Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: All the Artists Were Valiant

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Mike Peterson Published: April 2, 2012 1 minute 1 comment

Thomas Yeates debuted yesterday as the new artist for Prince Valiant. I tend to be more prone to dissect stories than go into detail on artwork, but the art has always been a critical element in Prince Valiant.

Yeates (I find) has drawn swords before, not like Mercutio but in the sense relevant to this blog. Among the swashbuckling things he has illustrated was a short-lived syndicated Zorro strip in the 90s in which I liked the art but wasn't crazy about the writing, which means he was the right half of that effort. 

Last Sunday's Prince Valiant (above) was the last for Gary Gianni, who has provided art on the strip since 2004, when he and Mark Schultz took over the art and writing from John Cullen Murphy and his son, Cullen.

I liked Gianni's art, but was particularly pleased when Schultz brought the stories back from the more exotic historical-fiction-mixed-with-philosophy areas Cullen Murphy had favored. I don't suppose Val will ever go back to cheerfully slaughtering Saxons as in the good old days, but I think he's a little closer to the original vision and I like the stories more.

But I had no criticism of JCM's artwork (below). He was Foster's hand-picked successor and had worked from Foster scripts for several years before taking over entirely.

It would have been during the time of the Murphys that I had the chance to re-cast the comics pages at the paper where I was working, and struck a deal to make our Sundays match our dailies, which is not common for a small paper. As I got into the paperwork of adding and subtracting strips, I found that the standard Sunday package we were buying, rather than saving money as we had assumed, was more expensive than a custom section would be.

(This was not the birth of my realization that editors pay little attention to the funnies, but it certainly heightened my appreciation of the fact. You'd think a successful person would either have a sense of humor or the ability to count beans, wouldn't you?)

Incidentally, most small papers do not print their own Sunday funnies, in large part because the large amount of color makes it much better to print them on a Flexo press rather than the letterpress traditionally used for the rest of the newspaper. Flexographic printing provides better quality control for large areas of colored ink and does not rub the way standard print does.

Which is to say, if the local paper printed its own Sunday funnies, they'd come out kind of blotchy and your fingertips would look as though they had snuck off to a Grateful Dead concert. 

The advantage of better images and of not having to pay labor, ink, plates and paper for another press run makes it advantageous for small papers to purchase pre-printed comics, which are brought in on pallets two weeks before they run. (Which is why Sunday deadlines are less forgiving than dailies.)

In any case, the two strips I added to the Sunday section that were not on our daily page were Prince Valiant and Mark Trail, Valiant because there is no daily version and Trail because the daily version has no logical connection to the Sunday, which is dynamically better.

As we went through the first few weeks of the new regime, however, I had to call the production house because Prince Valiant is deeper than the standard strip. They were wedging Val into a spot that was too short, so that the X was correct but the Y was not and everything was distorted accordingly.

Which is too bad, because John Cullen Murphy was producing some nice art.

Though, of course, nothing like what the Master, Hal Foster, had done particularly in the glory days when he (and other artists) got a full page to stretch out on.

For instance:

or

And this one, showing that, even if the art was simple, the amount of real estate made for more detailed storytelling:

I wonder how Hal Foster would have made out in a parallel universe in which he launched Prince Valiant as a web comic that was updated each week?

Meanwhile, enjoying the stories each week would be worth the $19.99 annual subscription to DailyInk, even if it were the only strip on the site. Good to see it continue.