"There's a really important ancestry in Austin from the underground comix scene," White says. And though by 14 he'd burned out on the Silver Age supermen and crime-fighters, he found Zap Comix only a few years later. Kennedy was assassinated, making him one of the youngest conspiracy theorists ever at 11 years old. Growing up the son of a newspaper editor in Mansfield and Arlington, White was in Dallas the day after John F. The most recent comic I did since then was last year, in Hotwire, and it was more a noir-type mystery about JFK, called 'My Gun Is Long.' And it's still very, very dialogue and narration heavy." It's really just an illustrated timeline. In The Bush Junta, I contributed a piece about 9/11, and that piece is barely a comic strip.
And those topics don't lend themselves to traditional comics. "What I do now," he says, "tends to be more political than anything else I wonder why. A close friend of the late Jack Jackson, one year away from retirement in the dean's office at UT's school of architecture, co-editor of The Bush Junta, featured in the touring gallery Comics on the Verge, and a blogger and podcaster on politics and conspiracies prolific enough to rival Alex Jones, White most recently has been creating work that's closer to surrealistically illustrated essays than straight comics. Mack White is one of the classic Austin artists. We sat down with five local artists who range from living and working through the Eighties' zine scene to just starting their first big contract about how they got there. Comix, manga, noir, diaries, and superheroes, they're making it. Instead of breaking out in the comics pages of The Daily Texan, which in its day played gallery to Robert Rodriguez and Ben Sargent, these artists are simply making it on their own. And fewer people follow the still fertile current comics scene. But while Chris Ware reigned through the Nineties as one of the most meticulous, creative artists and Berkeley Breathed made Bill the Cat into a household name or at least a familiar bathroom reading companion fewer people remember Austin as the birthplace of underground comix with Jack "Jaxon" Jackson's God Nose. And it's certainly more than enough to justify the geek-chic culture. Austin has a pedigree of comic-book artists to make any bullpen on any coast nervous.
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