Wednesday Words, pictures edition

Well, it looks as though Prince Valiant has joined the resistance.

I am no longer ashamed to admit that Prince Valiant is perhaps my favorite cartoon in the Sunday Papers, jostling out Frazz and Doonesbury (this ranking is only for newspaper comics, not web comics).  When I was a wee lad, I thought it was just soooooo hokey and dumb and unhip.  It might have been—it was kind of a fossil, going back to the 1930’s or so, and preserved in amber by successors to the original creator.  Heck, it was the favorite strip of the exceedingly callow, Nazi-curious Edward, Duke of Windsor.  But the more I look at it today, the more I like it.  It’s anachronistic, but it is original—every other strip in the paper adheres to more or less the same aesthetic formula, but Val stands alone.

Not only does Prince Valiant follow its own aesthetic muse, but it does so brilliantly.  People talk seriously about graphic novels as art, praising the layout of panels and the interplay of art within panels that drives the story forward or makes a larger point—and Valiant does exactly that, week after week.  The artwork itself is formidable, the colors vivid.  Look at the Sunday Funnies page from a distance, Valiant will stand out.  Look at it a little closer, the panel layout (which is never the same) flows.  Look at the text and the story, it matches the layout.  Look at the details, and they are rich.

Now, thanks to the n-th generation heirs of Hal Foster, Prince Valiant is woke.  The cast of characters is pretty diverse for medieval Europe, and people of non-Euro ethnicities play key roles in the stories.  Women do a whole lot more than faint and wait for the prince—they drive stories, are warriors, are politically savvy rulers of their own kingdoms.  This is the Dark Ages for the modern, multi-cultural world.

The most recent story arc highlights this hipness (the strip still moves in multi-month long stories) It features the Queen of the Misty Isles (Valiant’s spouse, but a queen in her own right, and on her own in this story) facing down a treasonous senator.  The senator, motivated by a hatred of foreigners, attempts to whip up popular support by demagoguery.  He colludes, treasonously—that’s the language in the strip—with a somewhat hostile foreign empire to try to seize power from the rightful queen.  He is thwarted, in part, by the Queen’s political savvy, an Amazon warrior, a boatload of immigrants, and his own two ne’er-do-well nincompoop sons.  Very, very with it!

So, all I have to say is, Rock on! Prince Valiant, Queen Aleta, and the rest of y’all.  Stay woke!  You GO!  And, hey, maybe could you come into our century and get medieval on somebody’s ass...