Abstract

ABSTRACT:

After a notable career as an underground cartoonist in San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jack Jackson returned to his home state of Texas and began to produce heavily textual and visually stiff comics about the history of the state. The first of these, collected into a volume titled Comanche Moon in 1979, concerns the life of Anglo-Texan settler Cynthia Ann Parker, who was taken as a child-captive by the Comanche in 1836, and her son Quanah. In constructing Comanche Moon Jackson develops a principle of visual and narrative choosing, what we might call citation, that differentiates it both from the underground movement and the autographies that have become the principal means of delving into historical subjects in comics form since Art Spiegelman's Maus. This essay explores how Jackson's citational practice suggests an important alternative to the autobiographical methods cartoonists tend to use to tell historical stories, challenges the ethics of underground comix, and expands the toolbox that the critical historian has for describing history to a public audience.

pdf

Share