Submitted photo Comic book illustrator and writer Chris Yambar of Youngstown calls himself “the most delightfully dangerous artist on the planet.”

YOUNGSTOWN — Chris Yambar sees the world differently than most of us see it.

Since the age of 6, he has articulated this unique vision as a pop art painter and a comic book illustrator and writer for some of world’s most beloved comic characters.

Bart Simpson, Radioactive Man, SpongeBob SquarePants, Popeye and Mister Magoo are but a few classic characters that have uttered Yambar’s words.

His own award-winning stable of characters includes Mr. Beat, El Mucho Grande: Wrestler for Hire, The Fire-Breathing Pope, Twerp & Blue Baboon, Spells, Meow Wow! and Suckulina: Vampire Temp.

These characters have earned Yambar an international reputation as one of the most original and diverse creators in the comic book world.

The defining moment of his life, Yambar said, came on the day his kindergarten teacher had him and his classmates trace the outlines of their bodies on butcher paper. “It was so Youngstown to do that,” he said. “That brown, crinkly paper that butchers used to wrap up their meats.”

The purpose of this exercise was to fill in their silhouettes and create pictures of what they wanted to be when they grew up.

“Grow up,” he thought. “What is she talking about?”

Growing up was a concept he just could not get a grip on. “Every morning I would wake up as an astronaut, a gorilla, a cowboy, or a superhero. I never thought about growing up. What I was that day was all I knew.”

As his teachers continually tried to squeeze Yambar into a box that most of his classmates fit into quite comfortably, his imagination led him to illustrate his frustration.

“Every time we had an art project,” he remembered. “I drew a monster in a cage.”

He would modify his monster to fit the seasons — a red cap for Christmas, for instance. But always, it was a monster in a cage. This concerned his teacher, who called his mother in for a conference and showed her Yambar’s collection.

“‘Christopher,’ she said, ‘would you tell your mother what the name of this monster is?’ I told her, ‘The name of the monster is Teacher.’ That floored the teacher.”

He was a free spirit, an anarchist of sorts, and from that day forth, Christopher Yambar was also, above all, an artist.

More than 5,500 of Yambar’s images have been displayed in numerous galleries, museums and celebrity art collections in some 13 countries. The Butler Institute of American Art, Hummel Museum, Superman Museum and the Ronald Reagan Library are but a few of these venues.

Moving from the West Side of Youngstown to Austintown, where he attended Austintown Fitch High School, Yambar continued dancing to the beat of a different drummer.

He admitted. “I hated all my classmates because they were either jocks or in cliques I didn’t relate to. I never fit into any of that.”

He credited his father for launching his career. To get his son to sit still for haircuts he gave Yambar comic books to read in the chair. He read all the popular comic books of the day — Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and of course, Archie.

“I don’t know what Archie’s problem was,” he laughed. “Why was he racing after Veronica when Betty was right there? Betty was cool. Veronica was a (rhymes with rich). Reggie deserved her.”

Yambar started writing and producing his own comic books while still in high school, learning the business on his own. His restless curiosity and ambition drove him to acquire a holistic understanding of the industry, from color separations to printing presses to marketing. “Once you break that code,” he explained, “then you find out how to make money doing what you really love to do. That’s what I did; I broke the code,”

Instead of going to college, Yambar opted to attend the Mahoning County Joint Vocational School in Canfield. “I learned everything I needed to know about business at that school from a man named George Cummings,” he said.”Once you understand the mechanics — how things work — you can make a living at it, and I did.”

Following vocational school, Yambar did take some courses at Youngstown State University. When his advisor pointed out that he was already doing outside of college — without a degree — what he had registered for, that was the end of Yambar’s university career.

Within two years, in 1989, he mounted his first one-person exhibition at the Butler Institute of American art — a historical retrospective of the Batman.

He called his first self-produced, original comic book “Mr. Beat.”

“Mr. Beat was a beatnik.” Yambar said. “He was all about art, music, social commentary, bongos, babes, and copious amounts of coffee. He was the guy I wanted to be — my alter ego. He looked a little like my dad,”

Yambar advises aspiring writers to write within their own set of experiences, to be mirrors to their own souls. For him, Mr. Beat was precisely that. It was an immediate hit. Having already “broken the code,” he quickly secured national distribution and branched out into merchandising with Mr. Beat coffee cups and T-shirts.

Building on his success, Yambar added new characters to his comic book cast. There was El Mucho Grande, a 7-foot tall masked wrestler who may or may not be human; and Suckulina, the vampire temp — a former torture princess in hell who got bored and rose to the surface world to do temp work on the graveyard shift. “Alina is vampire office humor that doesn’t bite much,” Yambar chuckled.

For 16 years, Yambar worked as a freelancer on the Simpsons’ Bongo Comics line. “Matt Groening was looking for new writers and my name came up. I had given every person I’d ever met who worked with Matt my Mr. Beat coffee mugs. When Matt walked out of his office to greet me, he had one in his hand.”

It was this assignment that led to writing stories and dialogue for other classic comic book characters. Next up: The Yellow Kid, a character that Yambar did not create. The Yellow Kid is, rather, one of the most influential characters in comic history and Yambar has reinvented him for the 21st century.

Yambar explained, “In the late 19th century, the Yellow Kid comic strip was immensely popular. Without him, there would be no modern comic books and comic strips. There would be no dialogue balloons. They would be only illustrations with words at the bottom.”

The Yellow Kid was an Irish immigrant in New York City living in the worst slums you could imagine, who rose above it all.

The character spawned modern comic character merchandising, as well. Marketers put him on cough syrup and whiskey bottles, on bubble gum wrappers and toys. The character only lasted for three years until Buster Brown came along but left a lasting imprint.

Yambar and his partner, award-winning editorial cartoonist Randy Bish, plan to launch the first Yellow Kid comic book in 2020 to coincide with the character’s 125th anniversary.

Yambar, who calls himself “the most delightfully dangerous artist on the planet,” still lives in Youngstown with his wife, Maureen. Readers can view his work on his website: www.yambar.com and www.yambartoday.com.