Southwestern Collection

2006 Southwestern Collection

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Jack Jackson: A Tribute

We lost Jack Jackson in June 2006. Family, friends, artists, historians, and the people of Texas lost a husband, father, colleague, and unique creative talent. Jack lived such a full life on so many fronts, he embodied something different to everyone who knew him. Reared in the brush country of South Texas and the descendant of early Texas pioneers, Jack developed a lifelong fascination with Texas history and with the people—especially the Indians and Tejanos—who had left their imprint on the landscape. Although he was a budding artist, he studied accounting, cultivating the organizational skills and attention to detail that would serve him well throughout his career.

But Jack was also a rebel. Arriving at the University of Texas in the early 1960s, he joined a small community of bohemian artists, musicians, free thinkers, and iconoclasts. He found a creative outlet as cartoonist for the Ranger humor magazine, a thorn in the side of UT administrators and regents. In 1964 Jack even produced the first underground comic, God Nose, a biting social satire literally printed on the basement presses of the Texas Capitol. The official repression of all this rebellious creativity helped convince Jackson and his beleaguered Ranger colleagues to heed the siren call of the new counterculture forming in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. Jack became an important part of a large Texas contingent that shaped that movement. He put his accounting skills to use as art director and distributor for the Family Dog's celebrated rock concert posters of the era. With fellow Texans Gilbert Shelton and Dave Moriaty he founded Rip Off Press, which became an important outlet for the burgeoning field of fantasy comics and other publications of the counterculture. Honing his pen-and-ink skills during the '70s, "Jaxon," as he was known, made his reputation among the leading cartoonists in the nation.

Jackson's art and his fascination with the history of his native Texas came together in the first of his trademark cartoon histories: Comanche Moon (1979), which recounts the saga of Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker from a Comanche perspective. Jack remembered the old Texas History Movies that since the 1920s had served Texas school kids as a popular bridge to their history. But those cartoons were full of Anglo bias and ethnic stereotypes that represented the old way of viewing Texas history. Jackson revolutionized the concept with a contemporary sensibility and graphic sophistication that elevated the medium from pop cliché to historical reality. He quickly followed Comanche Moon with a series on the Tejanos and their greatest hero, Juan Seguín; late in life, Jack still considered Los Tejanos one of his proudest achievements. Over the years Jack's cartoon histories embraced other nineteenth-century themes, including Sam Houston (Indian Lover), the Alamo seen from both sides, and even the Austin urban legends of Oat Willie and Threadgill's restaurant. But it was a scathing review of Jack's portrayal of "un-Reconstructed" Anglos after the Civil War (Lost Cause, 1998) that put his entire cartoon series in perspective. Accused of both racial stereotyping and historical inaccuracy—the very things that he had fought throughout his publishing career—Jack defended his research and argued that even Anglo racists must be understood as complex human beings who suffer. It was pure Jackson, still the iconoclast, still the rebel against conformist thinking, still the explorer of uncomfortable historical realities.

Jackson's research for his illustrated histories led him naturally...