Underground Station
by Bruce Sweeney
It breaks my heart to have open with this paragraph, but word has it that the great underground artist John Jackson, aka Jaxon, has died at his own hand by a gunshot. We have lost an enormous talent. From the same college as Gilbert Shelton, the University of Texas; Austin, Jaxon created one of the first underground comics, God Nose.
He made an enormous contribution to the genre, telling true historical adventures through his medium of a caliber and stature that few could reach. Some of his finest material was a remanifestation of the old EC comics of the ’50s. He worked that explosive horror line into titles drawn for Skull and Slow Death in the ’70s. His Comanche Moon, the true story of a kidnaped white girl on the Western frontier by Comanches was one of the best titles of the decade.
Rick Geary has done it again for NBM (www.nbmpublishing.com) with The Case of Madeleine Smith at a reasonable $15.95 in hardcover. Rick has devoted enormous attention and talent to illustrating the historical assassinations of British and American history. He has done enormously compelling tales about Jack the Ripper, Lizzy Borden, and Abraham Lincoln. The Case of Madeliene Smith is about the events surrounding the poisoning of a young Scottish society lady’s unfortunate suitor. Rick plunges us into the details of an obscure Victorian murder trial. He draws no conclusions, and we’re left with uncertainty as to the poisoning death.
Further, NBM has another $15.95 hardback title out, Warfix, about a news junkie who turns into a war correspondent hooked on war itself. The book is done by David Axe and artist Steven Olexa. This is way topical, of course, and clearly speaks to this generation.
Sort of back up the street, the University Press of Mississippi is publishing and distributing a lot of material covering comics and animation. Ol’ Miss in the ’60s was a hotbed of segregation; resisting integration of its campus until President Eisenhower nationalized the local National Guard. Ol’ Miss wanted little to do with the 20th century. Forgive me for shaking my head over their title, Black Superheroes available as a paperback for $18 from www.upress.state.ms.us. Eerily, their Comic Books as History features the recently deceased Jack Jackson, as well as Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar.
Canada’s Drawn and Quarterly (www.drawnandquarterly.com) continues to excel as a small publisher with an enormous amount of talent in its roster. They have a superior stable of polished artists turning out high grade product. They have material by R. Crumb, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Joe Sacco, and Joe Matt, to name some obvious successes. They also show heart in developing a format for some lesser known but stupendous emerging artists in their robust compilation, Drawn and Quarterly Showcase: Book Four. I have yet to tease a copy from them, but the promotion looks promising. It retails for $14.95.
There’s a new fanzine out, Mineshaft, devoted to underground art (get it?). It’s one of these sporadically published little magazines that seems to attract as many older underground artists as it does subscribers because it’s chock-filled with material by Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Kim Deitch, and a host of others. The cost is $17.50 for a three-issue subscription, but this is too funky to be without. (PO Box 1226 Durham, NC 27702)