop out of school when they become adolescents and get their period because they don’t want to deal with the bathroom. So it’s fascinating to think about some of these health things or cultural things that actually affect, you know, learning, you know, an education, you know, you don’t think you don’t put two and two together. And we did another book about another group of superheroes who are all about brushing your teeth regularly, because in many countries, kids don’t brush their teeth after they eat or before bed. They brush them before they eat to clean their palates. But it’s not good to. But then after dinner, the the food is still on their teeth and starts decay in the teeth. Or when they sleep at night. They hadn’t brushed their teeth before. So it starts decaying teeth. And again, it affects their education because the number one cause of school absenteeism around the world is, uh, you know, tooth decay, you know, kids having tooth problems.
Craig Yoe: [02:45:09] So it’s amazing. So we were able we’ve been able to help all these different kids. And also we did a program for adults in Africa situated around clean water. Many of these villages, the women are tasked with every day. The women have to walk over a mile to the stream, you know, with their empty buckets and things, and then they fight with other women to get there first and to get the best water. Because if you get there last, then you get the dirtiest water because people are washing their clothes in there and who knows, doing maybe defecating in the water. Well, that was what else? So, you know, the water is a real problem and it actually contributes to a lot of fighting among the people of the different tribes and stuff like that. So we created this whole program to, uh, set up water stations with bottled water, and then the women could actually become the managers and owners of these water stations. So it gave women these jobs. It created clean water for the people in these areas. And the biggest takeaway was that the women said it’s brought peace to the villages because now they no longer fight over the water, you know. So this is what this our work played a part in, in these life changing life, sometimes life saving things. So that’s a pretty feel good thing.
Alex Grand: [02:46:43] Yeah it is. You’re touching the world, making a better place, improving both third world and first world dilemmas and problems. Cultural problems, pop cultural problems. It’s incredible. And you know, people can find out the inner workings in this atlas to Craig Yoe, available from Clover Press. I loved it. I, uh, like my green screen loves it too. Turns out. And uh. But I really enjoyed, uh, reading this. Uh, it was interesting because my son’s watching cartoons on the screen, and I’m sitting next to him reading this, and I’m kind of, you know, I’m kind of pushing the page a little. I don’t want to see some of the pages that are in here. But I loved it, and I loved that, that I could kind of combine a cartoon sense with this very, you know, detailed, intimate. The ID just sprayed out onto paper. I really enjoyed this. And also learning about you and and learning about your Incredible life. Obviously there’s there’s more to come. But I really enjoyed, you know, piecing together the puzzle, the enigma of what I was able to track down on Craig. You and I really had fun. I really have a lot of fun talking to you in general. I really appreciate our, our, uh, our relationship and, uh, and our, the chats that we’ve had.
Craig Yoe: [02:48:27] Well, you know, Alex, uh, you might have to cut this out because it might, uh, uh, besmirch your journalistic integrity, but I just, uh, talking to you to prepare for this interview. I feel like you and I have become good friends, and so I again, that might not speak to your journalistic impartiality, but, uh.
Alex Grand: [02:48:48] No, I like it. I’m keeping that in, I love that.
Craig Yoe: [02:48:51] I appreciate your time today. And it’s it’s weird to talk about yourself because I in some ways, I don’t feel it Speaks too much to to any humility I might have. Uh, but I did enjoy sharing with you today. A whole bunch of. I hope, uh, I hope your viewers, uh, maybe found it interesting to even to the end, because YouTube would give you gives you better, uh, better coverage if people go all the way to the end. Right. So we’re at the end. So you people that are still there, you dig? You you helped us. And I do hope you’ll you’ll buy my book. It’s, uh, I opened up, uh, my wrists and poured out blood slash India ink onto these pages, and and I hope you’ll find some hope and humor in amidst all the angst and wacky psychedelic, bizarre artwork too.
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