When last we left our intrepid cartoonists, exacting Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster was having some difficulty relinquishing any control of the strip to his hand-picked successor, John Cullen Murphy. That theme continues in this second volume, although reduced a bit with evidence of only a few critical letters passed from Foster to Murphy. Otherwise, the partnership is business as usual, with the supposedly semi-retired Foster providing scripts, written panel breakdowns, and pencilled layouts for Murphy’s pencils and inks, with Foster also coloring the completed pages.
Buy Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant Sketchbook Volume 2Volume 2 covers just over a year of the strip, from May 1972 to June 1973, and appears to be nearly complete, with Foster’s color guides taking the place of a couple of missing or omitted layouts. As retrieved from Murphy’s meticulous archives, each strip is represented by Foster’s typed page of script and typed page of panel breakdowns combined on one book page, followed by Foster’s corresponding pencilled layout reproduced at full-page size. Those lavish pencils are the primary selling point of the book, revealing Foster’s continuing magnificent attention to detail and mastery of the art form, even though they were only originally intended as throwaway guides for Murphy’s audience of one.
Series editor and designer Brian M. Kane breaks up the monotony of the standard format by interspersing other Foster ephemera and accolades from significant figures every few pages. This helps to paint a fuller picture of Foster the man, not just the artist, as he muses about missing Connecticut as a Florida transplant, shares home pictures of himself and his wife, and includes whimsical drawings made for personal Christmas cards and other events. Foster’s perspective on retirement comes through loud and clear, with his stated intention to continue working to keep himself busy rather than risk succumbing to boredom and irrelevance. One assumes this stance and his micromanagement will gradually change as the sketchbook series progresses through to the planned sixth volume, but for this volume Foster is still very much in tight control of the strip’s production.
As with the first volume, my only minor gripes are the somewhat misleading sketchbook designation and the lack of any completed Prince Valiant pages for comparison. Sketchbooks typically signify an artist trying out new things in free form, experimenting while honing their craft, but here we have a venerated master providing fully formatted comic-strip page layouts of his most famous creations, rendered in his inimitable pencils. Those layouts are so impressive that I constantly wanted to compare them to the finished pages, or at least see a few side-by-side examples within the book, but the only recourse is to refer back to the corresponding volumes 18 and 19 of the flagship Fantagraphics Prince Valiant reprint series.
The book contains one noteworthy surprise, revealing that Jack Kirby’s Demon comic-book character creation in 1972 was wholly inspired by Foster’s early utilization of a duck skin mask on Val in strips appearing in late 1937 to early 1938. That side by side panel comparison really drives home just how monumental Foster’s talent and tenure really were, as he was at the top of the game for so long that he inspired many other classic masters who we now generally consider as peerless. The fact that his detailed strip directions to Murphy have survived is a testament to Murphy’s foresight; the fact that we can all savor them decades later is a testament to Foster’s enduring talent.
