Review by Frank Plowright
Because these Prince Valiant volumes are sequenced to present exactly two years continuity from the first January strip of a given year to the final December strip of the next year, Vol. 19 ended mid-story. The good news is that it’s a short spotlight about immense personal bravery, not on Val’s part for once, and the story moves rapidly on.
Arn was the focus for most of Vol. 19, but it’s Val back on centre stage here. First he travels through France, then there’s a quest to join Aleta in the Misty Isles where she’s Queen and must return every three years to maintain her throne. After that there’s a trip to Spain where a greedy duke gets his deserved comeuppance.
A characteristic of Foster’s writing is finding unique ways to apply the options available to those in the 5th century. An example occurs with Val’s clever manipulation of attacking archers habit of retrieving arrows shot at them for re-use as they move forward, although it results in a rapid defeat for a threat built up over a considerable number of pages. When reading Prince Valiant, though, it needs borne in mind that pages printed one after another in collections were originally plotted to be read week by week. On that score Bella Grossi’s threat lasted for four months, and Foster knew when to move on. As the strip’s characters age, he also marks the seasonal conditions, with Val arriving back in England during a chilly winter, and another Foster trademark is his careful plotting of sequences that involve messing with the landscape. One such here is an inventive few pages as Val grapples with the problem of retrieving treasure from beneath quicksand shown to have already claimed several lives.
John Cullen Murphy’s sample art features brooding sorcerer Hashida, one of the volume’s primary threats, but there’s a breathtaking breadth of technique displayed on what’s essentially a page just to set up a story. From the exaggeration of the spirits via the attractive mountainous landscape to the detail supplied in the final panel to convince of day to day life in a 5th century palace it’s an amazingly well composed page, yet just one of 104 as good or better that Murphy drew in 1975 and 1976.
Murphy’s called on to draw plenty of action on the book’s final long sequence with Val on a rescue mission then caught between two squabbling monarchs of minor communities on either side of a bridge. It’s cleverly plotted to ebb and flow and Foster provides a couple of surprises as well. As was the case with the previous volume, 1976’s content ends mid-story with Arn accompanying Camelot’s jester Dinadan to France on a mission, to be continued in Vol. 21.
This is yet another superb volume of old adventure that hasn’t dated at all.
The earlier paperback editions corresponding to this content are Vol. 44: Harak the Terrible, Vol 45: The Mark of Cain, Vol 46: Sunken Treasure and the first two pages of Vol. 47: Queen of the Amazons.
