Jay Jackson (artist)

Jackson died of a heart attack on May 16, 1954. His widow got the Defender to publish the two unpublished strips, and sold them to other major black newspapers, including the Michigan Chronicle, Louisville Defender, Tri-State Defender and the New York Age Defender.

In 1949, Jackson left Chicago for Los Angeles and set up a studio there. He would stay there, except for a brief period doing murals in Mexico, for the rest of his life.

In 1938, pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories had fallen on hard times, and had been purchased by Chicago-based cartoonist-turned-ad man William B. Ziff. He turned its editorial direction over to Chicago science fiction fan Ray Palmer. Ziff's company had obtained a dominant position in advertising for black-oriented publications, and he was familiar with Jackson's work for the Defender and other papers. Jackson illustrated three stories in the first Palmer-edited issue of Amazing (June 1938). Over the next four years, his work would appear in nearly forty issues of Amazing and its stablemate, Fantastic Adventures, with Jackson frequently illustrating more than one story in a single issue.

By 1934, Jackson was put in charge of cartoons for the Defender. In addition to editorial cartoons, he did a variety of single-panel cartoon series and comic strips for the Defender and other papers of the Negro press, including The Adventures of Bill, As Others See Us, Billy Ken, Exposition Follies, Senda, Skin Deep, Society Sue, Speed Jackson, and Tisha Mingo. In 1934 he revived and reshaped the Defender's long-running Bungleton Green strip. Comics historian Tim Jackson wrote, "Jackson produced an astounding amount of comics and illustrations during the decade of the 1940s... Jackson's illustrations fairly dominated the newspapers in which they appeared." He married Eleanor Poston, a fellow Defender staffer.

Born in Oberlin, Ohio, Jackson dropped out of school at thirteen. He drove spikes for a railroad, moved to Pittsburgh and worked in a steel mill, attended Ohio Wesleyan University for a year, and had an unsuccessful and brief career as a boxer. He left Wesleyan, started a sign-painting business, and became a featured artist for the Pittsburgh Courier. He began selling illustrations to the Defender and Abbott’s Monthly in the mid-1920s, but did not become a Defender staffer until 1933.

Jay Paul Jackson (September 10, 1905 – 1954) was an African-American artist who spent many years working for the Chicago Defender, in addition to working as an illustrator for science fiction magazines such as Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures.

After four years in the science fiction field, Jackson realized the potential for science fiction to safely criticize contemporary America by displacing action to another world or time. He stopped his work for the science fiction magazines, but turned the Defender's long-running Bungleton Green strip into science fiction and Green himself into a superhero. "Bung" is killed, revived and rebuilt, time travels first to 1778 (to showcase the shameful history of American slavery), then to Memphis in 2043, where blacks and whites have built a colorblind utopia, but a newly-risen continent of green people treats whites ("chalkies") in a manner painfully familiar to Jackson's black readers of the 1940s. (By 1947, this transformation would be reversed — "it was all a dream" — and another artist would take over the strip, returning it to its gag strip origins which Jackson disdained.)