这个周末,猎人杰克逊将返回Houston to sell his artwork. He’ll have prints, T-shirts and other apparel. You can also have his work permanently applied to your skin.

On Saturday, the artist (who mainly goes by Crocodile Jackson, a nod to the runaway reptile that escaped the enclosure of one of his relatives, a collector of exotic animals) will be having a pop-up where he’ll be selling his merchandise. This pop-up will be located not too far from Better Luck Tattoo Studio, where he’ll be doing tattoos Friday through Sunday. “Anytime I’m in Houston,” says Jackson, “I’ll be at that spot.”

The native Houstonian, 28, is calling from Los Angeles, where he moved shortly before the pandemic hit. Since then, he’s been coming up with colorful, eccentric pieces that people can hang on their walls, include in their wardrobe or have illustrated on their bodies. “It’s just a little bit better weather, better opportunities,” he says. “There are also a lot more artists out here that I can bounce ideas off of.”

More opportunities have been sprouting up for the man who calls himself the “Legendary Cowboy.” Not too long ago, the operators of a Hawaii nightclub called The Republik flew him out to the Aloha State, where he did a mural on one of the venue’s outside walls. “They put me up and paid for my flight, bought all the supplies and just let me work,” he says. “They’re real good about putting up artists, and they love to show off art. So, they just hire an artist every five years, and they do some work and it stays up for about five years.”

As someone who consumed a steady diet of newspaper comic strips and ’90s cartoons as a kid, Jackson always knew art would be his thing. “I spent a lot of time in West Texas — near Uvalde — and didn’t have much to do. So, I would just re-draw comics of, like, ‘Garfield’ or ‘Archie’ and all that stuff.”

His entrepreneurial senses started tingling during high school, when he began selling T-shirts with his designs on them. As he got older, in what he calls “a weird series of events,” he became a tattoo artist. “That was, like, the breadwinner for a long time, until I started to be able to make money off of illustration and other stuff.”

His illustrations can be kitschy and trippy — think R. Crumb if he took edibles. Some of them might also feature a thematic, thought-provoking message. One T-shirt features one cowboy smacking another identical cowboy, with the line “I Ain’t Beatin’ No One Up But Myself” above it.

“It’s like I’m exploring myself and how I view stuff,” he says. “It’s really just — I’m not here to push any political views. It’s mostly me spouting off into the void and being myself, you know … I do try to push for mental health and all that jazz. But, like I said, it’s more of my personal stuff, so that I can hopefully help other kids or younger people see that they’re not alone in that feeling, you know.”

Recently, he dipped his toe into the wide, wild world of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, seeing how his work would fare in the online digital art marketplace. But, after trying that out for a brief spell, he felt that it wasn’t his scene. “It’s like Beanie Babies but for the internet,” he says. “You know how Beanie Babies got all popular for a while, and I think that’s what’s happening now. But I do think that it’s exciting what might be happening in that scene.”

For Jackson, his scene is still here in Houston, where he did his first shows at Flatland Gallery in Montrose before moving to California. He’s always going to come back and support where he came from. “It’s a smaller scene, for sure,” he says. “To me, Houston is still, like, a really growing city. It’s not so much, you know, making its money off of art. So, there’s less of that there. But there are still amazing artists out there in Houston that I think, one day, they’ll lay down the groundwork for people to have a community there.”

Craig Lindsey is a Houston-based writer.