Cresting the High Wave

Well, well, well, I appear to be back in ship shape order . . . I hope. 

I'm skimming the surface of various applications, apprehensive of hearing the theme from Jaws. But at this point, I'm cresting the high wave, and seeking calm on the far side. I've a lot of work to catch up on, but I wanted to say 'hey' and hope to see more of you sailing through here again. 

And yes, after taking the longest possible time, the geniuses from Apple called me in on Black Friday to pick up my machine. Aarrrghhh.

Hal Foster — Prince Valiant panel — 1940s

Battle Cry

One of the finest comic strip panels in the history of the medium:

Hal Foster — Prince Valiant — panel detail from June 19, 1938

Defensive Formation

Imagine that. One simple average panel for Hal Foster . . .

Hal Foster — Prince Valiant — panel detail —8-3-1969

Fanboy Stuff

Here's something for you fanboys out there (and fangirls?). As you Wally Wood fans know, Wood was in contention as artist when Hal Foster was retiring from the Prince Valiant strip. Wood 'lost out' to John Cullen Murphy, but (no offense to Murphy) I think we lost out from the direction Wood might have taken the strip (and I don't know, maybe given him more reason to live?). He couldn't have taken it as far as this page from his Wizard King pages, but one for one brief moment imagine this big panel as if Prince Valiant had ascended to King through mighty combat and fair Aleta was his Queene. Yeah, yeah, fanboy stuff.

Wally Wood — page from Wizard King story entitled The End

Storming Up the Stair

Here is another closer examination of a Sunday panel of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant—just one 'ordinary' panel, but a masterpiece of composition from the 1960s.

Val is battling his way up the staircase, yet is front and center with his men for us to know who the good guys are here, displaying his heraldic horse and all. The perspective and shadows feel proper and the melange of arms and legs are perfectly placed and connected so that we feel a total authenticity to the scene.

Foster was not using models or photos here—you couldn't stage such a scene. This is his mind and hand at work.

Hal Foster — Prince Valiant — panel detail

Luxury and Indolence

Hal Foster really 'illustrated' the Prince Valiant comic strip, rather than 'cartooned' it, composing more detail into one panel than most Sunday strips had in their entirety. It's almost ludicrous to turn over one of the published Valiant full pages to see Yogi Bear, ViP, and Wizard of Id with their simplistic, repetitive graphics.

For the ongoing Paneltopia category, here is another isolated panel that deserves to be examined in closer detail.

Hal Foster — Prince Valiant

Paneltopia

I'm starting a new recurring and sporadic feature post that I'm calling Paneltopia, a place where panels and covers from comic books and strips are portals for the imagination to enter and contemplate — panels and covers isolated from the story for pure enjoyment of the art. Roy Lichtenstein took comic panels and bastardized them into 'high' art. I'm just honoring comic panels as they are as 'low' art. See which art form you would rather gaze at.

Hal Foster's Prince Valiant has panel after panel that I love to examine, especially in the large format that he drew and was published in. The panel directly below was HUGE on the printed Sunday broadsheet. I have many Valiant strips from the '60s that will be contributing panels to this feature.

Oh to be in the hunting party of King Arthur on a crisp Autumn day...

Page 2000

Prince Valiant was the only comic strip that I know of that kept track of how many pages it had published, week by week. This was page 2000 of Hal Foster's epic Sunday strip. Published well after Foster retired and laden with iconic Foster artwork from the past, it was quite a treat to see in the midst of John Cullen Murphy's run on the strip.

Hal Foster — Prince Valiant page 2000 — June 8, 1975

King Arthur Connections

Neil O'Keeffe was an illustrator/cartoonist that had a long career in the early/mid 20th century. He illustrated the book immediately below, In the Court of King Arthur, published in 1918. The color illustrations in it are reminiscent (to me) of Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, even though it predates that comic strip by a generation.

I have to wonder what connections there may be here between O'Keefe and Foster. They were born within a year of each other in the 1890s, and died within a somewhat close time of each other in the 1980s, both working as illustrators turned cartoonists during those long years of the 20th century.

O'Keeffe's style in this book looks somewhat like Foster's, even with Valiant's pageboy haircut on display. Yet O'Keeffe's cartoon style that he used in Dick's Adventures, years later (seen at the bottom of this post), looks (to me) very similar to the comic strip style that John Cullen Murphy used when he replaced Foster on the Prince Valiant strip.

O'Keeffe and Foster seemed to cross paths in Chicago and elsewhere in their early illustration careers. O'Keefe, Foster and Murphy all worked for the King Features Syndicate (owned and guided by William Randolph Hearst), during a concurrent period in the 1950s, Murphy drawing Big Ben Bolt.

To further mystify my curiosity, the fellow who wrote Dick's Adventures was Max Trell, and that same Max Trell wrote the text for Hal Foster's hard cover Hastings House adaptations of Prince Valiant in the 1950s.

I've casually tried to find an official connection between O'Keeffe and Foster, such as a friendship or sitting at the same table at the NCS gatherings, or anything—to no avail. There may be no connection whatsoever, but if anyone knows more of the backstory alluded to here, please do let me know. The most curious thing to me is the similarity of this book's illustrations to the later Prince Valiant, not saying whether Foster was influenced or not.

Neil O'Keeffe — In the Court of King Arthur — cover

1918

endpapers

This and most other black and white illustrations in the book (most not shown) seem stylistically to belong to another hand.

The one below initialed G.G.

half-title

frontis piece and title page

Below, an O'Keeffe magazine illustration from 1950

Below, O'Keeffe's cartooning style on Dick's Adventures that I feel is reminiscent to John Cullen Murphy's style on Prince Valiant.

Four Color #245

Glory and Pageantry

OK, for the pleasure of comic strip illustration connoisseurs, I will scan and post some more Hal Foster Prince Valiant black and white art some time next week.

I really enjoy studying his line art, and I know there are some black and white purists in this viewership, but color is such a part of the glory and pageantry of the Valiant Arthurian epic. Here's a panel just to remind us of that:

In the Days of King Arthur

Anyone who loves Hal Foster's artwork, and specifically Prince Valiant, has seen his work dozens of times in dozens of different editions of printings, including the beautiful current hard covers from Fantagraphics.

But somehow I am so enamored of the 1950s Hastings House editions that printed Foster's artwork as black and white line work, with a narrative text by Max Trell. The artwork is so clean and crisp, looking much like his original drawings would look like. And there were epic scenes throughout.

I'm only showing a few of the many illustrations in this volume, not in any particular order, and one of those I cropped. We've seen this work in many places, but if you'd like to see more of these beautiful black and whites, let me know and I'll be glad to scan some more.

I love this set of books!

In Delirium

You can see here that the Nostalgia Press editions of Prince Valiant had their own way of colorizing the reprints. They weren't horrible, but they weren't accurate to the original color palettes, many times using single colors to cast over large scenes.

Say as compared to the same panel, below, published in the latest Fantagraphics hard cover reprint, which is a very nice edition. The color is quite similar to the huge, full-size editions put out by Manuscript Press (which is still my favorite reprinting of Prince Valiant—but limited to only 3 volumes).

And then, compare again to the stark and dark Fantagraphics 1st-time-around softcovers from the 80s:

Companions in Adventure

I've been a fan of Hal Foster since I was eight years old. Before even being aware of comic books, I was in love with the Sunday comics with their huge broadsheet layouts. And Prince Valiant always drew me in, even when I had no idea what the story was about.

So flash forward to when I was a young man, having served in the army, but now unemployed, looking for a job. Money was incredibly scarce for a few months. Window shopping at a quaint bookstore, my eyes land on, not one, but two volumes of Prince Valiant art, newly published by Nostalgia Press. The covers were incredibly appealing and each cost $12.95. Thirteen dollars plus tax, and I happened to have fifteen dollars on me. Problem was, that 15 was supposed to keep me in food for a week until my unemployment check came in. Well, you can guess what choice I made. That was the easy choice. The hard choice was deciding on volume one or two, since I could only get a single volume. Well the choice wasn't so hard. Judging a book by its cover, I went for volume 2, Companions in Adventure, the cover art and even the name drawing me in, just as I was drawn in as an 8 year old.

The cover got torn when my (soon to be ex) roommate 'borrowed' it.

When I went back a couple of weeks later, having landed a job, to buy volume one, it was gone. I had to wait some ten years until I found it at a used book store.

With all the other great Valiant books that I now have with better production values, I hold onto these now out of pure nostalgia, and those covers, those incredible covers that never fail to draw me in.

Favorite Foster

Hal Foster created one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight Prince Valiant Sunday pages in his lifetime, and they are all beautiful in various degrees. But my all time favorite Prince Valiant page was created as a limited edition print in a very small run:

Violent Wood

Wallace Wood had sort of a long history of involvement with Prince Valiant, the comic strip. First, like most all other cartoonists the admiration, if not adulation, of watching the epic strip unfold (literally) every Sunday in full tabloid size glory. And then the influence  in drawing, for Wood as a boy and even later as a professional was considerable (as with so many illustrator-cartoonists).

But in the case of Woody, he had the unique experience of periodically lampooning Prince Valiant— for Mad a number of times, in the comic book and later the magazine. It should be said here that however brilliant Wood was as an artist for these parodies, in the case of Prince Violent it was Harvey Kurtzman's writing and breakdowns that took Wood to the heights of achievement. Wood proved many times later that his own writing was, well, somewhat wooden. Kurtzman was 'A" number one in laying a foundation of classic quality for artists to build their own brands of humor.

Wood plus Kurtzman were the best in their genre (ok, Will Elder plus Kurtzman were the best too—I'll post about Elder in due time).

Wood was so good at simulating other artist's styles, he could have ghosted any comic strip for any cartoonist. Prince Valiant would have been the ideal strip for him to do that.

 
I posted this much earlier in the year, but the above parody is worth repeating for the art.

And the above double page spread shows Wood's incredible ability to mimic other cartoonists, with Prince Valiant right in the middle of the action. And the art for Prince Violent, below, well, is just plain gorgeous.

Violent Wood