Prince Valiant (What fun he is!)

Feeling sad?

There are two sure fire drugs in our household against sorrow: Sherlock Holmes audiobooks read by Charlton Griffen and Prince Valiant comics. Leaving aside for another day the perfect voice acting of Griffen, let me praise the artistry of Hal Foster, artist, story teller, maker of jolliness. 

Do not confuse him with Hal Foster the art critic, a killer of jolliness.

Hal Foster’s most famous work, the comic “strip” Prince Valiant still exists even in the pages of the Houston Chronicle, normally an even more potent slayer of jolliness. Do not try to leap (and you are about to do a great deal of leaping if you follow my advice) into the story at this point. The paper has reduced the splendor of Foster and the heirs have been uneven curators of jollification.

Instead, each holiday purchase for your very own these wonderful hardcovers and read them slowly.

Hal Foster damns the complexities of history and tells a story about an Arthurian age that now exists in Foster’s jollier reality. Nothing is that sad in Foster: the sack of Rome by barbarians, merely a hiccup in wedding plans for Our Hero.

Hal Foster invites us to watch his story unfold in tableau frames. They are packed with action but the action does not intrude on our peacefulness. Foster achieves the nearly impossible feat in today’s world of being stimulating without being over stimulating. I got done reading Foster and I want to tell my own stories. When I was younger, I felt ready to go be a knight in play, because Foster stimulated my imagination without overloading it. Prince Valiant is the beginning of fun, not the exhausting end like a CG laden comic book movie.

The comics are drawn beautifully for comics. Be not deceived: Rembrandt is greater than Foster, but Foster is easier on the mind that Rembrandt. Foster was an illustrator and these comics are illustrations to go with his simple stories. The stories are not deep, profound, or even very good, they are fun. The illustrations are marvelous as illustrations and you can look at them for minutes at a time without coming to the end of them.

Don’t spend your life studying Foster, but do let Foster amuse away the grittiness of an overly serious world.

Prince Valiant has a weird hair cut. Let us get that out of the way. Deal with it or you will not get past the first page.

Valiant is courtly as a hero while doing manly things. This is highly unusual. It is so unusual that contemporary readers will have to get used to it. Valiant lives by his code and his code is not our code. If you can get over the haircut, you can get over that. Valiant is no superhero, just good. He gets beaten up, fails, and does foolish things. Prince Valiant is everyman with a page boy hair cut. The woman of his heart, Queen Aleta, is everything that modern movies think they have discovered: Valiant’s superior in every way. She outthinks him, out generals him, and simply adores him.

Valiant works for me because so much of the story is not there. A frame may capture a long period of time and the next frame jumps the story forward by days, months, or years. It is in this “between” time that one gets to imagine. (Thank you to Fred Sanders for teaching me to look between!) Start your Foster collection today.

If you are sorry, then I am sorry for you. Hal Foster: the surefire jollifier who never leaves a bad hangover, causes no side effects, and is gloriously, happily inexpensive.