Dean Yeagle
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DY: Yes. They’re great little designs and very pleasant to draw. The comic book that I’m working on is a sequel to the original. When Dark Horse wanted to put out a new printing of the old book Disney said,“ok, but we want to also put out a three-issue comic book showing what happened to them afterwards, in today’s age.” It was written by Mike Richardson and I’m doing the first two issues out of the three. I was going to do the whole thing, but time and moving and other work got in the way, and I’ve only been able to do the first two, although I did all the covers. There are new human characters, which are all my designs, but the gremlins are all the same ones from the book. They live a long time.
JF: Do you think the current wartime climate explains the newfound interest in this old product?
DY: I don’t think so. I think it was just brought up to them, and Disney decided it was a good thing to pursue.
JF: Do you know of any of the original Gremlins artists?
DY: The original books came out without artists’ names; it just said “art by the Disney Studio.” However, Walt Kelly, of Pogo fame, did little one-page and two-page inserts into the old Disney Comics and Stories during the war. They were little pantomime things with no dialogue and starring Gremlin Gus – he has a little mustache and he wears a derby over one horn. This was before Kelly started Pogo in 1949.
courtesy of Disney