Texas History "Movies" #1

History

In 1926, Edward B. Doran, director of the news and telegraph section of the Dallas Morning News, proposed a comic strip covering Texas history, intending to ride the widespread popularity of newspaper strips of the era; the concept was also aligned with the educational philosophy of the paper's owner, George B. Dealey. Doran tapped two Dallas Morning News staff members — journalist and critic John Rosenfield Jr. to write and editorial cartoonist Jack Patton (then working for the paper's sister publication, the Dallas Journal) to draw — while respected Dallas educator Justin F. Kimball supplied the quirky title, riffing on the then-common description of comic strips as 'movies in print.' The strip ran six days a week, but only during the school year (October 5, 1926 through June 9, 1928), pausing each summer at teachers' requests, and produced 428 four-panel strips in total before concluding at approximately 1885 — the creators having decided that later Texas history was too visually undramatic for the format. In 1928, the P.L. Turner Company of Dallas acquired the copyright and published the complete run through its Southwest Press imprint as a 217-page oversize hardcover bound in green cloth; simultaneously, Magnolia Petroleum Company sponsored an abridged 64-page paperback edition of 124 strips, distributed free to Texas schoolchildren, with a second printing following in 1932.

Trivia · 7 facts

• Written by journalist John Rosenfield Jr. and illustrated by editorial cartoonist Jack Patton, both Dallas Morning News/Dallas Journal staff members; the strip debuted October 5, 1926, and concluded June 9, 1928.
• The title was coined by Dallas educator Justin F. Kimball, exploiting the contemporary usage of 'movies in print' as a synonym for comic strips — not a reference to motion pictures.
• Rosenfield and Patton produced 428 individual four-panel strips across two school-year runs; the strip intentionally stopped at approximately 1885 because the creators felt later Texas history was too visually undramatic for the cartoon format.
• It is widely cited as the earliest book of American nonfiction comics, predating Platinum Age milestones such as 1929's The Funnies and 1933's Famous Funnies, and is argued by several sources to be a strong candidate for the first American graphic novel.
• Paperback editions sponsored by Magnolia Petroleum (later Mobil Oil) were distributed to Texas schools continuously for approximately three decades, reportedly reaching millions of copies across numerous printings; the strip was used as a classroom teaching aid as late as the mid-1960s.
• By the 1970s the strip drew criticism for its racially insensitive depictions of Mexican Americans, Native Americans, African Americans, and women; the TSHA produced edited reprints in 1974 and 1986 attempting to address the most offensive content.
• In 2007, counter-cultural cartoonist and independent historian Jack Jackson (Jaxon) — who credited the original strip as a formative influence on his own career — produced an entirely new New Texas History Movies for the TSHA; it was the last work completed before his death in June 2006, and won the 2008 Best Western Graphic Novel award from True West Magazine.

Full credits