All Hail, Prince Valiant!

How perfect that the birthday of Hal Foster (1892-1982), creator of Prince Valiant, falls the day after that of Sir Walter Scott? (I wonder if Foster got Scott’s books as birthday presents as a kid. Don’t sneer, troglodyte. I read Scott’s books as a kid, and for SURE kids read him at the turn of the 20th century. As I write this, I’m not sure that most American adults know what to DO with a book.)

Anyway, if Scott’s books were fantasies, Foster’s comics are UBER-fantasies, a hodgepodge of times and places, but it all seems to make aesthetic sense somehow. Unlike Scott, Foster was not a scholar. He came up the working class way. Originally from Nova Scotia, he later moved to Winnipeg and then Chicago, where he toiled as a commercial artist and audited classes at what is now the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1928 he was hired to adaptTarzan into a comic strip. He drew that for nearly a decade before he had the opportunity to create his own strip Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur in 1937. The strip is still going!

I rarely looked at Prince Valiant as a kid, on account of its ongoing storyline, which is still in progress after over 4,000 installments I might add. I like an experience that’s nice and manageable, not catching up on several decades worth of old comics pages. Well… I liked Dick Tracy (and re-read vintage storylines), so I guess that puts the lie to that. But also, the mythos of Prince Valiant was difficult to pin down, and that’s because it was a historical and literary mash-up, involving aspects of the Arthurian Legend (a product of pre-Anglo-Saxon Britons), and Viking/Germanic/ Pagan stuff, Late Rome, early Christianity, and even early Islam, among other elements. Some of the events that take place seem to indicate that it takes place circa 500 A.D., but most of the visuals seem far later, like a thousand years later. See that castle in the illustration above? That’s a fairy tale thing. Real castles are forts, short on ornament, big on walled protection.

But fairy tales are legit! I happen to love them. So ultimately it’s a fantasy world you can get lost in, if you choose to gallop on your steed in that direction. And Foster’s world is so well realized. He has always been justly prized as one of the best draftsmen ever to work in comics. His art is just really, really good. He was a major influence on the guys who came up right after him. Superman, for example, debuted just a couple of years after Prince Valiant.

The big screen version of Prince Valiant came along in 1954, starring Robert Wagner in a wig that made him look like Jean Brooks in The Seventh Victim. Man, what an epic production. Written by Dudley Nichols, directed by Henry Hathaway, with a cast that included James Mason,Janet Leigh, Debra Paget, Sterling Hayden, Victor McLaglen, Donald Crisp, Brian Aherne, Tom Conway,Brian Aherne, Neville Brand, and Primo Carnera! Narrated by Michael Rennie. Shot in Technicolor and Cinescope! How could it fail! But somehow it did. It didn’t break even at the box office.

In 1997 it was remade by horror director Anthony Hickox, with plenty of stars in the cast, although some of them are kind of cheesy. They included Stephen Moyer of True Blood,Katherine Heigl of Grey’s Anatomy, Joanna Lumley (of more than just Ab Fab, but yes, of Ab Fab), as well as Edward Fox, Ron Perlman, and little person Warwick Davis. As with most of these modern remakes, it possessed none of the magic of the original, and fell off its horse at the box office.

Around 1970, Foster stopped personally drawing the Prince Valiant strip, but he continued to write it and supervise how it should be laid out for another decade. Many succeeding artists picked up the gauntlet after that. It’s still carried in 300 newspapers!