Hal Foster's Prince Valiant "Far From Camelot" Review

Title

Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant – “Far from Camelot”

Writer:

Mark Schultz

Artist:

Gary Gianni

Content:

Prince Valiant is an all ages book that contains scenes of action, fantasy, and romance.

Introduction:

Prince Valiant is a seventy year old strip that has boasted over 44 million readers in its time as a Sunday morning cartoon strip. It is a high art comic strip that tells the story of a knight of Camelot and his adventures in and around the kingdom. He faces many different foes, some ordinary knights and warriors, while others are the thing of magic, such as dragons, wizards, and trolls. I remember my father breaking out the Sunday funnies and reading us Prince Valiant as a kid. At the time, the art took me in and held my attention with its stark detail compared to Garfield and Peanuts. It never became one of my comics though, as I always thought of it as my dads.

Story:

Far from Camelot combines the stories from Prince Valiant that ran from November 21, 2004 to May 18, 2008.

This graphic novel tells the story of Prince Valiant’s path from boredom, to bonding, to high adventure. It starts with Prince Valiant being testy about being stuck in Camelot ruling as regent with his wife Aleta. He takes his frustrations of not being on the battlefield on the knightly trainees, even upon his own family, and it take suggestion that from his own son to become a squire that sets them off to find adventure and a bonding time for father and son.

The two inevitably gets into trouble as Valiant falls to the silver tongue of the pict Brogut with tales of dragons and Valiant’s son Nathan being captured by a young pictish maiden. The story that unfolds has Val and his son separated time and again, with Val’s adventures taking him across the globe from one dangerous situation to the next.

Review:

For only $19.95, this collection packs a punch of content. You’re looking at almost four years of material, all in full color, and enlarged to boot. The cover takes from one of the scenes early on in the material, an iconic shot of Val and his son Nathan heading out to seek adventure from the land of Camelot. I also liked the metallic read circles that help reinforce the spine, it gives the collection a regal flair that my eye keeps coming to as I look at it.

The oversize pages help to display one of the best qualities of this collection, the “high art” of this Sunday funny strip. The art of this strip goes above and beyond most strips, that pays close attention to character detail and the backgrounds of the larger scenes such as the Pictish settlement, the captured dragon, the attack of the Kraken, and the ancient watchtower all come to mind.

The part that seems to break down for me in the art is the coloring. It’s not that it isn’t well done, but it appears to me that it was kept rather simplistic since it was going into a newspaper. It just doesn’t have the rich coloring detail of most comics today. Much of it is rather flat with whole sections being one simple color. A touch up may have been in order, but understandable due to the size of the collection.

The story is the typical fantasy Valiant story that I remember from my youth and it is interesting to see that it took nearly four years to truly complete. Most storylines in regular comics only last a few arcs or even one issue. This is one hundred and eighty-two pages of storyline.

Probably my biggest complaint about the collection is the thin material for the front and back cover. Due to its size, the collection is really floppy and I’d fear that it wouldn’t hold up well to reading. The collection I had is already showing some curl to the cover after one reading.

There also isn’t very much in the way of extras for the collection, only a letter from the writer, Mark Shultz. It would have been neat to see some rough pencils, scripts, and character designs. As it is, it is very bare.

Conclusion:

In the end, I could see fans of the series really liking this collection. The amount of material for the price is really good. Combine that with the enlarged full color strips and that aspect really starts to shine. I would have liked to have seen a beefier cover to contain all the strips, but that would have put the comic in a whole different price point. I also thought he coloring should have been touched up and more extras added. The trip to nostalgia was fun with this Prince Valiant collection, and I can’t wait for my dad to see it.