Tim Jackson – RIP

Cartoonist and comics historian Tim Jackson has passed away.

Social media was sharing the sad news of Tim’s passing yesterday:

Comics community–I am very sorry to report that the cartoonist Tim Jackson has passed away. Tim, cartoonist for the Chicago Defender as well as many other venues, and the author of the invaluable Pioneering Cartoonists of Color, was kind and always generous with his time. He was devoted to making sure people knew about African American cartoonists.

and

Chicago cartoonist Tim Jackson passed away today. I’ve known Tim for almost 30 years, ever since I moved to Chicago. He, along with underground comix legend Grass Green, was a part of my early entrance into the game. I have had the privilege of being around, and absorbing knowledge from, true pioneers in this industry. Vaya con Dios, Tim. May the Ancestors welcome you with open arms.

From Tim Jackson’s short autobiographical note in his Pioneering Cartoonists of Color book:

Timothy Lee Jackson is a native of Dayton, Ohio. Out of high school, Jackson enrolled in the commercial art program at Sinclair College in Dayton. He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the school ofthe Art Institute of Chicago. In 1985 he founded the Creative License Studio to freelance his cartooning and graphic design skills to a variety of organizations, including the Chicago Department of Public Health, Chicago’s public schools, and the American Red Cross and served as art director at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois. For thirteen years starting in 2000, Jackson contributed daily and weekly social commentary in the form of editorial cartoons in the Chicago Defender. In 1997 he began doing research about pioneering Black cartoonists and presents information about them at the website A Salute to Pioneering Cartoonists of Color.

From Sheena C. Howard’s Encyclopedia of Black Comics:

Jackson began drawing comics early on, with his first cartoon feature published in his hometown newspaper, the Dayton Journal-Herald, at age fourteen…

After attending the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Jackson self-published a series of educational comic books throughout the 1980s, including Friends Are for Signing, A Story about Sign Language, AIDS: Just the Facts Jack, and The Case of the Great Graffiti. During this time, Jackson also began to produce political cartoons for distribution in newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and The Cincinnati Herald.

In 1999 Jackson joined the staff of the Chicago Defender, one of the nation’s most renowned African American newspapers. Working as a contributing editorial cartoonist under the wing of pioneer Black cartoonist Chester Commodore, Jackson remained at the paper for fourteen years.

In 2009 R. C. Harvey expanded on award winning cartoonist Tim Jackson’s newspaper career:

A 1985 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he joined the staff of the Defender in 1999 as a layout artist and began drawing cartoons on local issues for the paper the following year. In addition to his work at the Defender, Jackson draws weekly cartoons for a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Madison (Wis.) Times; Capital Outlook in Tallahassee, Fla.; the Cincinnati Herald and Dayton Defender in Ohio; Northern Kentucky Herald; and the magazine Urban Life Northwest, based in Seattle. From 2006 to 2008, Jackson’s cartoons appeared in the Sunday Chicago Tribune’s Perspectives section.

Below are a series of Tim’s Chicago Defender cartoons from 2005, 2006, and 2007 that were featured in the Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year compilations of 2006, 2007, and 2008 respectively.

I first “met” Tim through his impressive and ground-breaking A Salute to Pioneering Cartoonists of Color website (now only accessible through the tricky Wayback Machine pages) where a whole new world of largely unknown newspaper comic strips and cartoonists was opened to the world at large. And when Tim’s research finally went to print I couldn’t have been happier. He was a pioneer of researching Black cartoonists in the United States and has led to more books like the aforementioned Encyclopedia of Black Comics and Ken Quattro’s Invisible Men and Rebecca Wanzo’s The Content of Our Caricature.

Tim was truly a trail-blazing researcher and as mentioned earlier an award-winning cartoonist in his own right.

Tim’s clstoons website has a nice archive of his editorial cartoons from 2012 to 2016 and a selection of freelance illustration assignments for various accounts and more.

The Evanston Public Library has a short interview with Tim from 2017.

We offer our most sincere condolences to Tim’s family and friends.