The first official San Diego Comic-Con was a three-day event held from August 1 to 3, 1970 in the U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego. Founded by Shel Dorf and some dedicated fans, many of them in their teens, this first West Coast comic book convention would grow in the decades that followed to become the biggest celebration of the comic book art form in the United States. The first San Diego Comic-Con was actually titled the Golden State Comic-Con and drew a “crowd” of 300 people.  Phil Yeh was a 15-year-old teenager who had dreams of making a living as a cartoonist when he met Jack Kirby and Ray Bradbury at that first convention. He convinced his father to drive him down to San Diego from LA and was on his way to learning how to get into this business of drawing cartoons for a living.

   One of the really nice things about that first convention was the unique chance to hear Bradbury and Kirby speak about how they approached their work and to meet them in person. Shel Dorf’s incredible vision was to have as many professional artists and writers as possible come to San Diego each year, where they could share their wisdom with another generation. These professionals definitely made an impression on the teenage artist who had grown up in Watts, one of the toughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. That fall, Yeh was living in Seal Beach, California. He had just turned 16 years old when he founded his own publishing company in order to publish his own work and the work of his friends. The company was named Eastwind Studios/Fragments West, and continues to publish today.

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  In 1971, Yeh and Los Alamitos High School classmate Mark Eliot published their own little humor magazine called Cement on campus and throughout the community.  They continued to go to San Diego for the Comic-Con and met more artists and writers who shared their vision of what this art form could become in the future.  In the fall of 1972, Eliot and Yeh entered Cal State University at Long Beach where they were both enrolled in the Honors program. This allowed them to explore journalism, art, and film. This provided a perfect base to build their small publishing company. Yeh landed a job with the daily school newspaper (The Forty-Niner) his first day on campus to draw a comic strip about a Tibetan foreign exchange student called Cazco in College.   Around the same time, Yeh met Richard Kyle, the owner of Wonderworld Books in downtown Long Beach. Richard would become a friend and mentor to the young artist.

     In 1973, the CSULB paper’s editor decided to move Yeh to editorial cartoons and discontinue Cazco in College as a daily strip. This unpopular move by an editor with little vision or sense of humor prompted Yeh to do the next logical thing in his career. Along with his old partner Eliot, the two 19 year-olds launched their own alternative free paper and called it Uncle Jam. The first issue appeared on November 5, 1973, and featured a cover by another CSULB student named Roberta Gregory who would go on to create an excellent animated series for the Oxygen Network and a bestselling series of books called Naughty Bits. For the next 19 years, Uncle Jam featured many fine articles about health, books, travel, and the arts. It featured interviews with some of the most important contemporary artists, including many of the masters of the comic art form - from Harvey Kurtzman (creator of MAD Magazine) to Jean (Moebius) Giraud.  What made Uncle Jam legendary was the use of first-class artwork for all the covers of a FREE paper, and its early use of color in newsprint. Ray Bradbury was an early contributor to the paper and he continued to inspire Yeh to dream of bigger things. In 1975, Uncle Jam became the title of the humor and cartoon section of our new arts newspaper for Southern California called Cobblestone. The name was later changed back to Uncle Jam in 1977.