Prince Valiant and friends continue their globetrotting wanderlust in the latest collection of two years of Sunday comic strips. With John Cullen Murphy well into his third decade of art duties on the strips collected here, his work continues Valiant’s signature look even as its fine details and sparse backgrounds slip below the impeccable standards set by Valiant’s deceased creator, Hal Foster. However, the writing by Murphy’s historian son, Cullen, maintains the epic scope of the ongoing international adventures of the royal adventurers.
Buy Prince Valiant Vol. 29: 1993-1994Where most other strips keep characters in suspended chronology, never aging as the years pass by, Valiant continues to let time take its course, with children and grandchildren eventually aging up to carry on the quests. The biggest sign of time’s passage here is a wedding planned for Val’s daughter, Karen, but the bulk of this book’s adventures still revolve around the original generation.
In the opening story, the evil Mordred hatches a harebrained plan to bring England to its knees by transporting ships full of non-native rabbits to wipe out their crops, leading Val on a quest to round up the nation’s stoats, foxes, and hawks to battle them. Later, Val’s wife, Aleta, and King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, get bored at court again, as seems to happen every few years, leading them to head out on an international adventure where they free two foreign royal ladies from captivity. This leads into Val and Gawain’s next quest, where they journey to Northern Africa to free a country from its illegitimate ruler, while also busting up a scheme involving child jockeys masquerading as adults in camel racing. On the way home, Val repels a Saxon attack, then gets captured at sea by Alaric.
The bonus features in the book are an oddly anachronistic opening essay by Spanish author and historian Rafael Marin about the Foster years, along with a closing study by German editor Dr. Uwe Baumann of the literary and historical references in Murphy’s strips, complete with copious footnotes and panel examples.
If you’ve followed Val’s adventures this far, the new book doesn’t rock the boat at all, and continues with many entertaining stories for the legendary characters. Writer Cullen Murphy leans into his other career as a historian to increase the real historical details in the scripts, while John Cullen Murphy continues his valiant attempt to approach Hal Foster’s defining artwork. Even if he falls a bit short of the creator, the results are still far and away more technically proficient than anything else in the comic strips of its era. Now restored in immaculate detail and color, Murphy’s artwork is given the chance to shine like never before.
