Hmmm, I'd like to have talked to Al Williamson in the 70s and then not remembered it. I bet he had/has some good and very off the record stories.

It's interesting to think about how Manning, Frazetta and also Kirby each assimilated Foster's influence. Manning added a kind of 60s streamline sense of design and line, Frazetta a wild, only-in-Brooklyn dynamism and Kirby a modernist (and then psychedelic) sense of action and character.

Boy I'd love to hear more about Manning. He seems to have been quite a character. And what a cartoonist. I confess to preferring Magnus to his Tarzan work, but maybe someone can recommend the right volume.

Both Al and I (and lots of other artists, of course) were — and are — constantly seeking to innovate within the genre of comic art. By breaking new ground we wanted to have fun, be original and expand the parameters of the medium.

I'd love to write about it. Unfortunately (for you, not for us), the conversations I referred to took place in the early 1970s, so I have no recollection of any specifics!

I do think, though, that the more conventional (conservative?) trappings of Prince Valiant hide a lot of how brilliant Foster was — unlike the much more obvious examples one could put up for Kurtzman, Eisner or Toth.

It wasn't mentioned but Frank Frazetta's biggest comic art influence (perhaps his biggest art influence, period) was Hal Foster. And although Russ Manning had a Burne Hogarth Tarzan original Sunday page on the wall of his studio, Russ was a Foster man all the way. Foster heavily influenced both the art and writing of Manning.

Russ' love for Foster (and the magnificent examples he showed me of Foster's work) inspired me to track down all of Foster's Tarzan Sundays. I also managed to compile a complete collection of Prince Valiant Sundays from 1939 to 1950 (I have a few of the 1937 & 1938 Vals but, man, those babies are expensive!).

The new book collection of Prince Valiant's first two years is a godsend. And it's got dinosaurs and a giant turtle! If you are new to the work of Harold Foster, you are in for a treat. And those first two years are just a warm-up. Wait until you see the African sequence!

Al Williamson and I used to laugh about the fact that whenever we thought we'd made some big innovative breakthrough in comics, we'd always discover that Foster had already done it. Humbling and amusing!
—William Stout

it's one of those classic comics that I long since dismissed.
as a kid when I'd see the old fantagraphics reprints at a library one of my main gripes with it was always the lack of monsters. the guy could draw amazingly well and I wanted to like the comic, but everything always looked like it's taking place on a golf course, or at Disney land. Foster's version of an Ogre is just a big fat red haired man. to me the strip looked fake, it looked like it was supposed to look more like a 1930s swashbuckling movie than it did someone's actual fantasy world. like he was forcing the special effects and costume limitations of theater and film on his comics.
I could never imagine the kind of child who was entertained by that comic. when my grandfather told me it was his favorite comic growing up, In my nintendo damaged mind I felt sorry for the old man.