Photographic Memory: William Henry Jackson and the American West

Zippy the Pinhead creator Griffith (Three Rocks) presents a sprightly graphic biography of his great-grandfather, photographer William Henry Jackson, who died in 1942. Griffith, who was shocked to see one of his great-grandfather’s pictures in his high school textbook as a teenager in the 1950s, replays Jackson’s life through an imagined conversation between an elderly Jackson and a visiting friend. The Eisner winner’s trademark cross-hatching neatly fits the narrative’s largely 19th-century setting. Self-taught in the nascent art of photography, Civil War veteran Jackson first specialized in portraits. He wandered the frontier for years, working for railroads that paid him to shoot the sights of the West as it opened to tourism and settlement. Jackson’s signature achievement—taking the first photographs of Yellowstone, which helped convince Congress to protect it as parkland—is detailed along with images from the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, Korea, and Afghanistan. Aside from an idiosyncratic nod to Yogi Bear (and a jokey suggestion that a 1904 Jackson photograph from Coney Island captured “a distant relative of Zippy”), Griffith plays this story straight; occasionally it can feel dutiful. Still, it’s an immersive and thoughtful examination of an innovative American artist. (Oct.)