I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read.

In the early nineteen-eighties, daily newspaper the Dallas Times Herald had a unique deal with Marvel Comics. Every few months, the popular publisher of superhero sagas provided the newspaper with an original, full-length comic book that could be stuffed into the Sunday edition. Usually, the comics featured Spider-Man, by far Marvel’s most well-known character, and had some sort of local appeal. Spider-Man teamed up with the incredible Hulk to track down some missing Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders or crossed paths with dancers from the Dallas Ballet. For the sixth comic book in the series, though, the wall-crawler was given a break and the spotlight was instead turned on the team of costumed do-gooders who were then dominating comic book sales charts: the uncanny X-Men.

In 1983, Marvel’s merry mutants were enormously popular with regular comic book readers and almost entirely unknown to everyone else. This was well before the cartoon series and film adaptations brought the characters into the broader pop culture. For most newspaper readers, even many of the kids who were the likeliest to rifle through the colorful supplement, this crew must have seemed mighty peculiar. As written by Jim Salicrup and David Kraft and penciled by Kerry Gammill and Alan Kupperberg, the team is very much on model with the way they operated in their regular series, right down the common instigation to adventure of journeying to find a new mutant whose emerging powers blipped up on Professor Charles Xavier’s Cerebro unit. In this case, the X-Men head to the Lone Star State, where, like many of the area residents, they pay for entry to the Texas State Fair. Reflecting the promotional nature of the comic book, the good professor is obligated to express his amazement at the abundance of activities available at the annual event.

As any seasoned fan surely surmises, that sinister presence whose already forming a bond with the young mutant is none other than Magneto, the main menace in the vast X-Men epic. The lad who’s attracted the dueling attentions of Charles Xavier and Magneto is Danny Wiley. A devoted worker on his family’s ranch, Danny is a big fan of horses. Conveniently enough, his mutant power has an equine element. He can transform into, well, a sort of pegasus centaur.

Danny even adopted Eques as his powered-up alias. As these situation often go, Eques briefly battles the X-Men until he realizes that Magneto is a bad guy who’s been misleading. Magneto doesn’t really like horses as much as he said he did, for example. Also, the group Magneto leads is called the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, which seems like a tip-off that he might be up to no good. Danny gets the requisite invite to enroll at Xavier’s Westchester, New York, where he’d have some nifty classmates. Danny politely declines, which is okay with Xavier. He seems more interested in getting in some more time at the State Fair, maybe to see of the freakshow giant statue dubbed Big Tex has burgeoning mutant powers that allow his previously inanimate form to wink.

The story’s over, but there’s loads more fun to be had. Keeping spirited young readers occupied, the back page of the comic book have a few stray extras. Among them is a puzzle page that makes a mockery of Xavier’s bald pate.

From my perspective, there’s even more entertainment to be found in the low-polish, afterthought advertisements in the back pages. In most of them, Spider-Man is wedged in like Ed McMahon fulfilling a backlog of pitchman contractual obligations.

The sixth comic book in the Dallas Times Herald series was also the last one. After The Uncanny X-Men at the State Fair of Texas, the team wouldn’t be part of the bundle hurled onto the front stoop by the paperboy. Any Dallas-area newspaper subscribers who wanted to read about the next adventure of the X-Men needed to head out to their friendly neighborhood comics book shop instead.

Previous entries in this series (and there are a LOT of them) can be found by clicking on the “My Misspent Youth” tag.