Tag: prince valiant

Hal Foster

The Artwork of Hal Foster

Born in August of 1892 at Nova Scotia’s capital city of Halifax, Harold “Hal” Rudolph Foster was a Canadian-American comic strip artist and writer noted for his attention to detail and high level of draftsmanship. He was the first to adapt American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 “Tarzan of the Apes” into the comic format. Hal Foster is, however, best known for “Prince Valiant”, his own Arthurian epic adventure to which he devoted over three decades  of his life.

In 1906 at the age of fourteen, Foster relocated with his family to Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba, to recoup their finances through a land boom. Although this relocation ended his formal education, Foster was inspired by such artists as Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham and N. C. Wyeth to study drawing. At the age of seventeen, he became employed as an illustrator for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s catalogue and as staff artist for the Brigdens Limited advertising firm. After his marriage to Helen Wells, Foster and his wife relocated in 1915 to the wilderness areas of Ontario and Manitoba where they worked on a goldfield claim at Lake Rice and as hunting guides for several years. 

Hal Foster, still interested in art and feeling pressure to support his family, relocated to Chicago in 1919 to seek employment and study art. After obtaining a position at the Jahn & Ollier Engraving Company, he audited evening classes at the Chicago Art Institute which was followed by night classes at the National Academy of Design and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Now in his thirties, Foster began independent work in 1925 with the Chicago advertising studio Palenske-Young as a cover and ad illustrator for Popular Mechanics, Jekle Margarine, Northwest Paper, Wurlitzer Grand Pianos, and both the Southern Pacific and Illinois Pacific Railroads.

Since 1912, “Tarzan of the Apes” by Edgar Rice Burroughs had been appearing as a serial novel in the pulp “All-Story Magazine” published by Frank Munsey. In 1927, Joseph Neebe of the Campbell-Ewald advertising agency wanted to adapt “Tarzan” as a ten-week comic strip series. After novel illustrator J. Allen St. John declined the position, Neebe hired Foster as the strip’s illustrator. The “Tarzan” comic series appeared in newspapers through syndication with the Metropolitan Newspaper Service, later part of the United Feature Syndicate until the end of its run. “Tarzan” appeared first in November of 1928 as a series in the British weekly “Tid-Bits”; it was introduced in the newspapers of Canada and the United States in January of 1929.

Hal Foster’s “Tarzan” strip employed the text comic format, the oldest form of comics and one dominant in European comics since the nineteenth-century. Text comics presented the story through captions, written in the same style as a novel, either below or within the panel. Between September 27th of 1931 and May 2nd of 1937, Foster drew all the Sunday episodes of “Tarzan” while artist Rex Maxon worked on the daily episodes. Although Foster turned the strip into an epic adventure tale, he became increasingly disappointed with the script quality and began development on his own series. 

Launched by the King Features Syndicate of the Hearst media empire, Foster’s “Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur”, was inspired by the legends of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table. The series premiered on the 13th of February in 1937 as a color comic in the Saturday tabloid papers. “Prince Valiant” became a full-page Sunday feature four months later; the comic series was changed to a half-page format in 1971. Due to the large-scale format, Foster was able to produce varied layouts and highly detailed scenes of outdoor life and epic fighting. He designed “Prince Valiant” in the same format as his “Tarzan” series,  a text comic with descriptions and dialogues as paneled captions..

Hal Foster’s epic sage followed the life of the son of the deposed King Aguar of Thule, Prince Valiant, who left his home in the wild fens of Britain to become a knight. Foster gradually refrained from the comic strip’s early fantasy elements and developed his characters into more real-life heroes. His “Prince Valiant” was rather unique at the time as an important core element of the narrative was Valiant’s domestic life. Through the course of the decades-long story, Foster’s characters age, an uncommon occurrence in epic hero-centered comics. Prince Valiant marries Aleta, Queen of the Misty Isles, and the marriage results in five offspring. In 1947, Foster became the first artist to depict a pregnant woman in a United States comic strip.

Using historical research, Foster gave “Prince Valiant” a strong sense of realism by drawing accurate depictions of medieval attire, castles, countries and weaponry. His characters were multi-dimensional and presented with subtle emotions as well as different attitudes to good and evil. Staying several weeks ahead of schedule, Foster would work over fifty hours a week to maintain the quality of artwork on single  page. In addition to the “Prince Valiant” strip, he also executed other projects including an 1943 comic adaptation of Frank Werfel’s “Song of Bernadette” and “The Mediaeval Castle”, a three-panel strip that ran from April 1944 to December 1945.

Beginning in 1950, Hal Foster began working with assistants which included his son Arthur James and Hugh Donnel doing the coloring . He continued writing the story script and drawing the comic strip until the early 1970s when arthritis began to affect his drawing ability. The final page drawn and signed by Hal Foster appeared on the 16th of May in 1971, thirty-four years after its initial printing. He continued to write and design the layouts for “Prince Valiant” until the February 10th episode in 1980. Harold “Hal” Rudolph Foster passed away in Spring Hill, Florida on the 25th of July in 1982 at the age of eighty-nine. 

One of the most widely praised comic artists of all time, Hal Foster was awarded the 1957 Ruben Award by the National Cartoonists Society, the Special Features Award in 1966 and 1967, as well as the 1978 Elzie Segar Award given to those who made a unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning. Foster was inducted posthumously into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1996, the Joe Shuster Canadian Comic Book Creators Hall of Fame in 2005, and the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame in 2006.

Notes: Contributing editor Felix James Miller wrote an excellent article on Hal Foster and the “Prince Valiant”comic strip for The European Conservative: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/reviews/the-9th-art-hal-fosters-prince-valiant-king-arthur-and-the-adventure-of-life/

Founded in 1968 by Kees Kousemaker, Lambiek in Central Amsterdam is the world’s oldest comic shop with an impressive collection of comics and art from all parts of the world. Its online site is located at: https://www.lambiek.net/infomenu/about-lambiek.html

Kees Kousemaker’s “Lambiek Comiclopedia is an extensive artist compendium that contains hundreds of biographies on comic artists as well as an art history article on comic books. Hal Foster’s biographical page is located at: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/f/foster_hal.htm

Bill & Sue-On Hillman’s “ERBzine” is an official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site that was founded in 1996. It contains over 15,000 webzines and webpages in archive form. The site’s Hal Foster section has photographs and biography, as well as archived Sunday page issues of “Tarzan” from 1931 to 1937 and “Prince Valiant” from 1937 to 1940. The Hal Foster section is located at: https://www.erbzine.com/mag55/5570.html

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hal Foster Drawing Prince Valiant”, 1937-1971, Gelatin Silver Print

Second Insert Image: Hal Foster, “Tarzan”, Episode 237-Mutiny, “The Vikings”, 22 September 1935, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Hal Foster, “Tarzan”, Episode 103-Darts of Death, 26 February 1933, Pen and Ink on Board, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Hal Foster, “Tarzan”, Episode 103-Darts of Death, 26 February 1933, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hal Foster Drawing Tarzan”, circa 1928-1937, Gelatin Silver Print

Calendar: August 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of August

Builder of Dams

August 16, 1892, was the birthdate of Canadian-American cartoonist, Harold Foster.

Harold Foster, as a youth, captained a sloop through the Atlantic, and learned to hunt and fish in the wilds surrounding Halifax from his stepfather, cultivating a love for nature that is readily apparent in his art. He left school at an early age. Foster’s career as a professional artist began when he was about eighteen, producing catalog art for the Hudson Bay Company, but before and after that he made his living in the Canadian wilderness as a fur trapper, hunting guide, and gold prospector.

Foster studied at the Chicago Art Institute and other schools and eventually landed a job at an advertising firm that allowed him to move his wife and two sons to the city. But when the Great Depression hit, work slowed to a crawl. Despite his reservations about entering the field of comic strips, when Foster  was given the chance to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan of the Apes”, he took it.

Debuting in 1929, the “Tarzan of the Apes” daily heralded a new age for comic strips. A fine artist to his bones, Foster introduced dynamic action, perfect anatomy and fluid body movement to the comics page. Through his hands, the titular character was imbued with a balance of nobility and visceral barbarity, and Hal Foster’s dramatically-lit chiaroscuro panels, accurate nature drawing, and raucous action ensured that “Tarzan of the Apes” was a hit.

Hal Foster produced hundreds of pages, and continuing to adapt his illustrative approach to cartooning, but he grew tired of the material. If he was going to continue working in a medium he didn’t care for, at minimum he wanted creative control over his output. So Foster began working on a story set in Arthurian England that he intended to span decades. After months of research and planning, he pitched his new story to United Features Syndicate, distributor of “Tarzan”, and they turned him down. He made the same pitch to William Randolph Hearst and was offered an unprecedented portion of ownership.

“Prince Valiant”, debuted in 1937 and quickly became the gold standard of the Sunday cartoons. The story begins with Val as the five-year-old son of a deposed king and follows him to manhood, through battles with ancient monsters and beasts, knighthood with King Arthur in Camelot, fatherhood, and adventures all across myth, history, and the globe. It is epic, swashbuckling, painterly, ornate, endlessly clever, and brilliantly plotted story, and without the intrusion of word balloons to muck up the panels. Every frame of Prince Valiant is like a story unto itself: beautifully designed, and rendered with a precision. In the golden age of the newspaper strip it was considered by many to be the pinnacle of achievement in the medium.