Jay Jackson (artist)

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.

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.

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.

While not genre-savvy, he became more familiar with the field, and was recognized as an especially suitable artist for the kind of humorous science fiction content that Palmer liked to run.

He was profiled in Amazing's "Introducing the Author" feature, a rarity for an artist, with a photo which guaranteed that the magazine's readers understood that Jackson was black, a college man with a suburban family and considerable experience in his profession.

He was an illustrator for one of the Telecomics companies (there were two using the same name), some of the earliest cartoon shows on television, essentially a representation of comic strips on screen, with a narrator and voice actors talking over still frames, with only occasional moments of limited animation.