Critique Revisited:
An Interview with Jack Jackson
by Gary Groth,
Originally printed in Comics Journal #213

Upon publication of Jack Jackson's latest graphic novel, Lost Cause, Jackson's hometown alternative paper, The Austin Chronicle (September 18, 1998), ran a double-barreled hatchet job on it: a review of the book itself by pop critic Michael Ventura and an accompanying essay condemning the book's main character, John Wesley Hardin (by Jesse Sublett). The book is a dramatic account of one of the most volitile periods of American history -- how white Texans dealt with post-Civil War Reconstruction. Ventura attacked the book from several directions. His first devastating strategy was to sneer at the book's designation as a "graphic novel" ("Well, it's graphic enough -- without pictures the 148-page story would shrink to maybe 25 pages, if that."), which is a little like saying that if you took the images away from a movie it sure wouldn't be much of a movie. He went on to question Jackson's historical accuracy -- falsely as it turned out -- and finally called the author and his work racist.

I thought it was a boneheaded review by someone who evinced no awareness, much less sympathy, with the comics medium in general and Jackson's work in particular -- which is the least you should expect from a review of a respected cartoonist's work. This didn't outrage me, though; After all, shoddy reviews are published every day, and it was more or less par for the course. What really pissed me off was the Chronicle's refusal to give Jackson space to rebut the review on the specious grounds that "if we allowed everyone who disagreed with a review of their art to rebut it, we would have room for little else." This is obvious bullshit. Every restaurant owner, musician, filmmaker and theater director who's criticized in the pages of the Austin Chronicle would not choose to rebut a negative review and in the unlikely event that the paper was overwhelmed with such rebuttals it could establish parameters accordingly. The Chronicle was clearly taking advantage of its privileged position of owning the local press. This is unjust on the face of it, and gives the victim of a bad review no recourse to have his say. (The Journal has prided itself on its willingness to run letters rebutting reviews, no matter how long or blowhardish the responses are; fair's fair.) And I know how this feels first-hand: When the allegedly 1st Amendment magazine Gauntlet ran a 30,000 word hatchet job on me, they denied my request to publish a rebuttal from me. Just like that. So, this interview with Jackson is my way of helping even up the odds.

I've known Jackson for almost 20 years now; I've been an admirer of his satirical and historical comics from the mid '70s, and published his Los Tejanos in 1981. Lost Cause is a major work by one of the most important artists currently working in the medium, and if the Chronicle refused to behave decently and give him space to address Ventura's charges, I felt the least I could do is show him the respect the Chronicle didn't and provide a forum to do just that in the pages of the Journal. We discuss not only the review that started a firestorm on net chat rooms, but the book more generally and the delicate position of writing politically charged historical drama.

GARY GROTH: Let's talk about Lost Cause and the controversy created by the review by Michael Ventura in the Austin Chronicle.

JACK JACKSON: I was pretty upset about it, and didn't really have any way to deal with it, except appeal to the Chronicle to let me defend myself, which they wouldn't do. And that was even more aggravating than the review itself.

GROTH: That they wouldn't give you the same kind of space that they gave him, I found to be pretty contemptible. The review ran in the Austin Chronicle on September 18, 1998. Was there any backlash towards you, as far as you could tell, after he called you and your work racist?

JACKSON: No. On the contrary, people were rising to my defense -- calling me, writing me and trying to e-mail me -- but I'm not on the Internet, so a friend of mine who was passed these things along. I was amazed at the issues that were being discussed on these posts, you know? They were going to the nitty-gritty, and half of them hadn't even read the book yet. They were just looking at the review itself and the ignorance that it manifested.

GROTH: So you didn't catch any more flak because of the review?

JACKSON: Oh, absolutely not. No, it was very supportive, and that's what finally made me realize that hey, there's no point in trying to dodge this, you might as well grab the bull by the horns, you know? I don't want to use the term "milk it," but controversy sells books. So if this guy wants to label me a racist, sure, let's talk about it. Consequently, I was going to book-signings and discussing the racial aspects of my book. For example, the governor's wife every year throws a thing down at the state capitol called the Texas Book Festival, and I was an invited speaker on a panel on John Wesley Hardin -- and guess what came up? The review. So I figure there's black people sitting in the audience, and you just have to deal with it, once somebody decides that your work is racist garbage. That's basically what the guy was saying, that Lost Cause is going to pervert and twist the minds of innocent young children, and he sees hitnself as their savior, as it were, by denouncing my work. To say it blind-sided me would be an understatement, because as you know, all my previous work had done just the opposite. It had tried to tell the story of "the neglected historical others," as Rusty Witek would call them. And simply because I wanted to do a book and tell the story from the perspective of the white Southerners who John Wesley Hardin was representing, as it were, then all of a sudden, I get this kind of reaction. At my age, I just don't need it, you know?

GROTH: Tell me a little about this panel you were on, and what the reaction there was, and what the discussion was.

JACKSON: Well, I was simply trying to say that you're talking about a very, very difficult historical period here, Reconstruction. And this is one of the few instances in which the white folks, particularly those in the South, found themselves the oppressed, as opposed to being the oppressor. They were just not ready for it, and could not make the transition to a subjugated people. They could not accept the standards that were being imposed on them, the way people were coming down from the North and saying, OK, I want you to act this way and that way, I want you to think this way, and these people are now going to be your social equals. So you had these pockets of resistance, which I think is natural in any similar situation. Even worse here. And violence, of course, was a necessary aspect of this transitional period before the kinks were worked out. Hell, they're still not worked out. But you can imagine in those days what the situation was like. The difficulty came mainly with the young men, the young-bloods, those who weren't old enough to have taken part in the Civil War. They had not experienced all of the obscene things that go on during war. They're sitting around listening to their older brothers, cousins and uncles talk about them, and they kind of saw themselves as the champions of this life style which all of a sudden is gone. "Don't worry, Pa. I'll make things right."

This was why you had the violence that occurred in that period so much, and their elders provided them with a support network that prolonged the ordeal.

GROTH: Let me quote from Ventura's review and ask you to respond to this accusation. He said, referring to the white Texan population in Reconstruction Texas, "Jackson's heroes have courage in the face of danger, fierceness, determination, flair, and a kind of flat-out pedal-to-the-metal madness that is very American" --

JACKSON: [laughs] This guy's great. He's a gonzo journalist by trade, I believe, always talking in his column about the major book he's about to do.

GROTH: He goes on to say, and I think this is the central accusation, 'Jackson is a racist because he finds these qualities only in white people. Almost without exception he presents blacks as oafs, exactly as blacks were represented in the old-type movies that are the model for his dialogue." And then he goes on to say "Every drawing of a black man is the same drawing, same bone structure, same expression, same lips. His whites by contrast are differentiated. This is more than a simple gap, this is how Jackson sees."

JACKSON: Well, the guy needs glasses very badly, and several of the people whose letters the Chronicle did publish pointed this out, that there is as much differentiation in the black people in the book -- because I'm working from photographs, for heaven's sake -- as there is with white people. But the reviewer evidently did not notice these. He thinks that because my blacks have flatter noses and larger lips than my whites, that these anatomical differences are somehow an insidious plot on my part to dehumanize these people. Gary, he's saying that I'm operating on exactly the same level as the Nazi artists in Germany.

GROTH: Right, right.

JACKSON: Those artists/cartoonists who depicted the Jews as squat, fat, little hooked-nose subhumans to prepare the German population for the idea that they should be exterminated. He's saying that I'm doing the same thing, and that by depicting my blacks in this fashson, I make the white violence against them more acceptable. Hey, man, that's a heavy charge. And it is not justified by the artwork. If you look at it, you will see these people come in different shapes and flavors like the white folks.

GROTH: I didn't detect that the blacks were any more caricatured within your style than the whites.

JACKSON: This is what is happening: I've never seen a single bit of artwork that Michael Ventura's ever produced, yet he claims to be an artist in his review, and he is not even perceptive enough to note the differences in the people that I'm drawing. And I was just floored by that and many of his other accusations. I'm not an ignoramus. This was not kind of a happy-go-lucky, "Let's try to draw these subhuman Negroes so that everybody will think that they got what was coming to them," sort of thing. Ventura's write-up was just a litany of putdowns -- everybody who read it said that it was the most bitter kind of so-called review they had ever read in their life and that it really amounted to a personal attack, a smear. I certainly wasn't prepared for it. So like I said, it put me in a state of mind where for like a couple of weeks, I didn't even want to do anything, you know? Why bother? If this is the kind of response that you get to something that you slaved on for a couple of years... It really did take the wind out of my sails, I must say. And he later defended himself, because evidently he had been getting a lot of letters and feedback from people himself.

GROTH: Now where did he defend himself?

JACKSON: He has a weekly column called "After 3 AM," or "Midnight Hour," or something like that. I don't know if he lives here in Austin or in L.A. I know that he bounced back and forth for a while, trying to become a screenwriter out there, and had no luck at it. One of his projects, as it turns out, was a screenplay dealing with John Wesley Hardin, which nobody wanted. I think that when he saw my book, a lot of something -- antagonism -- came into play. I just don't know. I've never met the gentleman, who, I understand, hails from the Bronx.

GROTH: How do you respond to his charge that you imbued the whites with certain qualities that you did not imbue the blacks with?

JACKSON: Well, it's horseshit. But my point is this: You have to, when you do a book, take a perspective, O.K.? My perspective in this case was from the side of the white Southerners during the Reconstruction period. Basically, I saw the book, because it is about a feud, as dealing with white-on-white violence, none of which Ventura even mentioned in the review. He only saw the white-on-black aspect of it, which in fact is a very minor part of the book. I am not trying to tell the story of John Wesley Hardin from the black point of view. And I'm not even interested in what happened to the blacks except insofar as it was a contributing factor to the overall violence of the era in terms of military rule and Reconstruction. So I am taking probably the most unpopular perspective for the book imaginable. And that is the politically incorrect idea that you can tell a story about racists sympathetically. You see what I'm saying? Because they were racists, as Ventura points out, but they were also human beings. In other words, racism was just part of the mind-set of that day and time. So it just seems mind-boggling to me that you cannot take any perspective you deem appropriate in the story you're telling. I think that an artist should have that latitude, in terms of putting together his story, and deciding on a perspective that is key to all that follows. And I say, hey, I'm not telling this story like Alex Haley would tell it. I understand and appreciate his approach, but it's not my cup of tea. Roots come in different colors.

GROTH: When you decided to tell the story from the point of view of the white Texas population, you must have known that you were treading a real razor's edge between sympathizing with their historical moment, with them as people caught up in an historical moment, and sympathizing with racism per se.

JACKSON: Well, of course I did. This is why the project sat on my backburner for a decade. During this agonizing period of time, I'm sending xeroxes of the script out to people who specialize on the Reconstruction era, as well as historians in South Texas. In other words, I'm soliciting response on different levels here. I'm going to the chronistas of those counties concerned, and I'm going to authorities on a national level, and I'm saying, "Tell me if I've got my facts straight here. Tell me if this is the way it happened." And so I got a lot of feedback over a period of time, and I finally felt pretty confident about it, except, of course, for the powder keg that it represents in telling the story from a point of view that most people do not find sympathetic.

GROTH: I think that one of the things that seems to come through his review, is that there seems to be an implcit accusation that you didn't condemn the racism from an authorial point of view, and yet --

JACKSON: Oh, yeah. That was a major problem with Ventura.

GROTH: But you did not feel the need to do that?

JACKSON: No, I didn't. In this case, I figured that what I needed to do was to make the story more up close and personal, and to show what was motivating these people to act the way they did, to reinforce, in my narrative voice, what you saw below, as opposed to qualifying it. There's a couple ways you can go in this voice. You can say, folks, what you're going to see in the panel below is horrible, an atrocity, a real stain against humanity, but, sad to say, this is the way it happened. And then show the artwork. I would argue that that is not effective storytelling because it strips away whatever power the artwork would have. By that kind of a qualifying voice you work against and negate the visual side of the equation -- and visuals are integral to the comics medium, aren't they?

GROTH: You're making a distinction between propagating racism -- which is what Ventura accused you of, I think -- and depicting racism -- which is what you're claiming to have done. But, would you agree with the proposition that an author could assert racism by the way he depicts it, that this is a matter of interpretation?

JACKSON: Yes, it's all in the interpretive realm, and this is exactly why our society has tied itself in knots conceming what's racist and what isn't. Today, many Chinese-Americans would find The Yellow Kid an objectionable symbol of past racism. That's also why humorous classics like Amos and Andy have fallen into the racist category. Funny, bust-your-gut-laughing stuff; but black intellectuals think it's the worst depiction of their society imaginable. I, a young country hick who'd never even seen a black person much less a big-city slum, thought it was a riot -- every bit as good as Red Skelton's "Freddy the Freeloader" bum character. [It's] all in how you interpret it and who's doing the interpreting. What a white person might find amusing, a black person might see just the opposite. This is a given, and seldom can you please everyone -- especially if your "interpretation" deals with a period as troubled as post-war Reconstruction in the South.

Ventura, so it seems, thinks that I must be a racist for even trying to tackle this subject, for even wasting my time with people he denounces as all racists themselves. "Why bother with such scumbags?" he asks. "Better that they and their evil ways remain forgotten." So I was doomed, in his estimation, from the git-go.

GROTH: One thing he objected to was your narration, and your use of the word "Negro" in the narration, and he said that's "Jackson talking, not his characters," but it was my impression that it was an omniscient narration, circa 1870 or so.

JACKSON: Are you talking about the use of the words "Colored" and "Negro" in my narrative banners?

GROTH: Yeah, in the captions. And it seems to me like what you were trying to do was to narrate it from the point of view of someone in 1870.

JACKSON: Yes, precisely! Now, Ventura makes some sort of a snide remark about that, saying regardless of "what the politically correct crowd thinks," and my argument is, "Hey, you're one of them yourself." What is a politically correct person? Has the reviewer never heard of a national organization that advances the rights of who? -- Colored people. Has he never heard of the Negro College Fund, whose motto in TV commercials is "A mind is a terrible thing to waste?" And yet he is condemning me for using "Colored" and "Negro" as a narrator. What is a politically correct person except somebody who hustles to make sure they're using the latest term that a minority group decides to call itself? African-American didn't exist as a term in that era. And yet that's how he would have me refer to black people in my captions, for to do otherwise is a slap-in-the-face to modern readers and especially to blacks. So I'm just at a total loss as to how to deal with that kind of criticism.

They were "Colored" people back in the 186Os and 187Os. They were "Negroes," which comes from the Spanish word for "black" [negro]. So I really don't know what to say to such bullshit charges that my work is racist and unfit for younger readers.

GROTH: He claimed to have caught you on a historical mistake, with the Winchester rifle...

JACKSON: Right. And he cited that one example, I might add, to say that my entire work was historically inaccurate and not to be trusted as a legitimate history of the era.

GROTH: Right. But he was in fact wrong, wasn't he?

JACKSON: He was in fact wrong. After letters started coming to the Chronicle, Ventura wrote a little blurb at the end of one of his columns. He said, "It was an honest mistake, which needs no apology." I loved that. He calls me a shoddy historian, but all he's doing is displaying his own ignorance and pretending it's okay to do so.

GROTH: And he based his charge virtually on that one mistake which he later conceded wasn't a mistake.

JACKSON: On that one damn thing, that a Winchester couldn't have been in a scene in 1857. And I'm not even drawing a Winchester. You know, a Winchester on the right side of the plate his a slot where you slide a bullet in? You look at the picture and tell me if you see one of those things on the side of the plate. No! It's a Henry rifle, and it's the same kind that Blondie used to save old Tuco's neck from the noose in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. They were rare pre-Civil War weapons, but people down in Texas got the latest in military technology available. Old Sam Colt himself said that the Texans had basically made his arm, and without them, he would have stayed in bankruptry. So when these types of repeating rifles came out, you know who was buying them first: Texans.

Anyway, that was just another example of the review's misdirected criticism of me, and Ventura used it to make a mountain out of a molehill.

GROTH: In the book itself, you talk about your various historical sources, but can you tell me what you used for the visual sources? How do you dig up that stuff?

JACKSON: Oh, there's quite a bit of it. For example, Hardin himself. All of his papers and photographic collection have been preserved. He wrote scores and scores of letters while he was in prison, and his relatives down there at Nixon gave all this stuff to the university in San Marcos, which is about 30 miles south of Austin. All that material is there, including pictures of the children, his wife, himself and other relatives. Much of it has been published, by the way, because he's one of the more notable gunfighters who actually left an autobiography behind. So in one sense, you've got a store of visual materials available for a project of this kind, cameras having been invented by the Civil War era? You've got no problem with weapons, costumes, houses... the whole shebang. Photographs of many of the main characters; they exist.

GROTH: What's always struck me about your historical work is just how authentic all the visuals look; I'm talking about the scenery, the carriages, the wagons, the houses, and so forth. Is all that, in fact, accurate?

JACKSON: Absolutely. I pride myself on it. In fact, one of the leading authorities on the Reconstruction period and the military's role in it is a man named William Richter. He lives out in Tucson. He not only read the script for historical accuracy, but he's now a big fan, and when I sent him the finished book, he wrote back and he said, "I can't believe it. I can recognize every general in your panels. Is this a comic book? I didn't know comics were so sophisticated." And stuff like that. So it's edifying when somebody who has combed the archives for these types of documents thinks that you're doing a halfway decent job.

But, of course, I'm not trying to cater academic "specialists." I'm tryng to get the general readership to feel the mood and the tempo of the time, and understand what it was like. This is my whole thing. When I create these books, what I'm trying to do is take people back in a time machine to that day and time and let them see events as they occurred through these people's eyes.

Well, some people don't like the view.

GROTH: [Laughs.] Right.

JACKSON: I notice that Alex Haley didn't beat around the bush with Roots, even when the thing was filmed. I mean, there was a lot of very objectionable issues that he met head-on. The white owner's abuse of the attractive black women, did he skirt the issue? Hell, no. Chuck Connors is crowded right on top of her telling her to relax and enjoy herself. And so I figure if a black man can tell the story and do it well, from his side -- his racist, if you would, point of view -- why the hell can't a white man do the same thing? But that's just not the way it works; we have a double standard about such things. Now people are even shy about naming a high school after somebody if they owned slaves. In an era when it was socially acceptable to do so! It's just mind-boggiing. Jim Bowie, for example. There was a great stink when they tried to name a high school here in Austin "Bowie High School," because he had been a slave-runner and owned slaves before dying at the Alamo.

It gets a little bit bizarre. Everybody in the South owned slaves in those days if they could afford to. It was a mark of one's social standing.

GROTH: As someone who has drawn some of the most virulent anti-racist comics in the history of comics, are you conflicted about that kind of political correctness?

JACKSON: It's not a matter of being politically correct to me at all, Gary. My creative mandate is to try to tell the story truthfully.

GROTH: No, no, I mean, when decent people lobby not to have schools named after people they consider to be oppressive people. I mean, do you feel conflicted about your feelings toword that?

JACKSON: Do I feel conflicted?

GROTH: Yeah, do you have some sympathy for that point of view?

JACKSON: Not really. I don't, because once you start hauling skeletons out of the closest, we won't have anybody worthy of naming anything after. For example, there's all of that hullabaloo about Thomas Jefferson and his children by a mulatto slave girl, or whatever, and then the family came up with DNA results that proved it. But earlier, when Nick Nolte made that movie about Jefferson in Paris, scholars were outraged. "Oh, you're showing Jefferson doing something that the historical record doesn't definitely say he did." So, when the DNA thing hit the media, I got a chuckle out of it, needless to say.

No, I don't lose any sleep at night over what my ancestors may or may not have done. Trying to guilt-trip an entire culture is -- I don't know, it's a little sick. We're not responsible for our ancestors' failings. It's not a problem with me. My problem in telling a story like Lost Cause, is to try and tell it as well as possible, from whatever perspective is most effective. In other words, with the Los Tejanos book, I certainly didn't want to tell that story from the white Texan point of view. Am I a racist for using the Mexican perspective? Most readers didn't think so. In fact, they patted me on the back and said I was breaking new ground. I think it's a little ironic that the same approach to a different subject has now caused me to be branded a racist.

So it's not a matter of being politically correct. As a storyteller, once you take a focal character, as a storyteller, I think you're obliged to try to tell the story from that person's point of view, and his culture's as well.

GROTH: You mentioned Haley's Roots, which is the history of slavery as seen through the eyes of a slave. Do you think that seeing history through the eyes of the victims gives the author a leg up, morally speaking, whereas seeing history through the eyes of the oppressor -- whether its the racist South during Reconstruction or Nazis or Guatemalan death squads -- could be intrinsically morally questionable? Does one of the goals ofart -- to humanize its subjects -- run into moral conflict with such an approach?

JACKSON: An interesting point. Obviously we "civilized" folk about to step into the 21st century identify with and see sympathetically the plight of victims of oppression. Thus, the success of Haley's Roots. White people the world over could appreciate the struggle for human dignity that his characters represented. Not only did Haley have a leg up morally, but as a writer he obeyed the creative imperative that I just mentioned: to tell his story as well and as truthfully as possible, whatever the cost. Imagine the reaction he'd have gotten if his book and TV series hit the market in 1910!

Now, is it "intrinsically morally questionable" to attempt a story from the oppressor's perspective? I don't know. People are just people, and few are perfect. Yes, white Texans of Reconstruction times were racists (as we now define the term), but they also had the same hopes and dreams of any era. Their lives had some redeeming qualities, and I don't think it's right to sweep them into the historical dustbin because they did politically incorrect things by current moral standards. True, there's a thin line between "glorifying" their misdeeds -- evidently what Ventura thinks I've done -- and sympathizing with their human condition in rough times. They were my ancestors, but I don't see how I've "fallen under their spell" (as the self-righteous reviewer claimed) by attempting to recapture the spirit of the Reconstruction era from their perspective. I don't even see them as the oppressor but rather as the victim. Maybe that's what annoyed Ventura. Anyway, it's not like I tried to hide their blemishes in Lost Cause; I put them right out thece for everyone to see, "warts and all." How is this glorifying my ancestors any more than Haley did his?

I guess, by extension, what I'm saying is that, yes, some death-camp guard's son or daughter could do a book/film/comic about their father's "struggle" against the Jews or the Mayan Indians in whatever historical period. It probably wouldn't win the acclaim of The Pawnbroker or Maus, that's safe to say! But their father, whether a brutal fucker or a hapless soul merely caught in an institutionalized web of violence, was still human, and if the work "humanized" him, then it would qualify as art, wouldn't it? Objectionable to those whose parent/ancestors were gassed or hacked to death? Certainly. But such things are history; they happened, and we're still trying to understand why. I had never thought much about life from the Nazi point of view until I saw Marlon Brando in The Young Lions. Though he was on the "wrong side," his role made me realize that he was a human being, too, his inner-workings worthy of attention just like the good guys.

So to me there's no "moral conflict" in humanizing your subjects, be they scumbags or saints, and I don't think the goals of art are incompatible with such an approach. If the story has a compelling ring of truth, it's art, and political correctness can take the hindmost.

GROTH: Now, you have been criticized, in Lost Cause, as being a bit all over the map, because it's not only about John Wesley Hardin, it's also about the Taylor-Sutton feud, and there's less one central character in this book than there is in say, Los Tejanos. Did you feel that scattered?

JACKSON: No, not really. Part of the problem comes from the fact that the editor there at Kitchen Sink wanted to use a different subtitle on the cover. Something about "the story of famous gunfighter John Wesley Hardin." So a lot of people saw that and bought the thing thinking that they were getting a full-fledged book about the life of John Wesley Hardin. Actually, I'm not interested in him except in terms of this feud that I'm writing about, and the era itself. So I think some people were disappointed, because the "main character" doesn't show up until deep into the book. But if you look on the title page itself you will see what the book is really about.

GROTH: I noticed that.

JACKSON: That's misleading hype, but I don't feel like I should be blamed for that. I understand that when a publishing company does a book, they want to market it on the basis of name recognition, via the Bob Dylan song, and the Time-Life blurb about him being so mean that he shot a man for snoring, blah blah blah. True, the book has sort of a "cast of thousands." And I guess that that's discombobulating, if you're expecting a very focused story told just from one individual's experiences throughout. But I didn't really see any other way I could deal with it, because this one person is not there all the time.

GROTH: I gather that focusing on John Wesley Hardin uould not have told the whole story.

JACKSON: No, it wouldn't have. He's in there, but right beside Creed Taylor and Joe Tumlinson, both brothers-in-law, who are the two main feudists. It's kind of like the Hatfields and the McCoys. And they are actually as large, if not larger, characters in the book than John Wesley Hardin is. If I wanted to do a biography of Hardin, believe me, it would have been completely different than this. But as I say, I was only interested in him insofar as he related to the feud, which was basically white-on-white violence. It wasn't white-on-black, except just once in a while when black people crossed them either as soldiers or policemen. I think if you'll look in the book at the number of people that are shot down, you'll see more of them are white folks than anything else.

GROTH: Can I ask you why someone else painted the cover?

JACKSON: Because I don't paint very much. I'm basically a practitioner of black-on-white, you know? [Taking] the old crowquill to a blank piece of paper, and getting something to arise from it, is completely different from color work. I have no color vision or talent for it. My experiences in the past, when I've tried to do color separations for my own art, have been dismal. About the only thing that I've really done is the Comanche Moon cover. And to me, this guy Sam Yeates is just incredible. I didn't think that Sam really captured the facial features of John Wesley Hardin. He's a little chubby there, and Hardin was more raw-boned and lean. But I think it works OK. And the other thing that probably put off Ventura, and possibly other readers, is you'll notice what's hanging behind him there on the cover.

GROTH: Oh, yeah. [Laughs.]

JACKSON: A tattered Confederate flag. As you well know, there are a lot of states in the Union that no longer fly such a banner from the flagpole of their capitol. In a sense maybe that is a red herring, or something, and might put off some people.

GROTH: Well, it is provocative.

JACKSON: I suppose so. I've tried to be like that most of my artistic career.

GROTH: But it certainly reflects the tensions that you were portraying, so...

JACKSON: Not only that, the book itself has those dynamics in the background. In other words, the legacy of the lost cause in terms of the Confederacy's stars and bars is the background for the entire book. But that's not the way I'm using the title; I'm not referring to the Confederacy or the Civil War, per se. I'm talking more about a passing life style, of which slavery was only one aspect. I mean, here are people being told that they are going to have to live differently and think differently than they have in the past. Nobody wants to be subjected to that kind of domination, especially whenever it's done at the hands of the military.

GROTH: I assume you were heavily influenced by Kurtzman's war material?

JACKSON: Oh, definitely so. The funny thing about the Kurtzman war books is that the Kurtzman strips were my least favorite of all. I much preferred the stories that other artists drew. I assume that Kurtzman had a guiding hand in writing them all. Did he, or did he not?

GROTH: Kurtzman wrote them all, except in the last few issues.

JACKSON: But nonetheless, as a visual storyteller, I did not find Harvey near as effective as the rest of the guys. He was too impressionistic for my tastes.

GROTH: I bet you liked Jack Davis.

JACKSON: Oh, of course. Davis particularly, but most of the rest of the crowd were also outstanding. You know, Wally Wood, Reed Crandall and --

GROTH: John Severin.

JACKSON: The whole gang. Yeah. Severin especially. Those books were a real eye-opener to me, and some of the best that were ever done.

GROTH: Has your drawing changed over the years from Comanche Moon and Los Tejanos to Lost Cause?

JACKSON: Well, I was rushed on this book. I was given a year to produce a 140-page book, and I told them I simply couldn't do it, and they gave me a year and a half. But then I was rushed on the inking and everything, and felt like that I was doing a sloppy job.

GROTH: Who is "they?"

JACKSON: The editor that I had at Kitchen Sink, Chris Couch. But I can't blame him, because at this time Kitchen Sink had fallen under the wing of their West Coast investment firm. And they had, I believe, some guy there barking orders about what would be done, when and on what schedule, and so on. It was extremely difficult to get a contract out of the boys at that time, because it had to pass so many musters. There were so many hurdles that you had to clear before you could even get an OK on a book. [It was] not like in the old days, all very "corporate." And once, like I say, that they decided yeah, they wanted to do it, then I'm put on this incredibly demanding schedule, and -- so what I was trying to do was to simplify the art a little bit in the book to deliver it on time. I don't know if it's readily noticeable. The lettering, in particular, is not as carefully done as I did on Los Tejanos, for example.

GROTH: I can see that.

JACKSON: Yeah. I had a much more satisfying experience with this book that I've just finished, which should come out this summer. I believe that it is the best artwork I've ever done.

GROTH: Now what book is this, Jack?

JACKSON: It's called Indian Lover. Sam Houston and the Cherokees.

GROTH: Who's publishing that?

JACKSON: An outfit here in Austin called Mojo Press. They published an anthology of Joe Lansdale's work called

Atomic Chili

GROTH: Now how can you afford to do these books?

JACKSON: How can I afford to do them?

GROTH: Yeah. [Laughs.] Yes. I mean, they can't pay well.

JACKSON: No, the pay is not very good. But you know, I decided a long time ago that life is short and you might as well be doing something you enjoy. Even if you have to kind of skimp along and starve in the process. This becomes more difficult once you have a wife and child.

GROTH: I know.

JACKSON: Yeah. But nonetheless, I've miraculously managed to pretty much do the types of things that I want to do, whether it is commercially viable or not. I mean, my sympathies are to my publishers, you being one of them, for going along with it, and helping my projects come to fruition.

GROTH: I know the royalty you earned on Los Tejanos and I can't imagine that the amount of money that you were paid for Lost Cause could possibly have sustained a year and a half of living.

JACKSON: Like I say, the only thing that makes it possible is usually people pay me as I work. So I've got a little bit coming in each month, just to cover the basics. And then I scramble for the rest.

GROTH: Well, I'm glad you can do it.

JACKSON: Well, yeah. I'm crazy for doing it. And that's why it hurts when some turkey calls me a racist for a labor of love. But it's what I enjoy, and I've seen so many dear friends not make it as long as I have, you know? Sheridan, Irons, Griffin -- each time one of them kicks the bucket, it makes me realize that hey, our time here is not guaranteed. It's a day by day proposition. We'd better be doing something that we're getting some fulfillment out of, and I assume this is why you continue to do what you've been doing.

GROTH: I think it is.

JACKSON: Now for how long?

GROTH: Twenty-three years.

JACKSON: That's what I'm thinking. Hey, you're almost to retirement age.

GROTH: Yeah, right. On what? But yeah, that makes all the difference in the world, you know?

JACKSON: Like the old-timer musicians that were sitting around chewing the fat: "Hey, you're getting old enough to retire," and the other guy says, "Retire from what? I've never worked a day in my life." If you're enjoying it, it's not like work. I continue to do it, and I've found something that's even less rewarding, financially, than doing comic books.

GROTH: Good god, like -- let me guess -- translating Croatian poetry?

JACKSON: No, scholarly publications for the university press circuit. And I've been cranking them out, almost as many as my comic books.

GROTH: I'd love to see some of that. How would I get a hold of it?

JACKSON: Have you got four hundred bucks?

GROTH: Four hundred bucks?

JACKSON: The Book Club of Texas, which is a brainchild of Stanley Marcus, the guy who ran the big Nieman-Marcus chain clothing store here in Texas. Back before the Second World War, he started a thing called The Book Club of Texas, that would issue quality reprints of rare and out-of-print books. It lapsed during the war, but it's been revived, and they decided to publish new scholarship as well as these oldies but moldies. This summer, I hope, they're coming out with a deluxe two-volume boxed set of a book I wrote. The books are like ten inches by fifteen inches, finely printed in an edition of 300 copies, and the book's called Shooting the Sun. It's a history of the mapping of early Texas. And you know, there is just no pay there, considering all the years of work I put into it. Because it's a worthy project, I basically forego my royalties, production costs being so high. But it will be so stunningly beautiful once it comes out.