cover image The Ancient Southwest & Other Dispatches from a Cruel Frontier

The Ancient Southwest & Other Dispatches from a Cruel Frontier

Michael H. Price, George Turner. Texas Christian University Press, $14.95 (85pp) ISBN 978-0-87565-306-8

Originally published in the Amarillo Globe News, this series has remained unseen since the 1950s and is an odd specimen of the educational/regional comic strip. The first half of the book deals with the ancient Southwest, particularly the prehistoric life found therein, such as dinosaurs, trilobites and the travails of early man versus wooly mammoths and other such staples of grade-school science texts. A smattering of glimpses at early Native American life are thrown in for good measure, but then the focus shifts to ""The Palo Duro Story,"" a rambling and slightly incoherent account of an early Spanish expedition's greed-driven and disastrous adventures. A litany of starvation, Indian attacks, abuse of indigenous cultures, clueless leadership and a desperate excursion into cannibalism make for one of the stranger moments in the history of the American newspaper strip, and Turner's script beats the reader over the head with a cycle of events that seem to repeat themselves almost immediately after the reader had encountered them on the previous page. Reminiscent of the similarly turgid Mark Trail, this collection drips with pre-rock 'n' roll quaintness, and Turner's artwork wavers between being perfectly suited to history books and being amateurish on the level of high school newspaper illustrations. It's an interesting curio, but there is good reason why this series had been relegated to obscurity.