Customer Reviews

Prince Valiant Vol. 37: The Adventures of Gawain

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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 37 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.