Customer Reviews

Prince Valiant, Vol. 17: Return from Rome

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Hal Foster's "Prince Valiant" was one of the great adventure comics of the mid-20th century. Initially a fugitive from an overthrown dynasty, Valiant joins the court of King Arthur and marries - without settling down - in a series of adventures set in a vaguely Dark Ages/early Middle Age setting.

In this episode Prince Valiant leaves Rome after a futile attempt to develop a united front against the Huns. Valiant's squire loses his foot but finds a wife, and the Prince returns home to find he has a new baby. A crazy kinglet holds tyrannical sway over petty kingdom and Valiant must fight for his life to defeat them.

Not one of the best episodes, but pretty good and with the great Foster artwork.

Hal Foster was forty four years old when he began writing and illustrating the Prine Valiant stories. Prior to beginning the series, Foster worked as a commercial illustrator for over twenty years. As a mature artist, Foster brought a level of technical skill to his work that elevated the Prince Valiant stories to some of the finest ever produced.

In my opinion, Has Foster was at his very best when illustrating the natural world. The "Return From Rome" has Prince Valiant crossing the high, snow covered Alps and returning to Britain on a long sea voyage. The story is told with Foster's usual competence but it is the beautiful illustrations that make this volume so special. It is hard to think of any artist working in the comic book field who even comes close to matching is craftsmanship. Highly recommended.

Hal Foster's "Prince Valiant" is a still-running Sunday comic strip that Foster began in 1937. Prince Valiant is a fictitious knight of King Arthur's mythic Round Table. Valiant's story starts with his family's exile from Scandinavia to Britain when he is a young boy, and in seventy-three years of Sunday comics, chronicles approximately thirty years of his lifetime. Along the way he experiences a breath-taking array of amazing adventures, all over England, Europe, Africa, and even North America. At the zenith of Foster's efforts, in the 1940s and 1950s, the strip was a perfect blend of adventure, intrigue, romance, chaste sexuality and dry humor. Foster was justifiably famous for his meticulous research and superb art. In later years the strip became more formulaic, and with the shrinking Sunday pages, and after Foster retired in 1980, the strip became a pale shadow of its former brilliance. In the mid 1980s, Fantagraphics Books undertook to reprint the first 2,271 pages of the strip, ultimately in 50 volumes, of which this volume 17 is typical. Fantagraphics commissioned artists to subtly re-color the original black line-work, resulting in a much richer product than the newsprint three color process. Occasionally, Fantagraphics had to use poor reproductions of the black line-work, but even at that it's a marvelous collection. Any fan of Prince Valiant will thoroughly enjoy this amazing reprint series. Highly recommended.