Posted by jukkahoo
Do you remember Prince Valiant?
The heroic prince of Thule, who used to grace the pages of [insert your variant] Uusi Suomi Sunday pages? Hal Foster's quaint olden days hero comic strip, the one without the word balloons. Prince Valiant of the Round Table, husband to fair Aleta and father of brave Arn?
It had a hint of fantasy, with historical accuracy in the portrayal of life in the days of King Arthur that looked unlike anything else. Could've been the balloon-lessness of it all, but I tended to clip out a number of those Sunday strips (only to loose them at some point in time, as is often the case with those wonderful little trinkets and baubles one amasses at an early age, just to lose them at some stupid [STUPID!] sudden burst of "culling-the-excess" frenzy most of us suffer from time to time) from my grandmother's paper. At that time the artist had already changed from the originator Foster (who also did Tarzan at some point) to the "fairly-OK'is-if-not-nothing-fancy" -John Cullen Murphy, the original series having started way back in 1937.
There were few albums published in Finnish (five-six?) and a lot more in original English, not to mention Swedish ones, that I remember at some point "reading" in a library. Hiltunen has these Swedish ones, but then again, what doesn't he have?
Now Prince Valiant is back! And it sure looks great. One could almost believe that Foster has risen from the grave, so eerily alike the new Valiant looks. And no wonder it looks great, for it is drawn by Gary Gianni (of the Wandering Star - Robert E. Howard -fame) with story by Mark Schultz (also from the Wandering Star - Robert E. Howard -fame). Gianni may not be the most adept comic illustrator working nowadays, but to this kind of stylised/homage work his eloquent pencil-work fits like a glove. One can only hope these will transform into whole albums in the near future.
A glimpse of the youth I had almost forgotten -ah!
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