Mack White

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mack White (born December 20, 1952 in Mineral Wells, Texas) is a comic book artist, writer, radio personality, and parapolitical researcher who lives in Austin, Texas.

White grew up in North Texas where his father published weekly newspapers in small towns in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, primarily Mansfield and Cleburne. As a teenager in Cleburne, he worked for his father's newspaper as a typesetter, proofreader, copy editor, and writer. He graduated from Cleburne High School in 1971, then attended Tarrant County Junior College in Fort Worth until his first marriage in 1972. For the next few years, he worked in newspaper print shops throughout Texas until 1977 when he enrolled as a psychology major in The University of Texas at Austin. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1982. He continues to live in Austin.

White began creating and self-publishing comics in the 1980s. His first professionally published story was "El Bandito Muerto" which appeared in Rip Off Comix in 1990. Throughout the 1990s, he contributed to a long list of comics anthologies (most notably Zero Zero, Buzz and Snake Eyes), magazines (Details, Heavy Metal, and others), and newspapers (primarily the Austin Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman). During this period he also published four solo comic books: The Mutant Book of the Dead (a one-shot published by Starhead) and Villa of the Mysteries (a three-issue series published by Fantagraphics). His stories have also appeared in translation in numerous publications in Europe and Japan.

In 2003 and 2004, the original artwork of his classic story "Cindy the Tattooed Sunday School Teacher" was selected by the Yerba Buena Arts Center to appear in the highly acclaimed Comics on the Verge art show which toured galleries and universities throughout the United States.

White's comics, drawn in a pseudo-realistic style, often combine black humor and bizarre fantasy to express metaphysical or political concerns. The Baltimore City Paper described his work as combining "an illustrative style reminiscent of serial adventure comic strips with the paranoia of Robert Anton Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy." White also occasionally works in a more whimsical cartoonish style, as exemplified by his Jokey comic strips which were featured regularly in the print edition of Boing Boing and his Bison Bill's Weird West stories (Heavy Metal, Top Shelf).

Beginning with his comic strips "Dead Silence in the Brain: The CIA Assassination of John Lennon" (The Comics Journal Summer Special 2001) and "Operation Northwoods" (The Comics Journal Winter Special 2002), White's work shifted from fantasy to fact-based subject matter. In 2004, he co-edited (with Gary Groth) The Bush Junta (Fantagraphics), a controversial anthology in which the history of the two Bush presidential administrations is told in comic strip form by 23 well-known cartoonists from around the world. White's own contribution to the book was "September 11," a heavily-documented, illustrated timeline describing the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In 2006 he published "1963," an autobiographical account of growing up in the Dallas area during the Kennedy assassination, in the comics anthology Roadstrips (Chronicle Books), and "My Gun Is Long," a tongue-in-cheek noir piece based on theories that there were two Lee Harvey Oswalds circulating in Dallas prior to the assassination, in Hotwire (Fantagraphics).

In addition to his comics work, White has published several articles based on his parapolitical research. The best-known articles are "Television and the Hive Mind," an analysis of television as a tool for mass mind control, and "Waco Remembered," an article based on White's interviews with the Branch Davidians who survived the controversial 1993 BATF raid and siege in Waco, Texas.

White is also a prolific blogger who writes on a wide variety of topics on his official website. He also maintains a second website, Bison Bill's Weird West, which features some of his surreal Western comic strips and fanciful essays on the Old West.

White has been interviewed in Rolling Stone, The Comics Journal (see List of Comics Journal interview subjects) and many other magazines throughout the world. He was also interviewed in the documentary Day 51: The True Story of Waco, and is frequently a guest on radio talk shows, such as the Alex Jones Show (GCN), Jack Blood's Deadline Live (GCN), Robert Larson's Out the Rabbit Hole (KUCI), Angela Keaton's Liberated Space (KOOP), and Dorian Devins' Nightcaps (WFMU). In 2006, White began hosting his own weekly show, The Mack White Show, on the Anomaly Radio Network.

[edit] External links

• Official Website
• Official Website #2: Bison Bill's Weird West
• Mack White at Lambiek.net
• Interview by Sasa Rekazic
• Interview by Claudio Parentale (Italian)
• Television and the Hive Mind
• Dead Silence in the Brain
• Operation Northwoods
• Cindy the Tattooed Sunday School Teacher