Prince Valiant Volumes 20 and 21

Prince Valiant’s story continues in these two volumes produced by Fantagraphics. This time, they are solely the work of John Cullen Murphy, Hal Foster’s successor, other than the 2000^th installment of the strip in Volume 20, which summarizes the key points of Valiant’s story and was drawn by Foster. The years of these volumes run from 1975-1978. I’ll summarize a few of the highlights here. But be forewarned there are some spoilers.

As this cover shows, Aleta always steals in the show in the Prince Valiant strip.

Volume 20 includes more of Prince Arn, Valiant’s son, who has become one of my favorite characters as we have watched him grow up. Here he meets twin princes, one of whom ends up murdering the other.

Aleta, Valiant’s wife, is another favorite character of mine. This time she and Valiant return to the Misty Isles, and on the way, Hashida the Sorcerer falls in love with her, kidnaps her, and hypnotizes her. Of course, Valiant rescues her, but Aleta won’t let him kill Hashida, explaining to him that if he kills everyone who loves her, he’ll decimate the male population.

Aleta’s banished sister, Helene, figures in the story also. Years ago, her husband plotted against Aleta. Now the husband is killed in a gambling fight and she is taken as a prize by the winner, so Valiant has to rescue her also.

Finally, Arn is sent to Camelot to begin to learn statecraft so he is ready someday to be a king.

In addition, a short but interesting essay is included at the end of Volume 20 by Michael Dean about stereotypical racial characters in the Valiant strip, particularly a very short segment in which a moneylender’s depiction led to an outcry by Jewish readers that he was a stereotype, even though the strip did not name him as a Jew. While Murphy was writing the strip at this time, Foster saw fit to respond with an apology. The essay mentions that in earlier strips Foster was sensitive to depictions of Jewish characters, but also that a larger study of racism and stereotypes in Foster needs to be made—something I agree with, for there are a lot of stereotypical racial characters in the strip, but at the same time, the strip is partly a product of its time and also has the problem of being very wide-reaching in allowing Valiant to travel over most of the known world at the time and consequently to come into contact with people from many different lands, some of whom have to be villains and some decent people to add interest to the plots. That is an oversimplification so I hope someone will write an in-depth article or book on racism in the strip.

John Cullen Murphy’s art work perfectly captures the style Foster created for the script.

Volume 21 begins with an interesting article about the “historicity” of Prince Valiant, which discusses the strip’s connection to the Arthurian legend and gives a fair overview of the development of the Arthurian legend and its sources while noting that Foster made reference to many events such as the quest for the Holy Grail and the love story of Tristan and Iseult while going off into Valiant’s own stories rather than focusing on the Arthurian ones. What is important and interesting here is how hard Foster tried to be historical, clearly setting the strip in the fifth and sixth centuries in the time when the Roman Empire had fallen and before the rise of the high Middle Ages. In fact, Foster was writing one of the earliest versions of Arthurian fiction that tried to be historical rather than being simply romance, although a few Arthurian novels predate it such as W. Barnard Faraday’s Pendragon (1930).

While there are several stories in Volume 21, for me the best were Valiant’s daughter Karen’s desire to become a warrior queen, and then the story of how Arn travels to Thule and reunites with Lydia, daughter of King Haakon, whom he has fallen in love with. Sadly, Lydia dies in a tragic accident, leaving Arn mourning. I trust Arn will find love in a future volume—there are even hints by the end of this one that he will. Meanwhile, Arn grown a mustache, showing us he is now fully grown.

The upcoming Volume 22 promises to return us more closely to the Arthurian plot as Arthur’s half-brother Mordred plots to usurp the throne. Stay tuned for more.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Children of Arthur series, which includes the novels Arthur’s Legacy, Melusine’s Gift, Ogier’s Prayer, Lilith’s Love, and Arthur’s Bosom. He has also written the nonfiction scholarly works King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition and The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, plus numerous other books. You can learn more about Tyler at www.ChildrenofArthur.com and www.MarquetteFiction.com.

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Prince Valiant: Volumes 7 & 8 – the Adventures Continue

In the past, I’ve written an individual blog for each volume of the Prince Valiant series, but I decided to group these two together because I couldn’t get myself too excited about Volume 7; furthermore, the adventure in it continues into Volume 8 because the books are printed by the years the strip was published and not by breaks in the storyline. Volume 7 contains the strips from 1949-1950 and Volume 8 covers 1951-1952.

Prince Valiant, Vol. 7: 1949-1950, published by Fantagraphics Books

Volume 7 begins by concluding Valiant’s trip to North America that was covered in Volume 6. Valiant, Aleta, newborn Prince Arn, and his other companions return to England and Camelot. They don’t have much time to rest, however, before new adventures begin for them. First there is an adventure with a haunted castle, and then a journey to Hadrian’s wall where the Picts are invading. Aleta is the great negotiator and trickster here as she wins over the Picts and stops the war. However, Valiant is wounded during the skirmishes, so he cannot travel by land back to Camelot because it would be too painful for him. Consequently, they take a sea voyage to visit his family in Thule. During the time in Thule, an enemy tries to overthrow Valiant’s father, King Aguar, and once again, Aleta steps in and saves the day through trickery; Foster, I believe, uses this method frequently to resolve conflict to provide a humorous tone to many of the adventures, while avoiding a lot of bloodshed in a Sunday comic strip—a couple of times when he did create frames that were too violent, they were censored and he had to change them.

To me, the most interesting part of this volume was that King Aguar listens to Christian evangelists who try to explain Christianity to him, but he finds they are poorly informed and they argue among themselves about the key points of their religion. Consequently, Valiant, who has been exposed to Christianity in Camelot (although he’s never been depicted as being baptized as a Christian) decides to travel to Rome to find teachers who can return with him to Thule to convert his father’s people.

The adventures in Volume 7 end there, but there is also an interesting article included about Hal Foster’s work painting illustrations for the Union Pacific Railroad. Many of these paintings show mountain scenes with railroad trestles, and this work may have informed his creation of scenes of the Alps and others in the Prince Valiant strip. While Foster’s storylines read like a soap opera and tend to wander about, no one can fault his ability to create great landscape drawings, so it’s interesting to see how his early career influenced the Prince Valiant strip in this way.

Volume 8 was much more to my taste. Valiant has several adventures on his journey to Rome to find Christian missionaries to return to Thule. He has even more adventures on the way back to Thule. However, we are informed briefly that the people of Thule do not warm to the missionaries easily, and it will still be centuries before the country converts to Christianity. The illustrations of Valiant crossing the Alps in this volume are incredible and reflect the influence of Foster’s Union Pacific Railroad artwork.

Prince Valiant, Vol. 8: 1951-1952

Other highlights of this volume include Valiant’s squire, Arf, who ends up losing a leg to frostbite during the journey and getting what must be one of the first prosthetic legs in history. On the way home, Valiant travels back to Camelot and then to the Orkneys to take a ship over to Thule. Gawain is his companion on this trip, and they stop to visit Gawain’s family, his mother Morgause, as well as brothers Gaheris, Agrivaine, and Mordred. We are only given the first hints here of the sinister role of Mordred in the strips that are yet to come.

Foster isn’t above some cutesy moments. Besides Val returning to Thule to discover Aleta has given him twin daughters, Valeta and Karen, we have Prince Arn, now a toddler, being jealous of his sisters, including several frames from his viewpoint. Arn even gets his own adventure when he is kidnapped and rescued by Tillicum, the Indian woman who returned with Val and Aleta from North America. Tillicum has her own subplot romance in this volume as well with a surprising twist.

At the end of this volume, another great adventure is in the works. Val travels around Thule to discover how receptive the people are to Christianity. He meets a druid (I didn’t know the Norse had druids) who gives him nectar to drink, resulting in Val having a vision of the Rainbow Bridge, the Norse Gods, and Valhalla. This vision is supposed to be proof, according to the druid, that Christianity is not the only true religion. Val will apparently explore this idea in more detail in Volume 9.

While I find moments of the story lag in places, the illustrations throughout these volumes are beautiful and breathtaking, whether it’s of Val and his men fighting the rapids in North America or Val seeing a rainbow bridge, or just splendid landscapes showing mountains and castles. I am looking forward to seeing what Val learns about the Norse Gods, as well as seeing his children grow up, and how Mordred plays a larger part in successive volumes. Stay tuned for more.

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