From dinosaurs to Conquistadores, The Ancient Southwest, a 
dynamically illustrated collection of natural history and early-day 
recorded history, takes its cue from the tradition of storytelling in 
pictures. The narrative medium is the comic strip, applied here "to 
increase popular interest in geology," as one of its original 
contributors described the project. An enormously popular feature in 
the West Texas newspaper where it originated more than fifty years 
ago, The Ancient Southwest has been painstakingly restored and 
annotated by the cartoonist and cultural historian Michael H. Price 
as a follow-through to a lengthy collaboration with the primary artist,
the late George E. Turner. The strips, originally designed for serialized 
weekly publication, have gone unseen since 1951–1952. Inspired by
the permanent collections of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum 
in Canyon, Texas, the cartoons cover a vast span of prehistory, from 
the earliest invertebrate and reptilian life to the Age of Mammals and 
the Paleo-Indians. The volume also contains a full restoration of 
Turner's The Palo Duro Story, recounting one of the earliest Spanish 
explorations of North America from the viewpoint of Cabeza de Vaca. 
An appendix reproduces a selection of Turner's college-newspaper 
cartoons of the post-World War II years, foreshadowing the style he 
would bring to bear upon The Ancient Southwest and The Palo Duro 
Story.

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What people are saying about this book

"Now that comics and education are no longer at their traditional 
impasse, it's wonderful to be able to look back and see where the 
first people to see the possibilities were trying to go."—Off the
Presses, Scoop website

" . . . historic [comic] strips have now been restored, retooled and 
compiled . . . [features] an epic strip chronicling the incursions of the 
Spanish Conquistadors, as well as a generous sampling of vintage 
cartoons published in school newspapers and sketches from Turner's 
personal notebook."—www.amarillo.com