Lost Cause: John Wesley Hardin, the Taylor-Sutton Feud, and Reconstruction Texas

AUTHOR: Jackson, Jack

ARTIST: Jack Jackson (illustrator); Samuel Yeates (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Kitchen Sink Press

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1998

Publication History

Kitchen Sink Press published Lost Cause as a single volume in 1998, after Jack Jackson worked on the novel for over a decade. Jackson, who began his comics career under the pen name Jaxon, was part of a cadre of cartoonists collectively known as “The Texas Mafia.” His early work God Nose (1964) is often credited as the first underground comic book. As a founder of underground publisher Rip Off Press, Jackson was a pivotal figure in both the business and artistic aspects of the underground “comix” movement.

Jackson’s early work was social satire, as exemplified by God Nose. The satire quickly evolved into stronger social commentary on environmental issues, seen especially in his stories in the anthology Slow Death (1970), published by Last Gasp. His story “Nits Make Lice,” from Slow Death, issue 7, was his first significant foray into merging his interest in Texas history with the art of the graphic narrative. Detailing the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre in brutal detail, this story laid the groundwork for his career as a historian working in both comics and prose. Lost Cause was Jackson’s final historical work in the comics medium.

Plot

Lost Cause is a complex story comprising seven chapters. As a historical western, it provides an elaborate and detailed account of the Taylor-Sutton feud and also chronicles Texas’s struggle toward statehood and its place in the United States before, during, and after the Civil War. The narrative can be divided into three primary story lines, which are intertwined. All are told in chronological order.

The first story line details Texas’s involvement in the Civil War and its subsequent ostracism within the Union. African American soldiers applying their own standards of justice exacerbate this postwar situation, as do carpetbaggers and other mercenaries, both official and otherwise. Postwar Texas has a tentative legal status. Its senators are denied seating in the U.S. Senate gallery, and the actions of Texans are restricted unless they sign a “loyalty oath” repudiating their involvement with the South during the war.

The second narrative involves ranchers trying to survive after having their herds taken from them, first by rustlers and then by soldiers. Before the Civil War, the practice of taking herds was the result of “mavericking,” named for the actions of a rancher named Samuel A. Maverick, who refused to brand his cattle, possibly in order to stake claim to free-roaming cattle in addition to his own. After the Civil War, range wars erupted over this practice.

Mavericking ties into the third, most complex narrative, which chronicles the Taylor-Sutton feud. Beginning with a dispute between John Wesley Hardin and Buck Taylor over the outcome of a shooting match at a family gathering, the feud escalates between 1866 and 1874. This escalation both parallels and intersects with larger tensions in Texas. Hardin survives the range wars, gunfights, and lynchings of his kindred. He outlasts most of his kin, living long enough to produce heirs before being shot in the back while playing cards.

This final narrative is wrought with twists and turns and two elaborate family trees. The chronicles of both clans are filled with treachery and survival amid the rebirth of Texas as a state following the Civil War. Ultimately, the only measure of success is the peaceful life of Hardin’s son in a peaceful Texas.

Characters

•Creed Taylor, arguably the protagonist, is the patriarch of the Taylor clan. He is approximately six feet tall, with thick black hair and a full beard. At first intent on keeping the peace, as evidenced by his arbitration of the shooting-match dispute that begins the feud, he later resolves to take any action necessary to defend his family. His efforts are exacerbated by the attempts of mercenaries and corrupt authorities to kill members of the Taylor family.

•John Wesley Hardin is the titular hero and antihero. Initially a stern-faced teenager, he grows into a dapper, cautious man who smiles once in the entire story. His role in the feud is minor until most of his family is killed. He becomes an outlaw and flees to Mexico at age eighteen, five years after the shooting match. Following his return, he serves sixteen years of a twenty-four-year prison sentence, writing a florid autobiography in an effort to “set the record straight.” He is shot in the back on August 19, 1895.

•Joe Tumlinson is the archenemy of the Taylors. Though balding, he wears his hair long. He is mustached, has a bit of a paunch, and has the overall air of being hardened by life. His efforts continue and escalate the Taylor-Sutton feud after the early death of Billy Sutton. As Jackson notes in his afterword, the feud might more properly be called the Taylor-Tumlinson feud, as it is not until after Tumlinson’s death that the feud ends. Tumlinson loses the horse race following the shooting contest, escalating tensions that had abated as the result of Creed’s arbitration of the initial dispute.

Artistic Style

Jackson’s art is realistically proportioned, and his subjects are posed. The layouts often resemble vintage photographs, even in action sequences. This is partially the result of his meticulous research and desire for historical accuracy.

The lines in Jackson’s illustrations are evenly weighted, only occasionally varying from their default weight. These lines are inked in heavy blacks, leading to the conclusion that Jackson’s primary, almost exclusive, inking tool is the crow quill pen. Despite the scratchy quality this tool can sometimes give, Jackson’s work is remarkably textured. Fabrics, furnishings, animals, metals, and even human blood all have definable visual characteristics. Almost all of the tone in Lost Cause is created using line work and hatching. There is little use of solid blacks, though the gray values used do tend be darker than 50 percent.

A rare exception to the use of the crow quill pen appears on page 107. This page consists of three banner panels. The first panel shows a trail drive in progress. The middle tier depicts the drivers camping for the night. This particular panel uses the uncommon device of Zip-A-Tone, a dot-pattern shading sheet now largely obsolete, to create the tonal value of the night sky. As the next day’s action begins in the third panel, the use of lines and hatching for tone resumes.

Jackson’s panel layouts are primarily straightforward six-panel grids with sufficient variation to hold the reader’s eye. For example, page 86 begins with a horse and buggy running wild after its occupants have been shot. This wordless banner panel occupies less than one-quarter of the vertical space on the page. The remainder of the page is a standard six-panel grid that equally divides the remaining space.

Jackson depicts characters and scenes from a variety of distances and angles. Nonetheless, almost all his compositions fall on the horizontal plane, and they rarely include views from above or below.

Jackson’s use of narrative caption blocks over panels is a recurring device with singular properties. The content echoes or reinforces the images, often seeming to function as stage directions. These captions have two basic visual styles. The first, slightly more dominant, is a bordered caption that intrudes slightly on the panel, either bannered or in the upper-left corner. These caption borders have decorative edges, often featuring scrolling in a manner similar to peeled bark, and wood-grain textures, regularly resembling vintage parchments or signs. The second visual style of caption, only slightly less prevalent, is a “floating” caption set in the gutter, the space between panels. This device reinforces the narrative omniscience of these captions.

Aesthetically, the cumulative effect of Jackson’s illustration and visual narrative is twofold. First, the sense of honesty and visual and historical accuracy resonates. Second, the work conveys a sense of melancholy and inevitability, despite the relatively minimal use of solid blacks.

Themes

Lost Cause deals as much with Texas history as it does with the story of Hardin. Jackson begins the narrative when Hardin is a child and does not introduce Hardin until page 44, when the future outlaw is thirteen years old. Hardin actually appears on fewer than fifty pages, and his story is a small but significant portion of the central narrative. The Taylor-Sutton feud is the crux of the graphic novel. That story, along with its interwoven subplots, reflects the central theme of power struggles in Texas’s fight for autonomy and identity before, during, and after the Civil War.

Much of Jackson’s oeuvre is concerned with a representation of Texas history from the standpoint of the underdog, and Lost Cause is no exception. Even in this context, however, no apology is made for the characters’ actions. While the narrative attempts to empathize with Hardin and understand his motivations, Hardin’s deeds and misdeeds are presented as matters of fact, rather than heroic or dastardly acts. No moral value is attached, beyond the author’s decision about which events to report. Despite his profound efforts, however, Jackson does not claim objectivity in these matters, noting in his foreword, “My ancestors are buried in the feuding ground, and I am a product of what they were.”

Impact

Given the page counts of its chapters, it is tempting to presume that Lost Cause might have been planned as a set of single-issue comics. The publishers of Jackson’s previous underground work, Kitchen Sink Press and Last Gasp, indicated that they were receptive to that possibility. However, given the disappointment over the state of comics that Jackson expressed in interviews at the time of the release of Lost Cause and his desire to be accepted as a serious Texas historian, an initial plan for serialization seems unlikely.

Lost Cause was Jackson’s fifth graphic novel on Texas history and the second to be initially published as a stand-alone volume. Last Gasp originally printed two of the novel’s predecessors, Comanche Moon and Recuerden el Alamo, as separate series of three comics each. Reed Press collected Comanche Moon in a single volume in 2003, while Recuerden el Alamo was collected as The Alamo: An Epic Told from Both Sides and published by Paisano Graphics in 2002. The third work in Jackson’s series on Texas history, Secret of San Saba, was originally published as a single volume, also from Kitchen Sink Press, in 1989. Mojo Press published Jackson’s stand-alone volume on Sam Houston and the Cherokees, Indian Lover, in 1999.

While Lost Cause did not receive specific awards, Jackson was made a lifetime fellow of the Texas State Historical Association and inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. Whether these honors were in recognition of Jackson’s graphic narrative work, his prose research of Texas history, or both was not specified, although Jackson stated in interviews that he was primarily recognized for his prose work. Jackson was posthumously inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame in 2011.

Further Reading

Jackson, Jack. Comanche Moon (2003).

McCulloch, Derek, and Shepherd Hendrix. Stagger Lee (2006).

Truman, Timothy. Wilderness: The True Story of Simon Girty, the Renegade (1989).

Bibliography

Estren, Mark James. A History of Underground Comics. 3d ed. Berkeley, Calif.: Ronin, 1993.

Rosenkranz, Patrick. Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975. Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics Books, 2002.

Skinn, Dez. Comix: The Underground Revolution. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004.

Witek, Joseph. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.