Peter Charles Geoffrey Jackson (4 March 1922 - 2 May 2003; Brighton, UK)
Peter Jackson was a master of historical illustration, second-to-none in his ability to bring any period to life. His wonderful London Scrapbooks drawn for the Evening News from the 1940s onwards, some of which were collected in two memorable volumes, "London Explorer" and "London is Stranger Than Fiction", are legendary.

Jackson began his career adapting classics into comic strips for newspapers in the late 1940s. This led to his long association with the Evening News. His collection of maps, prints and artefacts from all ages of London formed the basis of a number of books, including London: 2000 Years of a City and Its People, The History of London in Maps and Walks in Old London.

Jackson trained at the Willesden School of Art in London, and his first published work was an illustration for True Story in 1945.

In the late '40s, he drew a series of adventure classics, one of which, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, was printed as Thriller Comics Library no. 29 with additional frames by Patrick Nicolle (taken from his 1952 Sun strip). Jackson is the first to dismiss this strip and it is certainly not in the same league as his version of Treasure Island, part of the same series, which was published in book form by Pitman, or any of the wonderful work he was to do later.

Much of his working life was taken up with historical reconstructions, etc., and his work for Look and Learn, Express Weekly, Swift, Mickey Mouse Weekly and Eagle confirm that he could have been an even greater asset to the Thriller Comics Library.

Jackson was chairman of the London Topographical Society, a founder member and chairman of the Ephemera Society and was to have been the recipient of an OBE. The announcement of this honour arrived a day after his death on 2 May 2003, aged 81.
Source: Illustration Art Gallery