Alfresco Art Day, Oct 18, 2020: Prince Valiant Fan Art

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At this week’s meeting of the Alfresco Art Club, we discussed that we haven’t been able to meet outdoors for over a year. Why? It’s the weather and the air pollution. In the winter Southern Oregon is too cold to sit outdoors, and in the summer, due to summer-long wildfires, it’s unhealthy to breathe. As a result of circumstances beyond our control, we meet inside and sit around the kitchen table.

I’ve been re-reading Prince Valiant this week, and decided to recreate one of the simpler cels from Prince Valiant: Vol. 2: 1939-1940. After a half hour of unprofitable sketching, I decided to focus on drawing the lovely (and manly) witch-woman’s face. Hal Foster’s treatment of eyes is dreamy and hard to duplicate, but I gave it my best shot. Drawing eyes is always perplexing!

In neighborhood news, the bears are back, and one of them took a big dump on the front sidewalk last night. I had to remove it with a snow shovel and a tall trash bag. As winter hibernation approaches, the local bears come into town to graze among the fragrant trash bins that sit year round in front of the houses in the neighborhood. Bears are inconsiderate jerks. They knock over the garbage cans and drag plastic garbage bags full of baby diapers into our yard, where they tear them open and scatter the trash around to look for the edible tidbits. Mr. Bear usually shows up at 4 AM. to wake us up when he knocks over the garbage bin. It’s unnerving to listen to a 400-lb carnivore rummaging around outside our window. We now have a locking trash bin, which we hope will discourage him enough that he will decide to move on to easier pickings.

Next on My List: Remembering What I Know About Adobe InDesign

Looking at all of the speech and text bubbles is painful. They chaotic placement really annoys me. For my next series, I’m laying out the text bubbles first and drawing the pictures around them. I want to be like Hal Foster, the artist who wrote and drew the Prince Valiant comic strip for 45 years or so. His goal was to preserve his beautiful images by keeping all of the text at the bottom or top of the page. There’s not a single speech bubble in the many thousands of pages he created. Here’s an example of a drawing the would only be diminished by a grotesque speech bubble coming out of the Prince’s mouth.

This is an awesome picture. It blows my mind that Hal Foster could do a full page of comics every Sunday for 45 years and keep the quality at this level.

Just Got Prince Valiant, Vol. 1: 1937-1938

Prince Valiant, Vol. 1: 1937-1938 arrived in the mail a few days ago. When I was a kid I really didn’t “get” Prince Valiant because I was a kid and Prince Valiant was an adult comic strip. I wasn’t interested in stories about loss of home and hearth, defending one’s honor, domestic life, death, revenge, and gory violence. Speaking of violence, Prince Val is one of the most violent characters in the story, though he only kills in self-defense. It’s a little creepy that he sometimes grins as he slits a throat or two.

I came back to Prince Valiant because I kept running into Hal Foster’s work in my image searches for “pen and ink”. I really dig the line-drawing and water color look. And I especially appreciate that Foster didn’t allow dialog bubbles to clutter up his beautiful drawings. There’s not a single, ugly dialog balloon in his 37 years of drawing the comic.

The Fantagraphic editions are gorgeous. I want them all! Each one covers 2 years of the Sunday-published strip, which comes out to 104 pages per volume. There are 19 volumes available covering all of the strips drawn by Hal Foster, 37 years worth up to 1974. After he stopped drawing the strip, he continued to write the story into his 90s. What a guy.

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Check out the current version of Prince Valiant at http://comicskingdom.com/prince-valiant.