Prince Valiant by Harold Foster (No. 100)

Prince Valiant (1937-1971)

by Harold Foster

REVIEW BY GREG CWIKLIK:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

It is well known that Harold Foster always considered himself to be an illustrator rather than a cartoonist, and it is Foster's artwork that gives Prince Valiant its majesty and scope. He remains unrivalled in his depictions of sea and sky, wild forest glades, medieval fortresses looming over fields of jousting knights. Foster was an outdoorsman and his love of nature in all its seasonal variations permeate the strip. A superb draughtsman and a master of complex composition, his work is never formulaic: whether drawing a wistful maiden lost in thought on a parapet, or rendering a warrior manning a catapult on a crowded and chaotic battlefield, each is always depicted as an individual possessing distinct characteristics of dress, physical appearance, and expression. His charming and earthly rendering of everyday domestic life also balances the more romanticised elements.

It is true that certain details of costume and architecture are conflated from other periods and sometimes owe more to Victorian imagination than to recent scholarship. But Foster had the rare gift of being able to transform his historical imagery, whatever its source, into a vivid, convincing and personal evocation of the past. When, for example, he portrays a boatload of Vikings, they come across as real flash-and-blood individuals, even if their winged helmets and barbaric ornaments may not be strictly accurate; and when Val leaps to the ship's rigging, harp in hand with the vast ocean visible behind him and sings a ballad to the weary sea rovers, Foster achieves one of those moments of true emotional and visual poetry that occur time and again in his work.

REVIEW BY EDDIE CAMPBELL:
(from a review in Escape Magazine #6, 1985)
I've always felt that Prince Valiant stands high over its contemporaries in the Adventure/Classical genre of the Newspaper Sunday, because, whereas Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon and Burne Hogarth's Tarzan were sometimes marred by juvenile simplism, Foster's work is not only impressive to look at like those, but is always interesting to read... As an artist, he never in his life rushed a pen-stroke; every tree, cloud and rock is put down with immaculate precision.

REVIEW BY DAN NADEL:
Sure I'd read Foster before, but I'd never found a way in. Fortunately, Fantagraphics recently released Prince Valiant Vol 1: 1937-38, and I was able to absorb the material in a wholly new way... Prince Valiant opens up a world that I wanted to stay in - a wide-eyed early 20th century approach to fantasy with a now-vanished sincerity and wholesomeness. It's an all too rare pleasure in comics.

FURTHER READING:

Harold Foster at Fantagraphics Books

Eight Things You Might Not Know About Prince Valiant