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.