PRINCE VALIANT

For Fantgraphics Books’ current Prince Valiant reprint endeavor, the publisher found better source material than was available for its earlier revival of Hal Foster’s classic Sunday page — to wit, a nearly
full set of pristine color engraver’s proof sheets of almost the entire Prince Valiant run, carefully preserved by Foster and donated to Syracuse University, which provided scans for Fantagraphics’ use. Apart from having higher quality source material than was previously available, advances in digital color technology permit more faithful reproduction. Previous editions of Prince Valiant — the Nostalgia Press effort in the 1960s and Fantagraphics’ 40-volume set (produced 1984-2004) — recolored the pages, but the color didn’t duplicate the appearance of the original publication of the strip, and the linework was often blotchy.

But the present effort is wonderfully faithful to the originals: not only is the color itself much much better, but the linear detail is stunning. The current volumes reprint twice as many pages (124) per book as the earlier Fantgraphics effort and the pages at 10x14-inches are slightly larger than the predecessor’s. But it’s the fabulously high quality of the reproduction that makes these volumes a bargain at $29.99 each; Volume 2, reprinting two years, 1939-40, is now available.

In it, Mark Schultz, current writer for Prince Valiant (being drawn nowadays by Gary Gianni) and an accomplished illustrator in the Frazetta-Williamson tradition and absolute master of the Xenozoic (the completeness of which is soon to be released by Flesk), supplies the Foreword in which he contends that Foster was “primarily a cartoonist, working with and exploiting the opportunities unique to the sequential medium” not, as is often argued, “a traditional illustrator squatting on the comics page while remaining largely aloof from comics conventions.” In support of his argument, Schultz says that Foster, conscious of the capacities of the Sunday funnies in color, deliberately simplified his drawing mannerisms, resorting to simple outline and high contrast style rather than using hachuring and the other tone-building techniques customarily employed by illustrators.

In effect, saith Schultz, Foster is a cartoonist because he used the drawing techniques of cartoonists and did so in the Sunday comics section where cartoonists were published. (Oddly, Gianni swerves off in the other direction, hachuring like an illustrator; nice-looking art in almost any venue but a newspaper’s Sunday funnies section, wherein, alas, Gianni’s Valiant is too often published at a much too small a dimension to enable us to appreciate the artist’s visual effects.)

In any event — regardless of the position you choose to take on the question — the Fantagraphics reprinting of Foster’s Prince Valiant is a high performance achievement, superior to anything that has gone before, and worth every penny, volume by volume, of its price.