Prince Valiant Volume 8: 1951-1952: 08 - Tapa dura

You might think that birth of Prince Valiant’s son Arn at the end of the previous volume would have slowed down Val’s adventuring, but you would be wrong. In Prince Valiant Vol. 7, after the baby has been christened, Valiant and Gawain are dispatched to investigate reports of black magic in Wales, ending up in pitched battle at the aptly named Castle Illwynde. Then it’s off to Scotland to battle the Picts, and then home yet again for Val to visit his growing boy. Valiant now enters the 1950s: The Thule winter is hard and bleak, and a prince who has designs on Aleta must be dealt with. Then it’s another epic-length story, “The Missionaries,†in which Val and several of his fellow knights and crew travel to Rome on a quest for teachers who might bring Christianity to Thule. The story also features an escape through the Alps, far too many red-headed girls, and a tragic, life-changing event for the young squire Geoffrey (a.k.a. “Arf †). And Foster charmingly ends the book with “The Prince Arn Story,†a three-week sequence narrated by the toddler.

Hal Foster (1892-1982) created Prince Valiant in 1937. Though remaining involved with the strip until his death in 1982, Foster handed the bulk of the scripting and art chores over to his longtime assistant, John Cullen Murphy, in 1971.

Brian M. Kane is the author of Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators and James Bama: American Realist. He teaches in the Illustration Department at the Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, Ohio. He has a Masters Degree in History of Art from The Ohio State University where he is currently working on his Ph.D. in Art Education with an emphasis in Visual Culture.