Phil Yeh: Cartoonist with a Mission

 

Phil Yeh is a real-life hero who has been traveling the world for 22 years promoting literacy, by painting more than 1600 colorful murals and speaking at schools, libraries, museums, and conferences. Charles Schulz (Peanuts) was the first cartoonist to endorse Phil Yeh's new organization called Cartoonists Across America and The World in 1985. Phil created this group to tackle the tremendous illiteracy problem in the United States at that time.

His friend Wally "Famous" Amos, the spokesperson for Literacy Volunteers of America, had given Phil the sobering statistics in an interview that same year. At that time, more than 27 million American adults could not read or write.

Yeh started the Cartoonists-Across-America-and-the-World organization to send out the message that cartoons can be used to actually inspire people of all ages to read more. Phil has self-published over 80 educational, non-violent books. He is passionate about literacy, education, and the arts. He has selflessly dedicated himself to getting real books into the hands of real kids, and gives away his comics at all his events.

He was featured in American Profiles Magazine last May as a "Hometown Hero" and will be in their up-coming book "Hometown Heroes: Real Stories of Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things All Across America", published by HarperCollins for release in April 07. Phil has painted with many celebrities and was honored at the White House by former First Lady Barbara Bush.

Cartoons and humor have a way of transcending cultural boundaries and really reaching more people. Promoting reading, music and the arts can only improve the lives of everyone in our communities. Phil believes that it is possible to entertain people and at the same time enlighten them.

MORE HISTORY:
Although comic books were "invented" in the United States, their development as a respected form of artistic expression was held back for many years, due to ignorant propaganda of people like Dr. Fredric Wirtham and others in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, in Europe and Asia, the art form was growing into something important that people of all walks of life could appreciate.

 

The principal reason why comic books were not respected in the United States was the terrible packaging of the art itself. Being printed on the cheapest paper and selling for mere pennies meant that they were not guaranteed shelf space in respected bookstores or libraries.

 

In the beginning of the 1970s in the United States, a significant revolution began in the way comic books and their creators were being treated. Shel Dorf and his first San Diego Comic-Con was the perfect setting for this new revolution. Held in 1970 with only a few hundred people in attendance, the San Diego Comic-Con brought respected creators in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and comics together with aspiring artists, writers, and publishers. In the summer of 1970, Phil Yeh was a 15-year-old teenager from Southern California who attended the first Comic-Con and that is where he met Ray Bradbury and Jack Kirby. Phil knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life and in October of that year, having just turned 16, he formed his own publishing company “Eastwind Studios.”

 

Phil started drawing his own comics in a magazine called Cement that he sold at Los Alamitos High School. He was learning the basics of the publishing business. In the fall of 1972, the second day at California State University at Long Beach, Phil talked himself into a job drawing a daily comic strip for the school paper. The only problem was that Phil didn't have a comic strip and he had to create a week's worth of strips that very same night. The strip was called Cazco , the adventures of a Tibetan foreign exchange student, and it became an instant hit. A semester later, the paper had a new editor who didn't like comic strips and Phil was forced to switch to editorial cartoons in the spring of 73. The paper already had the talents of Bill Schorr enlisted, so this decision didn't make a lot of sense.

 

Phil did what he always does in situations like this: he started his own alternative newspaper on November 5, 1973 called Uncle Jam : a paper covering health, books, the arts and travel with extensive coverage of the world of science fiction, fantasy and comics. One of the students who joined the small Uncle Jam staff was a young cartoonist called Roberta Gregory . Yeh was impressed with her talent and offered her the cover spot for the very first issue. Today you can see animated versions of Gregory's work on the Oxygen TV network and also in her comic book series Naughty Bits . Another student at the first staff meeting was writer Gregg Rickman , who would go on to do the last series of interviews with the late author Philip K. Dick for both Uncle Jam and for a series of books that Yeh would later publish. Bladerunner and Total Recall are among the films inspired by Dick's stories. Today, Rickman is film professor at San Francisco State University and working on a fourth Philip K.Dick book.

 

Long Beach was also the home of one of the first comic book stores in the United States: Richard Kyle Books, originally Wonderworld Books . Phil had met Richard in 1972 and they became fast friends. Phil even painted the sign on the store! Most importantly, Richard had many professional contacts in the field of science fiction and comics and was always eager to share his feelings about what worked and what didn't work in regard to stories, artwork and publishing in general. The true history of the arts scene in Long Beach has often been overlooked by the mass media and especially the comic book press, although quite a few talented writers and artists lived in the seaside town in the shadow of Los Angeles.

 

Although Uncle Jam and its sister-paper Cobblestone were being published in Long Beach, they were being distributed in every southland bookstore, library, museum, and selected businesses all the way from Santa Barbara to San Diego. The paper interviewed many creative artists from all fields but Phil always had a special place for the works of his fellow cartoonists. In the November 1975 issue of Cobblestone , Phil was the first person to interview Superman's creator Jerry Siegel about the terrible injustice he and the artist Joe Shuster suffered for years. That story was finally brought to light in the 2004 book Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones . Although Jones mistakenly called Phil a Filipino artist (in fact, Phil’s mother is of European descent and his father Chinese), the basic facts have finally been told. In 1975, Jerry Siegel had sent out 1,000 press releases to the American media and until Cobblestone ran this story - no one else picked it up!

 

In the December 1976 issue of Uncle Jam (which ran for two years as a section in Cobblestone ), a review of "Beyond Time and Again" , written by David Miles, was published. That issue also featured a full-color cover, especially created for Phil by the late and legendary underground & rock artist Rick Griffin . Yeh took his old high school friend Greg Escalante (now with Juxtapoz Magazine) and Tom Luth (comic book colorist for Sergio Aragones and an illustrator) to conduct a rare interview with Griffin . Here is a quote from Mile's review about the Metzger book that Richard Kyle had just co-published.

 

"Beyond Time and Again" , Metzger's almost legendary underground comic strip, out of print since 1972 when it was last published in weekly installments by the short-lived Los Angeles Staff, is now back in print as a lavish hardback book by Kyle and Wheary —a new Huntington Beach (CA) publishing company, created to preserve this first true graphic novel in America --- and one of the most important books in the last twenty years."

 

The year was 1976 when this review was published for Metzger's book. Comic historians: please note that this was more than a year before Eisner was credited in 1978 with creating the "first" graphic novel in America. Some may argue that Metzger's work was a collection of strips gathered together to make a whole novel and therefore not a true graphic novel. Other historians don't believe that, since Metzger's work was more than a mere comic strip.

 

In 1976, Terry Nantier and his company had also published an English language version of a European graphic novel as well. In all fairness, graphic novels existed in Europe many years before the United States was introduced to this concept.

 

In the summer 1976, Phil published his first collection of new comic strips based on his Cazco character as Graphic Album. In 1977, Yeh and Roberta Gregory teamed up to do a graphic album for kids called “Jam.” And that same year, Yeh released his first 80 page graphic novel in an 8 1/2 x 11 square-bound format. This was all new material , created specifically for this new book format. The introductions to this graphic novel were by MAD Magazine 's Sergio Aragones and the late Golden Age artist Don Rico . Inside the cover, under the copyright page, Yeh used the term graphic novel when talking about another project soon to come.

 

In meeting Don Rico , Yeh was also introduced to the beautiful woodcuts of Lynd Ward who made graphic novels in the 1930s, so it would not be fair to say that the concept of the graphic novel was born in 1976 or 1977 or 1978... but for the modern American comic book history, it is important to understand that not only was Long Beach, California the birthplace of this wonderful art form, it was also the place where Uncle Jam and Phil Yeh 's publishing company championed the graphic novel and the comic art form for many years. Uncle Jam was distributed through public libraries, bookstores, art theaters, and museums from Santa Barbara to San Diego. It was also distributed at all the major comic book and science fiction conventions in Southern California until 1991. Cover artists in this groundbreaking free paper (which featured full color in 1975) included: Kelly Freas, Flavia, Alfredo Alcala, Moebius, Greg Hildebrandt, John Pound, Wendy Pini, Sergio Aragones, and many others. Uncle Jam also featured contributions by or interviews with such notable people as: Ray Bradbury, Leonard Nimoy, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Harvey Kurtzman, Matt Groening, Laura Huxley, Norman Cousins, Gary Owens, Wally Famous Amos, and many other influential thinkers and creators.

 

Phil also spoke at public gatherings about the importance of graphic novels and opening the market for bookstores and libraries in the United States. He bought a booth at the American Booksellers Association convention (now BookExpoAmerica) in 1977 to promote this new graphic novel for the book industry. It would be years before other comic book publishers would see the wisdom of the bookstore market. Phil also spoke at colleges and conventions. He was invited to speak to Art Spiegelman 's class at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in the early 80s by a young student called Adam Philips who along with his friend Scott McCloud brought him into their class. Phil never got tired of promoting the future of graphic novels and the power of using comics to get more people into reading in the United States.

 

Phil followed his first graphic novel with a series of books aimed at mature audiences Ajaneh (1978), Godiva (1979), and Cazco in China (1980). Cazco in China was the first published appearance of Phil's Winged Tiger character, inspired by Phil's trip to his father's homeland in 1979. Phil's dad had left China in 1948 and could not go home for more than 30 years because of the Communist closed-door policy. In his book, Cazco in China, Phil introduced old legends and animal characters doing martial arts. Phil also wrote a series of landmark articles about his trip to China in Uncle Jam under the title Shanghai Waltz. In 1995, Phil returned to Beijing, China, to paint his first mural at a children's book fair. It was his fourth trip to his father's home.

 

In 1985, Uncle Jam published an interview with the cookie-king Wally Famous Amos that changed the direction of Phil's life. Wally is also the national spokesperson for Literacy Volunteers of America. When Wally explained to Phil the seriousness of the illiteracy problem, he inspired Phil to found Cartoonists Across America & The World. Since 1985, the band of artists have painted more than 1500 murals throughout the world promoting reading and the arts. These events help call attention to the power of the cartoon art form in enticing people of all ages to read. Phil has already spoken to thousands of students around the world, as well as to educators, librarians, and parents about using the arts to encourage a better education and increased literacy.

 

Phil has won a number of awards in his career, but one that has special meaning is the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award which he received in 1989 from the San Diego Comic-Con. In 1991, with the help of his friend Kevin Eastman , co-creator of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , Phil released a children's book called Theo the Dinosaur. The book's oil paintings were used on posters throughout the world and even featured on a postage stamp in Hungary when Phil painted a mural there in 1990 for the United Nations International Year of Literacy . The introduction for Theo was written by former First Lady Barbara Bush who later honored Phil in the White House for his work for literacy. The foreword to his Theo book is by Nigel Seale, the founder of Earth Day International. The original oil paintings have had their own shows in galleries in Carmel, San Francisco, and New York City. In April through August 2006, the Cleveland Natural History Museum mounts a new show of these paintings celebrating reading and recycling with the slogans, "Read. Avoid Extinction." And "Recycle. Avoid Extinction."

 

In 1993, Phil wrote and illustrated an entire wordless graphic novel called The Winged Tiger with three main themes; world peace, the environment, and literacy. That book was named one of the best 25 graphic novels in print in Steve Wiener 's book: 101 Best Graphic Novels. This wordless graphic novel was something that anyone on the planet could understand. The book even had illustrated introductions by Jean "Moebius" Giraud and Elfquest creator Wendi Pini.

 

The father of the graphic novel, Will Eisner had this to say about Phil's landmark book:

 

"The Winged Tiger is a most imaginative concept and a singular achievement. The employment of imagery as language is at the very cusp of modern communications. It is the new literacy."

 

And Scott McCloud , author of Understanding Comics , and that former student who heard Phil speak so many years ago in Art Spiegelman 's class said this about the Winged Tiger:

 

"The Winged Tiger is a remarkable feat of human imagination. Phil Yeh's vision of a universal language is inspired and compelling. Highly recommended to readers of all nations."

 

 

As part of Phil Yeh's literacy and arts campaign around the world, he continues to produce graphic novels, illustrated books, comics, and to champion the comic art form he loves.

Phil is still making constant public appearances to the present day. He is currently working on a new Cazco graphic novel for the summer of 2007, celebrating the 30th anniversary of the American Graphic Novel and Phil's 1977 classic graphic novel: Even Cazco Gets the Blues. It has been 35 years since his Cazco character first appeared in a comic strip at Cal State University Long Beach in 1972.

Email direct: philyeh@mac.com

 

 

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