by foster, murphy + murphy vol. 29: 1993-1994
THE SQUIRE AND THE PRINCE
Rafael Marín
Twelve years after the beginning of the series, Prince Valiant is already a title that moves within unique parameters that set it off from the larger world of comics. Harold Foster knows and perfectly masters the resources of his narrative. He has stylized his prose and has also stylized his drawing, dispensing with a good part of the backgrounds and accepting for the first time the collaboration of assistants.
Always going against the grain, Foster may have identified with Val and his environment, a world that had become bigger, more perfect, with the development of a memorable cast, including, above all, Val’s marriage to the beautiful Aleta. His wife added the sweetness and irony of everyday life to the epic scale of the stories (and, incidentally, attracted a multitude of female readers to the title). Comic-strip heroes, for the most part, did not know how to do without their eternal girlfriends, and Foster made the most of this convention, which paved the way for the birth of Prince Arn and the rest of the offspring and demonstrated that the strip could advance in time and resemble, without excess complication, what is so fashionable now: a novel in comics form.
We see here, perhaps unconsciously, a couple of returns to origins, or perhaps Foster develops previously outlined elements of his narrative more freely. Magic and witchcraft, only lightly suggested in the first years of the series are now revealed here: the spectral inhabitants of Illwynde Castle (strip 624, opposite) use theater and masks to scare their neighbors and protect themselves ... a subterfuge similar to the duck-skin mask Val himself had already used against the ogre of Sinstar Wood (strip 48, excerpted below left). Also, the exciting passage of the fight against the Picts on Hadrian’s wall (and it should be remembered
that every time Val travels north he ends up on the brink of death) refers to the beautiful moment of the siege of Andelkrag, the confrontation of barbarism against civilization, the delicacy of the ladies compared to the rudeness of the Picts (or the Huns, in that case).
And I even find a clear parallel between panel 5 of strip 663 (bottom center) with panel 4 of strip 124 (bottom right): In both cases, we see the passage of time, how the young man who defied death is about to succumb to serenity. From this moment on, Val’s features will no longer be those of a boy, but those of an adult man. But the most important thing about these years is the introduction of young Geoffrey (above right). Every knight needs a squire. Prince Arn is still just a baby, but Foster is undoubtedly already imagining what the future life of his characters will be like. Geoffrey (or Geoff, or Geff, it seems that Foster is never quite sure what to call the boy ... until he resolves it later, giving his story a complete twist) is in a way a reminder of the youthful Val, Sir Gawain’s squire, and a draft of what could be a teenage Arn, as if Foster was in a hurry and did not want to wait twelve or fifteen years for Val and Aleta’s son to enter adolescence. Brave and reckless, faithful and nervous, capable of flouting the rules, Geoff will accompany Val and his knights and family for several years, as if he were a kind of adopted son. Through
his admiring sidekick eyes we will often see the discovery of landscapes and countries, the dangers and miseries of human beings, the humorous elements and, when the time comes, the tragedy of powerlessness. Geoff is a good boy with aspirations to be a great warrior like Val, but destiny has another greatness in store for him. As time goes by, he will become not only an inextricable part of the legend of Prince Valiant but also its caretaker. Geoffrey is the excuse for Foster to recycle moments from Val’s saga while he takes the opportunity to travel and enjoy a well-deserved vacation with his wife, a resource that readers of the moment did not perceive as repetitive (the stories were, in editorial time, fifteen years in the past). And these rehearsals form the basis of Geoffrey’s “true” story of Prince Valiant and its written version (in Latin!) for the greater glory of his legend. ^
Spanish author and cultural historian Rafael Marín has published more than forty books in and about various genres, including Hal Foster: A Post-Romantic.
