By Paul Carrier
Created in 1937 by illustrator and cartooning legend Hal Foster, Prince Valiant takes us to King Arthur’s court, where Val, the young son of an exiled Nordic king, advances from squire to knight of the round table and sets off on a seemingly endless series of fanciful adventures that take him around the world.
Foster is long gone (he died in 1982) but various artists and writers have assumed his mantle over the years, and his much-admired epic remains in circulation to this day. Known for its detailed artwork, stunning realism, literacy, sometimes humorous domestic story lines and high drama, Prince Valiant certainly deserves a reference book of its own. Now it has one.
Edward, Duke of Windsor, once described Prince Valiant as the “greatest contribution to English literature in the past hundred years,” which is, of course, a ridiculous overstatement. Still, it underscores the exalted spot that Prince Valiant holds in the annals of comic-strip history.
As King Features Syndicate, which distributes the strip, explains on its web site, Prince Valiant is “a historical novel in serialized form, one in which characters have more than two dimensions — the virtuous have flaws, and the villainous are frequently not without some small virtue. The characters have known defeat as well as triumph. And they have aged over the years.”
Also included is a timeline of Val’s life, summarizing the highlights from his birth circa 433 through the next 40-plus years. Well-focused interviews with Foster successors John Cullen Murphy and the artist/writing team of Gary Gianni and Mark Schultz are part of the mix as well. But there are sins of omission and commission here too.
Noticeably lacking are brief biographical sketches of the major characters in the strip, which would have been beneficial because Prince Valiant has covered a lot of ground in its 73 years of weekly strips. (There never was a daily strip.) We could use a bit of help sorting out King Arthur, Sir Gawain, Sir Tristram, Merlin, Mordred, Val’s wife Aleta, their children, and the countless villains and heroes who have filled the strip’s pages, either on a recurring basis or in passing.
The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion also features a fawning, overly long, interview with Foster that was conducted late in his life. This exchange includes some revelations, such as the fact that Foster thought cartooning was beneath him when he began illustrating Tarzan several years before the creation of Prince Valiant. But the interview would have benefited from some judicious editing.
This handsome volume’s assets outweigh its deficiencies, however, and it is a must for any library devoted to classic comic strips.
