{"id":558,"date":"2009-09-10T18:55:00","date_gmt":"2009-09-10T23:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/2009\/09\/resisting-prince-valiant\/"},"modified":"2009-09-10T18:55:00","modified_gmt":"2009-09-10T23:55:00","slug":"resisting-prince-valiant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=558","title":{"rendered":"Resisting Prince Valiant"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my experience, Prince Valiant<\/em> 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<\/a>, Dan admits that it took some work on his part to find a way into Prince Valiant<\/em>. I think for a certain type of reader, resistance to Prince Valiant<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

To my mind, the best account we have of this forbidding and stultifying quality in Foster\u2019s work comes from the fiction writer Clark Blaise. In his 2001 collection Pittsburgh Stories<\/a>, there is a tale called \u201cSitting Shivah with Cousin Benny\u201d where the narrator offers this illuminating riff: <\/p>\n

Every Sunday for as long as I\u2019ve been conscious, there\u2019s been a Prince Valiant<\/em> on the comic page. It can\u2019t die, it\u2019s eternal, and I\u2019ve never read a single panel. It\u2019s 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\u2019d think he\u2019d have his lone, crackpot, visionary advocates, but no one talks about him, he has no explicators. Even Krazy Kat<\/em> 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<\/em>? It\u2019s too late for me to start, too much has gone on, I can\u2019t enter that theatre any more. In some way I feel I\u2019m not good enough for Prince Valiant<\/em>, just like I wasn\u2019t good enough for \u2018The Voice of Firestone\u2019 or the East Side of Pittsburgh or for Cousin Benny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(I should add that Clark Blaise is a really great writer<\/a>; 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).<\/p>\n

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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[246,536,1054],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-c-blaise","tag-foster","tag-prince-valiant"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}