A
comic strip, created by
Hal Foster in 1937 and distributed by
King Features. As far as I can tell, it's always been a
Sunday-only strip, which surely makes it easier to tell stories than in those
itty-bitty daily strips. It also doesn't use
word balloons--all
text, including
dialogue, is placed in
captions.
Val started the strip as a
youngster living in
Britain, where his father, the deposed
king of
Thule, lived in
exile. Most of his
childhood was skipped over to get to the
prince's
adventures as an
adult, when he met and
befriended
King Arthur,
Sir Gawain,
Sir Lancelot, and the rest of the
Knights of the Round Table. Between slaying
dragons and rescuing
maidens, he also acquired the fabulous
Singing Sword, was
knighted by King Arthur, and got his father reinstated as Thule's king--all in the first four years of the strip's existence!
Val married
Queen Aleta of the Misty Isles in 1946, but she was quickly
kidnapped. While pursuing her, Val ended up in
North America, about a thousand years before
Christopher Columbus! They lived in North America for a while, and their first son,
Arn, was born there a year or so later. Over the years, Val's family has grown to include four more kids and a grandchild.
Foster and "Prince Valiant" received the
Reuben Award from the
National Cartoonists' Society in 1957. The strip was turned into a
movie, with
Robert Wagner as the star, in 1954, and the series was briefly turned into a
comic book that same year. An
animated series called "
The Legend of Prince Valiant" ran on the
Family Channel in 1991;
Robby Benson provided the voice of Val, while
Tim Curry was Sir Gawain. There was also a
live-action film released in
England in 1997.
Foster
retired from drawing the strip in 1971 and stopped writing it in 1980. He died in 1986. The current strip is drawn by
John Cullen Murphy and written by a variety of different writers.
Addendum: Habakkuk notes:
"You forgot to mention that he, Mr. Spock from Star Trek and Moe from the Three Stooges all share the same barber." Mmmm, perhaps, but if Moe had worn a true
pageboy haircut, Larry woulda slapped him silly.
Research from http://www.toonopedia.com/val.htm