Hal Foster in his studio working on Prince Valiant in 1947. the one trait missing from most of today’s fictional characters—passion—and he drips it from every pore. Foster’s development of multidimensional characters does not end with just Val. All of Foster’s people are individuals. Each character is not only visually different from the next, they also have different personalities. Their speech is different, their body language is different, they have wrinkles and scars, and if they stub their toe or have their hearts broken, we feel for them. You can almost imagine that each person on a Prince Valiant page, even the minor ones, has a history, a rich, full life that precedes their ever walking into the scene. To Foster’s credit (and to his wife Helen’s as well) the women in these stories are often smarter than the men. And, just to be clear, while “The Winning of Aleta” storyline that ran from May 1944 to January 1946 (see Volumes 4 and 5 of the Fantagraphics editions) begins with Aleta in shackles being dragged by Val through the desert, this Queen of the Misty Isles is no frail flower and could kill Val any time she wants. Lucky for us Aleta has other, more “insidious” plans for Val, who often complains that he will never understand the ways of women. Finally, one of the more interesting yet overlooked elements to Foster’s storytelling genius was how he used Prince Valiant to mirror society, thereby drawing us into his world. When Hitler marched through Europe, Val fought the Huns—and the strip was immediately dropped from German newspapers. Even though Foster later claimed the Hun invasion was a coincidence, one gets the feeling it was said with a knowing nudge and a wink. During World War II, when husbands, brothers, sons, and friends were falling on fields of battle, a 44 COMIC-CON ANNUAL 2012
beloved, faithful friend of Val’s died in combat too. And let’s not forget that “The Winning of Aleta” saga, perhaps the most romantic sequence ever created in comics, occurred during WWII when the greatest percentage of readers in America were women. Then, after the war, just as the soldiers were returning home, Val travels to America to rescue his pregnant wife, and it was here among the Native Americans where their son Arn was born, thus heralding in the beginning of the Baby Boomer generation. For the next decade, as Val and Aleta raised their children, they were in sync with other young couples who were raising their own children (back then one of my neighbors even named their daughter Aleta!). In the 1940s, and ’50s, Prince Valiant was nothing short of art reflecting life— with a dash of swordplay. Foster wrote and illustrated Prince Valiant until 1971. That amounts to 34 years, or 1,764 weekly pages, without missing a single deadline, and he continued to write and lay out the strip for 9 more years with illustrator John Cullen Murphy. When Foster retired from Prince Valiant in 1980 at the
age of 87, he had worked on the strip for 43 years. Not surprisingly, Foster is in four artistic Halls of Fame—more than any other comics illustrator. He is in the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, the Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creators Hall of Fame, the National Cartoonists Society Hall of Fame, and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. In 1980 editor and author Cullen Murphy began writing Prince Valiant, and the father-son team continued until Jack Murphy’s passing in 2004. Today, writer Mark Schultz and artist Gary Gianni continue Val’s adventures. It is only fitting that Prince Valiant’s wanderings continue, even after 75 years, for the witch, Horrit prophesied to Val long ago, “You will have high adventure, but nowhere do I see happiness and contentment.” Personally, I am wishing Val many more un-contented years! Before Superman and Batman, before The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia, before Joseph Campbell understood “The Hero’s Journey” and David Lean dragged Peter O’Toole through a Technicolor desert, there was Harold R. Foster’s Prince Valiant, comics’ greatest 4Q hero.
Brian M. Kane has taught art for 14 years and has a master’s degree in history of art from The Ohio State University. He is the author of the Eisner-nominated, Ippy Award-winning Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators (Vanguard), The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion (Fantagraphics), and James Bama: American Realist (Flesk). Kane’s essays also appear in Volumes 1 and 4 of Fantagraphics’ new Prince Valiant reprint series, for which he is also a consultant. He is currently working on a new book collecting all of Hal Foster’s penciled layout pages and would appreciate it if anyone owning a page or a pencil sketch by Foster would contact him.