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UNCLE JAM - Thirty Years After
by Phil Yeh

On November 5, 1973, a group of student artists and writers at California State University Long Beach (CSULB) published one of the most original free newspapers in history. The cover of the very first issue was drawn by Roberta Gregory who has since become one of the most influential women cartoonists in the independent comics movement. Roberta now has an animated series on the Oxygen Network based on the characters in her Naughty Bits comic books published by Fantagraphics Books. I was 19 years old in my second year at CSULB in the fall of 1973 and as I type this in the fall of 2003, my youngest son Gabe is 19 and also attending my old college. My partner Mark Eliot and I had created a little humor magazine called CEMENT while at Los Alamitos High School and when we entered CSULB in 1972, we continued to think about publishing our own work. The previous year I had created a daily comic strip for the school newspaper The Forty-Niner called Cazco in College. I had dreamed of syndication at that point in my life but when the new editor, in the fall of 1973, announced that she didnšt want to publish comic strips in the school paper, I knew that I had little choice but to start my own alternative newspaper.

Mark and I put up fliers around campus asking for volunteers who wanted to help us and that is how we came to meet Roberta Gregory and Gregg Rickman. Gregg would later go on to write a whole series of books on the late Science-Fiction master Philip K. Dick from an interview he did for Uncle Jam. When Mark and I first saw Roberta's portfolio of animal drawings, we knew that we had our first cover artist. We naturally picked a drawing of a dead dolphin surrounded by a lion and an ox in tears (do not ask me why). With the words "Humor Illustrated" under that cartoon, a revolutionary publication was born.

As for the strange name of Uncle Jam, we later made up countless odd stories to explain its origin. The best one came from one of our editors, Don DeContreras, who explained that Uncle Jam came from the ancient Sumerian saying Un Kell Jom meaning "You have just stepped on a toad." That ran in our staff box for almost two decades along with a $5,000,000 subscription price. The true story of how we came up with the name was that we were in the journalism offices at CSULB debating the name for this new paper without any conclusion. Mark and I once had a similar argument in high school over the name of our first humor magazine CEMENT. Mark suggested calling our magazine CHEEZE and when I said that was as stupid as calling a magazine CEMENT (we were standing on the sidewalk at this point) -well, you know how silly high school students can be.

This time I wanted to avoid all the fights over the name of the new paper. So I announced that I would simply open up the campus magazine (I was also the art director) and with my eyes closed, I would put my finger on any word at random and that would be the name of our new humor newspaper. Mark agreed that would be a sensible and scientific marketing approach. A few seconds later, UNCLE JAM was born.

For the historians out there, my finger landed on a local record store's ad selling a variety of albums. One of the albums was from a group called Ten Years After and my finger had landed on their song, Uncle Jam. I still have never heard the song all these years later.

When that first issue of Uncle Jam hit the campus on November 5, 1973, my life changed forever. Gone were the dreams of being a syndicated comic strip artist or working for other people. I knew then that I would spend the rest of my life publishing my own books, newspapers, and magazines. That was a sure way to avoid having to look for a job.

Uncle Jam created a lot of attention at CSULB and later helped inspire many changes throughout the campus. In 1974, CSULB gave our little staff a 90 minute a week comedy radio show. This was before Saturday Night Live was born. We pioneered all sorts of insanity on that program. Our old engineer for the show, Tim Keenan, has since served as the Mayor of the city of Cypress, in Southern California and runs his own production studio with his wife Linda called Creative Media. We even started the Uncle Jam Humor Party and I was elected to two terms as Senator-At-Large at CSULB helping to transform campus politics for women and minorities.

In 1975, Uncle Jam became the title of the humor and cartoon section of our new arts newspaper for Southern California called Cobblestone. We took Cobblestone off-campus and with distribution through public libraries, bookstores, (there once were a lot of independent bookstores in California), museums, and other places where intelligent literate people hung out (there actually used to be more intelligent, literate people in those days before the age of video games), the paper grew in circulation and popularity. Within a year, we had opened our own Cobblestone Art Gallery in Long Beach and our monthly newspaper went full color! Ray Bradbury contributed poetry to that first full-color issue. Tom Luth was one of our first colorists and he did some amazing work for us over the years before the age of computers. Tom has since gone on to color many comic books including the work of Groo the Wanderer's creator Sergio Aragones. It is hard to imagine that when we were publishing these early issues, personal computers did not exist and all the layouts were done with exacto knives and wax.

Cobblestone was published monthly from January 1975 to the summer of 1977 with Uncle Jam inside as the humor section. During those two years we interviewed Will Geer of The Waltons, Jack Haley Sr. of The Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz, Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, Jerry Siegel, half of the team who created Superman, Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of MAD magazine, and many other notable artists, actors, and musicians. We even ran an unpublished interview with George Lucas when he was still a film student at USC and long before Star Wars.

In the summer of 1976, we published our first comic books and then in the spring of 1977, we were among the first companies in the United States to publish a graphic novel Even Cazco Gets The Blues. Uncle Jam championed the graphic novel form in our pages and with our own series of books. Our annual edition at the San Diego Comic-Con International helped to influence the direction of the art form.

In the fall of 1977, I decided to change Cobblestone back to Uncle Jam and in later years, Uncle Jam was shortened to UJQ for Uncle Jam Quarterly. The staff of the paper continued to grow and Uncle Jam's coverage of Health, Books, The Arts, and Travel made this free paper one of the best in the world. I had this thing about classified ads (we didn't have any) and other useless filler. Uncle Jam was famous for original art and feature stories and in-depth interviews. I wanted a paper that people would read and keep. Over the years our covers featured some of the best illustrators in the world including Moebius, Rick Griffin, Alfredo Alcala, Flavia, Sergio Aragones, Kelly Freas, Hal Robinson, Wendy Pini, Greg Hildebrandt, and many others. Our writers traveled all over the world and I am especially proud of the personal journalism that they used in their stories. The late Burr Jerger's ground breaking reporting made national news when he covered the first victims of Atomic testing in Utah. My own series of articles on my trips back to my fatheršs homeland of China starting in 1979 were well received. I will write that novel someday about my experience.

Uncle Jam interviewed a lot of noted people over the years including Norman Cousins, Matt Groening before The Simpsons, Laura Huxley, John & Toni Lilly, Patrice Rushen, Harlan Ellison, Gumby's creator Art Clokey, Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius, and many others. I think that Gregg Rickman's landmark interview with the late Philip K. Dick stands out more than most since Phil was so taken with Gregg's writing that he asked him to be his official biographer (this was before the film Blade Runner was completed). I agreed to publish Gregg's books on PKD. There have been three volumes so far. Gregg's life changed forever when Philip died shortly after our interview was run and before Blade Runner was finished, Gregg decided to devote his life to covering Phil's life and work.

My own life was forever changed by an Uncle Jam interview with the cookie king and literacy advocate Wally Famous Amos in 1985. Wally explained to me that more than 27 million American adults could not read or write and inspired me to do something about it using cartoons and humor.

That is how our company Cartoonists Across America & The World was born and our new series of comic books promoting literacy, creativity and the arts. My sons were young children at that time and I thought perhaps we might inspire an entire generation in this country to read, using comics and humor and the arts. I actually thought this was going to be easy when we started the tour in 1986. I could not have been more wrong. It's almost 2004 and we now have more than 44 million American adults who are functionally illiterate and many more Americans are basically aliterate, i.e.: they know how to read but they don't. This might explain why we are doing so much work outside the United States in the coming years. One has to go where one is appreciated.

I went on the road with this Cartoonists Across America & The World campaign in 1986. I tried to keep Uncle Jam alive while being in transit. We even managed to put a few papers out into the 90s. Our last editor Ed Gauthier is still working on the official history of Uncle Jam. Maybe by the 40th anniversary in 2013 we will issue a book featuring the best of what we did. The staff members who worked on the paper have gone on to some amazing work all over the world.

I haven't given up on my love of publishing, writing, and drawing. I wrote this 30th-anniversary article hopefully to inspire some young or old person to consider publishing their own comics, books, magazines, or newspapers. Modern technology has made that dream easier in terms of producing one's own stuff, be it on the internet or in print. We could all use better things to read in this country. Perhaps with better things to read, we might even create a whole new generation of readers. I remain an optimist.

We like to wave flags these days and profess our love of democracy, but the truth is that without a literate citizenry, you really cannot have a real democracy. Intelligence has to come from reading and this nation is in serious trouble as we enter the 21st century. I challenge all of us to cut down on the mindless electronic entertainment bombarding us and to consider balancing our lives with both reading and writing ---and drawing, too!

When I speak to young students about how to create their own books, I am always amazed at their enthusiasm and excitement, especially in elementary school. Sadly, the vast majority of our American high school and college students have adopted the couch-potato stance of Homer Simpson. Too many years of mindless entertainment have created some very frightening problems in this nation.

Yet I remain an optimist. My own three sons are in the college-age generation and I know that there are a few very talented, bright young people who understand that they can indeed change the world with the power of the pen. I tell everyone that we need better television and movie scripts, better books, better magazines, better comics and much better newspapers. Even in the age of personal computers, that is still going to come from your own imagination. Without new and better ideas we are lost. Look at the many problems on this planet and start to work on one or two of them. Get off the couch, turn off the video games, and show us what you can do to make this a better world.

Thirty years ago, a group of college kids with almost no money proved that a free newspaper could make a difference.

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