J

JACKSON, JACK (JAXON) (1941–2006). Jack Jackson was a pioneering underground

comics artist (using the pen name “Jaxon”), a fi gure in the San Francisco rock scene
of the 1960s, a graphic novelist, and a self-taught historian who became one of the
foremost experts on early Texas cartography, eventually becoming a fellow of the Texas
State Historical Association and a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Jackson
grew up in Texas and attended the University of Texas Austin, where he began car-
tooning for a school humor magazine, until he was fi red over a censorship issue. In
1964, he published the one-shot comic God Nose, considered by many to be the fi rst
underground comic. Soon afterward, he was one of a group of Texans who moved to
San Francisco, including his friend Janis Joplin, as the counterculture was being born.
Th is group, including Fred Todd, Gilbert Shelton, Jackson, Jackson’s girlfriend Beatrice
Bonini, and Dave Moriarty, was aff ectionately called “the Texas Mafi a.” Jackson went on
to publish a variety of visionary comics for Last Gasp and his own Rip Off Press (which
he co-founded in 1969). He also played an important role in the development of psy-
chedelic art, as art director for Chet Helms’s Family Dog Productions, a key force in the
area’s burgeoning countercultural music scene.
Returning to Texas in 1973, Jackson became a more serious cartoonist, focusing on
the history of Texas in his comics. His fi rst historical story, Comanche Moon (1979),
began telling the story of Quanah Parker, the last great leader of Texas Comanche,
who was the son of a captive mother and a Native American Indian father, and sought
peace between the Comanche and white Texans. Jackson created additional works
detailing Texas history (often focusing on the plight of Native Americans displaced
by the arrival of white settlers), including Los Tejanos (1981), Lost Cause (1998), and
Th e Alamo (2002).