Jaxon, as he usually signed his underground comix, grew up in Pandora, Texas under conditions rural in the extreme. Born without a doctor in attendance, raised without indoor plumbing - and his favorite teenage hobby, he says, was "bustin' watermelons on the back of hogs at feeding time." Least favorite was babysitting a flock of 2,000 turkeys "until every last one of the bastards had flown up into trees to roost."

Bored with school work, he filled hundreds of "Big Chief" drawing tablets with little drawings over the course of his childhood and adolescence. He first drew his God Nose character in 1963, and it was during fall registration at the University of Texas in Austin, the following year, that the first edition of the God Nose comic book was sold. The comic was printed with black and gold (which came out looking a sickly chartreuse) on purple cardboard covers, each page printed individually and hand collated by Jackson and his team of cohorts. Says Jackson, "when we were putting the books together each person would add one sheet and pass it to the next one. As we got drunker, things began to get a little sloppy and some of the comix had pages put in upside down." In the late 1960's he was working as the bookkeeper for the Family Dog, the collective which threw concerts at San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom (the venue where legendary groups like Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Doors were first seen by Bay Area audiences). That job ended, and he got together with old friends from U.T. - Gilbert Shelton, Fred Todd and Dave Moriaty - and founded Rip Off Press in one corner of a really big room in an upper story of Mowry's Opera House (in the Western Addition, long since burned down).

Jaxon travelled back and forth between San Francisco and Austin several times over the next few years, finally settling down for good in Texas. His work in later years, beginning about 1980, moved away from the extremely underground toward Texas history (Comanche Moon, Los Tejanos) and horror (Bulto, the Cosmic Slug). Realizing in the early 1980's that he was not, after all, going to die young from a hereditary ailment that had killed his father, Jack got a new lease on life and became a father for the first time in 1986--at the age of 45. Jack spent most of the last 20 years of his life (years he never expected to have) working on southwest history projects, and was widely respected as a historian by academics (most of whom were unaware of his earlier career). He passed away in 2006, at the age of 65. He will be missed.