Resisting Prince Valiant
by Jeet Heer
Thursday, September 10, 2009
In my experience, Prince Valiant is an easy comic strip to admire (all that evident artistry, that labor-intensive craftsmanship) but a hard one to warm up to. In his recent, very persuasive posting on Hal Foster, Dan admits that it took some work on his part to find a way into Prince Valiant. I think for a certain type of reader, resistance to Prince Valiant is a natural instinct. Any appreciation of the strip has to come to terms with why it can be, at least on first glance, so off-putting.
To my mind, the best account we have of this forbidding and stultifying quality in Foster’s work comes from the fiction writer Clark Blaise. In his 2001 collection Pittsburgh Stories, there is a tale called “Sitting Shivah with Cousin Benny” where the narrator offers this illuminating riff:
Every Sunday for as long as I’ve been conscious, there’s been a Prince Valiant on the comic page. It can’t die, it’s eternal, and I’ve never read a single panel. It’s beautifully drawn, and the most literate script in the paper, postmodern before there was Postmodernism, new age before there was New Age, camp before there was Camp. With all that mad hair, that costuming, that intricately irrelevant story line, you’d think he’d have his lone, crackpot, visionary advocates, but no one talks about him, he has no explicators. Even Krazy Kat has its exegetes. What mad consortium thought him up, who pitches his stories every week, who keeps churning him out? Who pays for it? Has anyone ever read Prince Valiant? It’s too late for me to start, too much has gone on, I can’t enter that theatre any more. In some way I feel I’m not good enough for Prince Valiant, just like I wasn’t good enough for ‘The Voice of Firestone’ or the East Side of Pittsburgh or for Cousin Benny.
(I should add that Clark Blaise is a really great writer; he is part of the strong cohort of Canadian writers from the 1960s that includes Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, and is equal to the best writers in that generation).
Labels: Clark Blaise, Hal Foster, Prince Valiant
Jeet, I would prefer to hear why *you* dislike Prince Valiant so much. Of course, I've heard various complaints on and off about Prince Valiant (some of them quite legitimate I'm sure) but it would be much more useful than Clark Blaise's take on the subject. It's not illuminating at all. With a few alterations, the very same things could be said about Krazy Kat. I presume, of course, that Blaise is talking about the Foster Valiants as opposed to all his successors.
Well, my biggest problem with Prince Valiant is that for me comics are primarily narrative, and art has to be in the service of storytelling. As Chris Ware likes to say, the art in comics is closer to words than to drawings. The art is PV is so dense and detailed that it hampers the narrative flow. It really is an illustrated story rather than a cartoon, at least in my experience. But I'm open to changing my mind.
It's not so much I "dislike" PV; it's just that I don't think a story drawn in that way can have the evocative power of a Peanuts, a Krazy Kat or a Jimmy Corrigan; all comics where the art is seemlessly integrated with the narrative.
It's interesting, Jeet, because before I read this new reprint, I would have agreed with your last comment just about word for word. But I was really surprised at just how quickly and beautifully the early strip actually flows. I probably still wouldn't place Foster on the same tier as Herriman or Schulz (and it sounds like, based on the Foster quote in Dan's post, he might not place himself quite so highly either), but I was definitely impressed. It certainly made me reconsider some of my assumptions.
What Tim said. I couldn't bear to look at PV as a kid and was surprised and delighted upon reading the new volume to find just how engrossing Foster's strip actually is.
That quote pretty much encapsulates my childhood to adult questions about the strip. I am to this day, baffled and mystified by the existence of Prince Valiant in that very exact way.
How much does modern newspaper printing have to do with it? Just asking because, as hard as it was to follow the narrative, it was much harder to physically even read the damn thing…
Jeet, I get the sense that your resistance to the strip stems from the same kind of surface judgment expressed in the Blaise quote, but please correct me if I'm wrong — how much have you actually read?
I remember loving the art as a kid, before I could actually read the text. Then, about ten years ago, I revisited the strip in connection with a feature I was editing and read Foster's entire run. I'd figured I would be in for a bit of a slog, but — like Dan and Tim — I was surprised to find just how well told it was *as comics*, how entertaining it was to read, and what a great cartoonist Foster really was.
Yes, the PV is somewhat anachronistic, from the harsh, at times colonialist, conservative thinking underlying it in the early years to the somewhat dull reactionary family values in the later years, but it's never boring and always a joy to look at.
And the first ten years are adventure gold with art that makes it transcend its genre and become a celebration of beauty, almost poetic in tenor.
I resisted the strip for over three decades, as a kid I avoided reading it in the papers because it wasn't "comics", it was dry-looking, too much text, no word balloons, it looked like it was supposed to be "good for me", like the educational-oriented strip features about famous people or events or local history. Dullsville. My wife was a fan, but the first impression stuck, and there's so much material out there, so why bother?
At some point I picked up the first two FBI paperback reprints on the cheap, for my wife, and for myself to try out. And I was surprised how much I enjoyed them. They're a bit staid at times, and the all-text format took some getting used to, but the voices of the characters does manage to come through. The art is lovely, and the story moves along. It's much more satisfying and inviting and even fun than I'd ever expected it to be. I got sucked in. It obviously isn't to all tastes for a variety of reasons, but there's no law against telling a story this way. I think Foster pulls it off, I raced through the new FBI hardcover and wished there were more, now (couldn't get a lot of the first FBI run, the prices went through several roofs on early volumes, and those in the middle of the run).
Sometimes a comic simply works because you want to know what happens next, and looking at wonderful pictures. is a real plus. Some of the panels open up beautifully, and the pacing is really nice for a text and illustrations approach. It's not my favorite strip out there by far, but it's a swell strip, imho.
And I think the collections flatter the work, it really goes down well in chunks. In the newspaper it just kind of…laid there, amongst the other strips. True, I only liked talking animals and The Fantastic Four and their pals back then, so Prince Valiant really looked like a wallflower to me.
Anyway, I like it. And I never thought I would.
For the record, I've read the first decade or so of Foster's run. But that was from the Fantagraphics reprint series from the 1980s and 1990s, which is far inferior to the current one. So I feel like I haven't really SEEN Foster's art, which is a big part of the strips appeal. I'll report back as I dig into the new books, which look just great.
Jeet, I've been hooked on Valiant since reading the Pacific Comics reprints sometime in the '70s, and bought about a third of the Fanta reprints (and the new HC, of course), so I understand where you're coming from, even though I'm a fan. Visually, it's a combination of dense artwork and dense text, both of which takes time to get into.
Perhaps it is similar to reading the Victorian novelists, such as Dickens. They can be just as rewarding, but you have to make the time to read them carefully, because they build up their narrative power little by little.
I would liken it to reading Henry James, as I did for a book review. I had to drop out of the day for several hours and carefully read his work, before I got a sense of what he was doing.
BTW, I wrote a review of the book, which I would recommend if only to look at the panel I scanned, showing the difference between a panel from the FBI series and the new book. While it's an extreme example, it's also common.
http://www.planetpeschel.com/index?/reviews/bookreview/masterful_reprint_of_a_comic_masterpiece/
I should say, too, that while I was massively impressed with the technical qualities of Valiant — and sped through the new volume in a very short, enjoyable sprint — it does still seem to me to have a certain hollowness to it. At least in the first two years, none of the characters really seem more than two-dimensional to me. I'm hoping that changes as the strip goes on.
Jeet, fair enough — I apologise if I came off a bit ungraciously. I shall be curious to hear what you think as you're rereading the strip.
I would agree with Tim that Valiant isn't exactly the most interesting strip in terms of its character studies, although I think the power of accumulation works for it. But really, its main qualities are elsewhere, primarily in the evocative power of the art and how it services what ends up a a pretty great romantic epic.