Jackson’s magpie career as a freelancer energized his creativity. Starting in 1938, he started illustrating pulp magazines for the Chicago-based publishing firm Ziff-Davis, among them Amazing, Fantastic Adventures, and Weird Tales. He became well-versed in the tropes of fantasy and science fiction, which now drove the plots of Bungleton Green; his foray into comic books, drawing the adventures of jungle adventurer Blond Garth, also helped. The pulps were an ambiguous demimonde for Black writers and artists. Unquestionably, there were racists in positions of power in that world, notably the recently deceased horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and John W. Campbell, the editor of the influential Astounding Science-Fiction, who would one day write editorials defending slavery and even rejected a Samuel Delany novel for featuring a Black leading character. In 1941, Astounding also serialized Robert Heinlein’s Yellow Peril novel Sixth Column, whose racist plot of an “Asiatic” conquest of the United States was supplied by Campbell.
But still, precisely because the pulps and the comics were on the lowest rung of the publishing world, and even if there were often racists in charge, they provided a precarious opening for a few Black artists. These included not just Jackson but also Matt Barker and E.C. Stoner, as well as many more cartoonists descended from Eastern and Southern European immigrants. The pulps offered Jackson not just freelance work but also a set of useful science-fiction tropes (time travel, hidden kingdoms) that the cartoonist repurposed to create pioneering Afro-futurist stories that imagined an inhabitable and indeed utopian future for Black people.
The glamour-girl art that Jackson did for his earlier comic strip Tisha Mingo would find another outlet in the women now populating Bungleton Green; so would the poster work he did for the US Treasury Department promoting war bonds. But if Jackson was a propagandist, he was a subtle one. Throughout Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos, he offered nuanced and sometimes critical support for the war: America had to win it, but defeating fascism would only be meaningful if racism were also eradicated. Fascism, he repeatedly stressed, had roots in racism and could have an afterlife in future racist regimes that did not declare themselves as fascist.
Deploying his various sci-fi allegories, Jackson pressed on this argument throughout the series. In one fantastic narrative of an anti-racist America confronting a society of green-skinned men who oppress whites, Jackson created more than a clever topsy-turvy scenario; he anticipated the postwar reality that a need to improve America’s global reputation would create an opening for the civil rights movement. The sequence was perhaps influenced by George Schuyler’s 1931 novel Black No More, a satire that also played with the theme of race reversal, but no matter its origins, it showed Jackson at his finest: impudent, scathingly sardonic, and audaciously bitter.