Home of
Dancing Man Press
Publisher of
The Shadow Winds of Q’ai Du’un
and The Book of Dag
Chas Fleischman is a "picture-drawer", something he began doing at 3 years old, as legend has it, drawing on book margins, date books and on the walls. A compulsive scribbler, he studied art at the San Francisco Art Institute, receiving his BFA in 1963.
Later he became an educational illustrator at the college of Marin, producing artwork for instructors, shuffling over a span of 13 years. While there he also created and produced "Dag's Bag", a weekly irreverent comic strip in Marin county's Pacific Sun for 14 years, culminating in his self-publishing of the iconic "Book of Dag" in 1982.
He studied printmaking later, with the Fort Mason Printmakers for several years, before shifting gears and moving to the Mendocino Coast and bringing together this story that had been rattling around in his head for years.
Born before Pearl harbor, he is now officially a card-carrying Tribal Elder and "older than dirt". He lives in Fort Bragg with his wife Jenny on the Mendocino Coast, within a stone's throw of the breath-taking Pacific ocean, surrounded by redwood trees and ravens. He is also, it should be noted, a pretty good finger-style guitarist.
Dag’s Bag, “Running barefoot through your mind”—was a mind-altering romp in the Pacific Sun for 13 some-odd years, for which he was paid a staggering $5 a week. Chas started this wacky strip back in 1967, and continued the weekly madness until 1980, when due to the rantings of humorless small-minded readers the hallowed strip was unceremoniously given the boot.
Undaunted, Chas assembled the storied tome “The Book of Dag”, which was printed—at no small expense- in a Corte Madera garage under cover of darkness, with the able assistance of Duncan Sutherland, and sold from the trunk of his car to reluctant local bookstores. This heroic plunge into high finance resulted in these intrepid entrepreneurs breaking even.
Some of these Dag strips continue to show up on Facebook, while continued requests to reprint the book have fallen on deaf ears. The Book of Dag back cover bio claims that Chas “..started the Church of What It Is, a loose cult of adoring flight stewardesses and dental hygienists”, but that rumor has no basis in fact. But, who can say.
Hard-to-find items today are the Dag Decoder ring, the original “I Dig Dag” button and the “Are you Hip Enough for Dag’s Bag?” bumper sticker. The iconoclastic “Dag’s Rangers” still exists today, but the dwindling membership is now mostly peopled with aging hipsters living in their old VW buses. Chas, it should be noted, is Dag Ranger #1.
Chas did a modest amount of freelance artwork over the years, including some strange client projects, like illustrating a person’s deadpan serious idea for a space ship that ran on spinning balls, and another who wrote a book about how to cheat the IRS and pay no more taxes. That guy went to federal prison. Other projects included a menu for Cafe Au Lait in Kentfield, a manual on running your own skate shop, many peace march posters and freebie rock concerts in Marin county, and other jobs that turn up in dusty cardboard boxes in the garage.
He did some artwork for KTIM FM in San Rafael, Michael Hunt’s Country Dance Lines magazine, and two coloring books, “The Victorian Seaside Hotel” coloring book for Dover, and the coloring book “Cowboys” for Troubadour Press, working with writer Kristen Hellberg.
Chas worked for the College of Marin from 1966 until 1981, originally as a college filmmaker, but later as an illustrator for instructors there, creating charts, graphs, maps, diagrams and book covers for syllabi sold at the college bookstore. Operating out of the Audio Visual offices, he lifted pen to paper for everything from restroom signs to drama posters, art gallery showings and campus maps.
He never got rich doing his artwork, being a less-than driven businessman, but his love of drawing continues to motivate him and fill his head with endless mind-files of crazy ideas. As a friend wisely stated, “We’d need several lifetimes to do all the things we want to do.”
And lest we forget, Chas studied printmaking at Fort Mason in San Francisco, under the guiding hands of Emmanual Montoya and Xavier Viramontes. He showed his work in several printmaker’s shows in Marin and San Francisco, and produced many prints over several years. When he decided to leave printmaking, he sold his press and moved north with his wife, to Mendocino.
Ultimately, over time he realized the need to sharply narrow his many interests, and so he returned to his original passion, the pen and ink single work on paper. He recalled that the earliest memory he had of his childhood was his desire to “draw a comic book”, and the realization of “The Shadow Winds” is the fulfillment of that dream, the coming full-circle of his life’s passion.