PRINCE VALIANT

vol. 10: 1955-1956 – by hal fosterpublished by fantagraphics books, inc., seattle.

Once there, sitting through a two- or three- hour service was a grueling task for me. I was a notoriously fidgety kid, afflicted with a near-terminal case of what we now call ADHD. To keep me settled, Mom always brought along a pencil and some ruled, loose-leaf paper from our school supplies. While Dad delivered his sermon, I’d occupy myself by drawing pictures of my favorite Bible heroes, Samson and the prophet Elijah, occasionally sneaking in a doo-dle of a cowboy or race car when Mom wasn’t looking.

When we finally returned home, it was time to relax. While Mom took care of the baby and prepared our Sunday dinner, Dad would kick back in an easy chair to read the Sunday paper. He’d always pull out the color “funny pages” and hand them to me. Lying on my stomach on the living room floor, I’d eagerly spread out the Sunday comics, reading every word and studying every drawing, the smells of fried chicken and fresh-baked rolls wafting through the air from the kitchen.

Even at that early age, I preferred adventure strips to the humor stuff. I had my favorites, of course—John Celardo’s Tarzan of the Apes, Mandrake the Magician by Lee Falk and Phil Davis, and Milt Caniff’s Steve Canyon. However, there were three strips that I looked for first: Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy; The Phantom, as depicted by Sy Barry; and—of course—Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. I’d read them once, then when I was finished with all the other strips, would go back and read them once again—savoring them more carefully this time, trying to figure out how the heck the artists had managed to draw all that stuff so well. I have to admit that, at that point in my life, the artwork of Tracy and The Phantom excited my young eyes the most. Gould’s characters were so bizarre, his drawing so wickedly stylized and intriguing. Plus, jeez, there were the two-way wrist radios

and Diet Smith’s flying gadgets! And not only did The Phantom star a masked, costumed hero, Sy Barry’s panel compositions and beautifully drawn and rendered figures were imbued with the type of dynamism and energy one found in comic books.

However, even a scrawny, hyperactive, butch-waxed seven- or eight-year-old like me could tell that Foster’s Prince Valiant Sunday pages were in a class all their own—something triumphant, glorious, and very, very special. Foster’s art was more refined, the drawings so realistic, carefully wrought, and sumptuous. Sufficiently inspired, I’d grab for the pencils and loose-leaf paper again and start to draw until Mom called for us to come to dinner. At that stage of my artistic development the figures I drew were little more than balloon heads on stick bodies, and I knew that I’d never, ever possess the drawing abilities of Hal Foster. But his work and that of the other artists in the Sunday comics pages provided me with the urge to try.

And try I did. As the years progressed, my fascination for newspaper comic artists waned when I discovered my cousins’ comic book col-lections. Kubert, Kirby, Glanzman, Steranko, Wrightson, Kaluta, Gulacy, Golden, then on to underground artists like Spain, Griffin, Jaxon, and Irons—in the late ’60s through the ’70s, these guys became my new inspirations. It wasn’t until I entered the Joe Kubert School of Car-toon and Graphic Art in Dover, New Jersey, in 1979 that I rediscovered the work of Hal Foster and gained a true appreciation for his work.

There really was no way around it, you see—not that I tried. When I attended the school, classes were still held in its original location in the old Baker Mansion, high on a wooded hill on the edge of town. Every morning, we sleepy students would trudge up the front porch stairs and through the big double doors that led into

the mansion’s main hallway. Immediately after entering the school we’d pass by a magnificent example of Foster’s art that hung on the wall by the teachers’ lounge door: a perfect black-and-white photostat of the Prince Valiant Sunday page from December 9, 1962. Seeing it was absolutely unavoidable. The page always looked huge to me. I’m told it measured 18" x 24", but compared to the then-standard-sized 10" x 15" comic book pages we were doing in class it appeared much larger. As I recall, it was the sole piece of framed art in the hall. It almost seemed as if Kubert had hung it there as some sort of monument: a pro-verbial sword in the stone, reminding us every day that that this—this!—should be the ideal that we, as devoted squires of pen, brush, and India ink, should ever strive toward. I’m not exagger-ating when I tell you that, for the three years I attended the school, a day would seldom pass that I didn’t stop at some point to look at that page. And almost every time, like the mirrored surface of the Lake of Avalon, it would attempt to reveal some little secret to me.

Look at those shadows on the boat, cast by the campfire. See how they frame Arn’s figure: they establish the mood and the overall sense of a young boy, all alone and overwhelmed by the dark night and the omnipresent, too-silent for-est. See Valiant against the black line of trees, lost in his thoughts, so concerned about the wel-fare of his son. Look at the way Foster sculpts the faces, the subtle characterizations he establishes, the way he allows you to read their thoughts. Look at how the folds work against each other; you can read the weight of the fabric. Look at the way Foster uses line work, alternating from thick to thin, adding weight and mass with unbe-lievable deftness and simplicity. Indeed, one of the most amazing revelations gleaned from that piece of art was just how much realism Foster attained with so few lines. Yet, while lessons can be revealed, it’s another thing for them to be emulated. For a guy like me who has ever been guilty of overworking a page and throwing just too much darn stuff in there—and poorly drawn stuff at that!—the 1962 Hal Foster original pro-vided a lot to ponder. Still, I tried and continue to do so. It’s one of the things that makes fac-ing an unfinished page of artwork that’s lying on your desk so worthwhile.

In any treatise about Hal Foster’s work and career, we always read about how much his art-work inspired and influenced other artists in the comic-strip and comic-book fields. It wasn’t until I attended the Kubert School that I discovered just how true that is. His impact on Kubert and the other instructors was all-pervasive. You could be absolutely certain there were four artists at least one of the teachers

SCHOOLED BY FOSTERIntroduction by Timothy Truman

When I was a little kid in the early 1960s, Sunday afternoons at our home in Parkersburg, West Virginia, were pretty special.

Dad was a Baptist minister, so early mornings were always hectic. After wolfing down some breakfast, our little house became all rush and frenzy as Mom, Dad, and my two oldest sisters primped and preened and selected their best clothes for the morning service, while in the middle of it all making sure my baby sister and I were dressed and my crew cut was all butch-waxed and combed. Then it was off to church, where Mom hoped that the family could set a good example for the congregation by arriving before the first hymn was done.

was going to mention during the course of the day: Alex Raymond, Milton Caniff, Roy Crane, and Hal Foster. Without a doubt, it was Foster’s name that came up most of all. Every instructor absolutely idolized him, and the most minute details of his work were constantly used as examples. Dick Giordano would show us how the master would some-times add weight to figures and root them to the ground by breaking up the linework and eliminating the shadows where characters’ feet touched the ground. Tex Blaisdell point-ed out to us that, while some artists would never touch the lines of a background image to a foreground figure, Foster would, and by doing so would actually give the overall image a clearer impression of depth and space. Oh, yeah—and also that, in his opinion, the women Foster drew were much better-look-ing than Alex Raymond’s. Bob Oksnar, who had an incredible and scholarly knowledge of composition, showed us slides of choice Foster panels, using them to illustrate how

compositions can be built by situating figures and objects in a drawing, and planning the lighting and shadows in the form of geomet-ric shapes. Among the Foster-derived wisdom that Hy Eisman imparted to us during one of his inking classes was a simple and eminently valuable fact: “Line equals shadow”—i.e., that when we were inking outlines around figures and objects we weren’t simply drawing lines. We were telling the reader about the light-ing. During one assignment, Joe Kubert used Foster’s work as an example of how to establish lighting continuity and how he used shadows as both a compositional device and a way to lead a reader’s eye to the next panel, or wherever else he wanted it to go. Nor were all the lessons purely technical. John Belfi once pointed out to Tom Yeates, John Tot-leben, and me just how much violence Foster could sneak into one of his otherwise family-friendly Sunday pages. Don’t believe it? Look again at some of his most famous action pan-oramas and fight scenes, and keep a careful

eye out for the barely concealed beheadings and chopped-off, bloody hands that fly through the air! And Tom Yeates has already told you—in an introduction to one of the earlier volumes in this series—about the time that Joe Kubert gleefully pointed out a few choice panels from his Tarzan comic-book run that he’d unashamedly cribbed from the Tarzan work done by his favorite artist, Hal Foster!

Once, as kids, all these cartoonists and their fellow instructors had probably lain on their bellies on the living room floor, gazing at the newest, eagerly awaited editions of the Sunday funnies, studying in wonderment the work of the master, Hal Foster.

Much like that preacher’s kid in Parkers-burg, West Virginia.

–Timothy Truman, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, June 2014 www.timothytruman.com