Panther Tales has a long and storied history of political and comedic comics, believe it or not! Going through the Panther Tales Archives, all the way back to the very first collection of stories, on November 12th, 1947, the first comic we can find in our archive was published.
However, when was the last time you read a comic? A comic book, a comic from a newspaper, or some other form of graphic storytelling? For most people, not recently. Jacob Willard, a freshman at Great Bend High School, hadn’t read a comic in the past two years, saying, “I don’t think I have read one in a while, so like- two years. A (comic) book.”
Simply titled U G H!, it shows GBHS’ mascot and Larned’s mascot on a football field, with Larned’s mascot pleading for help as the black panther approaches the football for a kick off. The only hint to who authored what is possible Panther Tale’s first comic is simply two initials in the bottom right of the comic, being J.B.. Looking through the people who ran the newspaper at the time, it’s possible that this stood for Jane Lee Bowman, someone listed to be in charge of “Art and Photography” of Panther Tales during the year.
This probably wasn’t the first comic of Panther Tales, as the issue it’s from is titled ‘volume three’, and this is where we get to theory crafting. Looking through the following years of newspapers, each year the “volume” would increase. So… are there two entire years of potential ‘first comics’ we don’t have access to? What happened to these two years? This is the very first record of the newspaper the school has, how could two entire years pass until they decided “maybe we should archive these things”? Did they just throw away the older volumes, ignorant to their destruction of history? Should we even make an effort to keep history intact?
“Not every tiny detail, but ones that matter, as in like- let’s say for example, back in The World War, we want to learn the lesson of what happened so we can try to face the conflicting story and try not to have another war.” Darren Lamb, a senior at GBHS, said when asked on the topic.
He’s not wrong either. World War II ended in those two years of history that we lost. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have occurred, and if we had access to those two years, we would get tremendous insight as to the mindset Great Bend had on the war and on the bindings. This is valuable historic knowledge lost to time that was only realized to be lost when I decided to do a story on the past comics of our school’s newspaper!
And seriously, how could I be the first to realize this? Had no one else wandered to the “first” volume of Panther Tales before? Apparently not, or their discovery wasn’t documented. Does it even matter? We know it’s lost to time now, and more likely than not, it will never be found.
Despite that, there is still plenty of interesting history to be dissected in the archives of our school. Vietnam, South Korea, The Unabomber, even 9/11. All of these historic events that most of us weren’t even alive to witness we have access to a source where these things happened around them. The folks writing the older newspaper entries of GBHS watched these events happen, and we have an untapped well of information on how people viewed these events!
And still… so much has been abandoned. As I said, ever since the school got rid of physical newspapers in favor of a website, Panther Tales has lacked an actual comic. Two years of valuable history is gone, most likely to never be found. But it isn’t all for naught, as if you couldn’t tell by the image attached to this story, there’s a new comic!
While history can be lost, the present is now, and the comic–for now–is back! Enjoy it, and in the meantime, do your best to not let history be lost to time, yeah?
