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Comics in the classroom… in the Platinum Age?
His enthusiasm for a collection of newspaper strips dating from 1926 was nothing he planned, though. “I'm as surprised as anyone else that this is where I've ended up for the moment,” said Adams, who counts JSA, Teen Titans and Noble Causes among his current favorites. “But this stuff is too cool!” “My interest in the history of the industry started very early on,” he said. “When I first discovered that there was an entire generation of superheroes that predated the ones that I knew about, well, I just had to know what that was all about! Those early JLA/JSA crossovers just set me on fire! And since there were no comic shops available to me in the early 70's, I had to hit the libraries and look for reference books on the industry. So I learned about the old characters and the people who created them at the same time. It seemed like every decade has it's own thing that made it fascinating to read about. The late '30s saw the creation of the true 'Superhero.' The '40s sent that hero to war. The '50s had a poor man's version of the McCarthy hearings that lead to the creation of a self-imposed regulating committee. The '60s saw both the rebirth of the superhero and his attempt to be relevant to the modern world. It was all fascinating to me. My interest in the history of the medium eventually lead me to an unusual find. At a yard sale, I found a small digest size paperback book that was a 1927 collection of newspaper strips. It was called Texas History Movies. My curiosity lead me to start research on this book that I am currently still working on.” First published in newspapers in 1926, Texas History Movies was the idea of E.B. Moran, who was the Director of News and Telegraph for The Dallas News and The Dallas Journal, predecessors to today's Dallas Morning News. The title itself was a suggestion of Dr. J. F. Kimball, a former superintendent of schools in Dallas. “The history of Texas is so picturesque that there is a natural temptation to tell it in pictures,” Jack Patton and John Rosenfeld, Jr., the strips' creators, said in a foreword to one of the collections. After Texas History Movies debuted in the fall of 1926, it ran until June 1927. Then at the request of many teachers, it took a hiatus until school resumed in the fall of that year. It was first collected into book form that year, though it would be more than 65 years before Adams' discovery of the book at that yard sale changed his life. His collecting days began, he said, like many other collectors in the decade or so before the birth of the organized direct market. “The first comic that I remember buying was X-Men #40, with Frankenstein on the cover. I also remember buying an issue of Detective Comics with an early (if not the first) appearance of Man-Bat. The artwork was by Frank Robbins, I seem to recall. What I do remember is that almost as soon as I purchased my first comic, the price went from 12 cents to 15cents! It's like someone said “He's hooked! Jack up the price!” A trend that I see has continued ever since,” he laughed. “I also remember buying some early Supergirl comics from racks because they had Legion of Super-Heroes backup stories in them.” He also said a wide selection of comics weren't that easy to find at the time. “In Grapevine, Texas in the early 1970s, comics were kind of scarce. There were 3 stores that had spin racks. However, each store didn't carry the full line of anything. So to make sure I saw the full releases, I would have to ride my bike to the south side of town to the Mr. M's and buy books there. As I didn't have a basket on my bike, I would have to roll those books against my calf and pull my 3 stripe athletic sock up over them, then ride to downtown to the Rexall's Drugstore. I bought books there, slipped them in my other sock, and rode on to the north side of town to the Quikway for my final stop. To be fair to my suppliers, I would sometimes ride that route in reverse to give the Quikway first shot at my meager wallet. And the Burris Grocery store would occasionally have some books also. I remember seeing the Atlas/Seaboard line in the Burris and being excited about that. That was also the first time I can honestly remember picking up a book based on knowing something about the creator. I knew that Larry Lieber was the editor-in-chief, and that he was Stan Lee's brother. So I bought Cougar based on that,” he said. “My first few purchases were still in the 12-cent era to the first few 15-centers, so I guess I had about 20 comics the first time I felt like I was some big cheese, a big collector. My family was having a yard sale one weekend and they asked if I wanted to put anything in it. I pulled out my comics. I put “5 ¢” stickers right on the covers with masking tape and sat on a bench at the curb. Almost immediately, a car stopped. The man in the passenger seat didn't even get out of the car. He just leaned out, looked at the pile of books and bought them all. That was my first back-issue sales transaction. Little did I know that one day I would be making my living in much the same fashion,” he said. “My early favorite titles were all team books. I guess I was being frugal with my meager comic money. Team titles give more heroes for the same price! I followed the Justice League of America, The Teen Titans, The Avengers, The X-Men, and Legion of Super-Heroes. The latter being where the Hero-to-dollar ratio was the best! Following the Legion at that time meant that I was alternately buying Superboy, Action, Adventure, and Supergirl,” Adams said. Grapevine, which is located just north of what today is the massive Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, was a small town in those days, Adams said. There were other kids who read comics, but no one who really seemed to follow them like he did. “It wasn't until high school that I made a friend based solely on the fact that we both read comics. He's still one of my best friends today, and we have a mistake made at the old Sparta printing facilities to thank for that! Art Kedzierski had purchased a copy of The New Teen Titans which actually contained a Marvel Two-In-One inside it. His friends sent him to me to see if this hybrid love-child comic was actually worth something. In the years since then, however, I have been fortunate enough to make some wonderful friends because of comics. And many of them were from inside the industry itself,” he said. “I didn't find a real comic shop until my senior year in High School. That's when Art and I found out about the original Lone Star Comics and Science Fiction shop in Arlington, Texas. Just a couple of years later I ended up working there. Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to have worked in and around the comics industry quite a bit. And I have likewise been lucky enough to have worked for some really talented and visionary individuals who have all taught me quite a lot about the industry. I have worked for Buddy Saunders (Lone Star Comics), Bob Wayne (Fantastic Worlds, now the VP of Direct Sales for DC Comics), John Christian (Paper Heroes), Brent Erwin (Paper Heroes in Waco, now of Wizard), Rory Root (Comic Relief in Berkeley), John Hart (Acclaim Comics), and Fabian Nicieza (Acclaim Comics). I have also been the Sales Manager for Chessex Games Distribution in Austin, Texas and the Manager of R&D/Game Design for Chessex Manufacturing in Berkeley, California,” Adams said. All through this period, he said it wasn't odd for him read from publishers other than the big two. “That trend actually started in the 1970s when I found my first non-Marvel/DC superhero titles, the ones published by Atlas-Seaboard. It was so hard to collect anything with the spotty spin-rack distribution system that you were just happy to read anything at that time,” he said. “So I have always been pretty open to new titles.” That openness lead him to explore the background of the Texas History Movies when he found that first collection. “The short story version is this: We had comics issued as text books in the classroom as early as 1928,” he said. “It told the history of the state of Texas in a cartoony 4 panel comic strip format much reminiscent of E Segar's Popeye. It was so popular with teachers in the area that Magnolia Petroleum (which became Mobil Oil, now part of ExxonMobil) was persuaded to collect selected strips into a digest and provide them to schools to use in history classes,” he said. “This book stayed in print with several format and content changes up until the mid 1950s. Ironically, while comic books were being demonized in Washington D.C as being harmful to children, we were still issuing one as a history text book in Texas!” he laughed. “By today's standards, there are some dicey passages to be honest. And although the intent was not to disrespect anyone, there are several places that the politically correct crowd would have trouble with,” he said. This book and all it's various incarnations up through 1986 have been largely unknown to comics collectors, he said. “This is a jewel of a Platinum Age book if you can find the 1928 digest edition -- good luck with that - and the 1930s through 1940s “long digest” format is also hard to find. But they include a few new strips created by the original strip artist just for that format,” he said. He added that the mid '50s regular digest edition may be a bit easier to find, and it also includes an additional 125 of the original newspaper strips that were not in previous editions. Adams said it was the theme of comics in the classroom - a popular discussion in the '80s as well as today - that helped him realize the importance of Texas History Movies in the scheme of comic book history. “There has been so much said about comics in the classroom since the mid 1980s. Once I realized that we have comics in the classroom and it happened in 1928, I started paying more attention to this odd little book I had found,” he said, adding that a widespread understanding of this would change a lot of long-held perceptions similar to the way that The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck from 1842 redefined awareness of pre-Platinum Age comics. “And don't forget the fact that it was sponsored by Magnolia Petroleum. They had corporate sponsorship of an education program using comics at textbooks in 1928. We don't have that now,” he emphasized. Adams has spent the last five years researching the book, and he said he finally feels like he's coming up on a time where he can write a thorough article on the series. “There are currently 5 different formats and one 'knock-off' that I am aware of. They are from various publishing periods dating from 1928 to 1986. In 1928, there were two editions published. The first was the regular digest size format sponsored by Magnolia Petroleum. It collected less than half of the original newspaper strips. The second was an oversize hardback format complete collection of all 250 strips published by the printer of the digest version. Shortly thereafter, Magnolia Petroleum again sponsored a collection of 125 strips in a horizontal 4-panel format. The top of the pages had a 4-panel strip, the bottom ran a text article by the author of the strips on the history of the state of Texas. This 'long digest' format was reprinted with different covers several times through the 1940's,” he said. “In the early 1950s Mobil-Secony (nee Magnolia Petroleum) sponsored yet another format. It was a return to the original digest size, but with an additional 125 strips, bringing the total to 250. This format stayed in print through 1956,” he continued. “In the 1970's the copyright for the smaller Mobil-sponsored versions of the book was sold and ended up in the hands of the Texas Historical Society. They published a magazine size format collecting many of the original strips. However, as social mores had changed so much since the last reprinting, they made the very bad decision to alter some and even create whole new strips to replace ones they didn't approve of. These were apparently drawn by a one-armed chimp with a bad itch. And in 1985, the larger format hardback book saw the light of day again to help celebrate the Texas Sesquicentennial, the 150th anniversary of Texas Independence Day.
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