Fantagraphics kicks off a new six-volume look behind the scenes of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant comic strip with this initial volume covering the years 1971-72. If you’re up on your Valiant timeline, you’ll likely recognize that this period represents the time that Foster had passed the art duties to his chosen successor, John Cullen Murphy, while still remaining engaged with the strip as its writer. Considering that Foster started the strip in 1937, the ‘70s may seem like an odd starting point for a sketchbook retrospective, but there’s a story behind that choice.
Buy Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant Sketchbooks: An Illustrated Memoir: Volume 1Foster crafted draft page layouts during his decades-long artistic stint on the strip, but considered them little more than scratch paper worksheets that he discarded after finalizing the actual strips. As he transitioned out of art duties, he still continued his pencilled page layouts to guide Murphy, including them with his script pages mailed off to his new apprentice. It’s only due to Murphy’s involvement that we have any of these layout pages, as he had the foresight to retain all of them along with the script pages, rather than trash them as Foster preferred. Murphy’s archival collection of Foster’s mailings makes up the bulk of this and all future sketchbook volumes.
After some initial essays and personal photos, the book settles into a format of Foster’s chronological script pages and pencilled layouts, along with occasional personal letters to Murphy. As such, it’s a bit of a misnomer to label this a “sketchbook;” it’s instead the nuts and bolts of Foster conveying his vision to Murphy, like a Criterion bonus feature behind the scenes. The pencilled layout pages are of course far from finished works and are rendered with a light touch, providing just a hazy glimpse of Foster’s intentions rather than any stunning artistic revelations. Still, any Foster work is superior to most other artists’ best efforts, so there is some clear artistic merit to his rough drafts.
The book is designed as a companion to the ongoing Prince Valiant comic strip collections, and most readers will likely have the corresponding strip volumes in their personal libraries already, but it would be nice to have at least a few side-by-side comparisons to the completed strips contained within the sketchbook. We see Foster’s pencils and scripts, but nothing from Murphy’s side, aside from a few stray panels on one page. There is one exceptional side-by-side example though: a comparison of Foster’s final drawn Valiant strip as it appeared in newspapers, right next to the same strip later watercolored by Foster as a gift to his son. The difference between the garish, non-gradiated newspaper colors and Foster’s delicate, heavenly watercolors is so extreme that I’ll never look at a newspaper strip collection the same way.
Reading through the book, one gets a strong sense of the immense pressure on Murphy to live up to Foster’s standards. Imagine getting regular mailings from a certified master, hoping he doesn’t call out any shortcomings in your approach to his creation, but knowing he probably will. Murphy must have felt extreme pressure drawing not just for that critical audience of one, but also for millions of opinionated newspaper readers, all while hoping to keep papers from dropping the strip. Thankfully, Foster was generally encouraging in his personal letters to Murphy, while still taking time to gently steer him the way he wanted, mostly related to Murphy’s art on faces. Foster may have retired from personally creating the finished art, but he clearly still desired to shadow craft it through Murphy’s willing hands as long as he remained the writer.
The book sheds valuable new light on Foster’s intense engagement with the strip after he relinquished its art duties. For those who assumed that the strip was a diminished product after he stopped drawing it, the reality is clearly presented here that he was still passionate about it and personally directed every aspect of it throughout the ‘70s. This in turn prompts a re-evaluation of the Prince Valiant strip collections from this era, as we now know that the strips were completely laid out and fine-tuned right down to facial representations and expressions by the original creator, not Murphy. While Murphy finally got his crack at presenting his own vision of Valiant for decades after Foster’s demise, the new sketchbook proves that ‘70s Valiant should be considered a continuation of Foster’s run, not a substitute.
