Prince Valiant: The Road to 90 Begins
Prince Valiant turns 90 on February 13, 2027. That gives us a few months to spend with a comic that deserves considerably more attention than a birthday greeting.
We’re excited to introduce Road to 90, our celebration of Prince Valiant and the people who have made it worth following for generations. The 1937–1938 pages are available now, with more eras joining the subscriber archive in stages through the anniversary. Along the way, we’ll publish features, creator conversations and reading guides, all free to read.
We have plenty we want to share. We’ll look closely at the drawings, revisit adventures and explore how a story about a young prince grew into a family saga. Our planned conversations with Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates will bring us into the work of making Prince Valiant today. For readers who have wondered where to start, we’ll help you find an adventure to settle into.
For this first entry, though, we’ve been looking at the page dated Saturday, February 13, 1937. It’s a rough day to be royalty.
Foster opens with the King of Thule riding for the coast, pursued by his enemies. He escapes aboard a fishing vessel with what remains of his followers, only to find that reaching Britain offers little relief. Men on the cliffs oppose their landing. Fog closes in near the Thames. The vessel runs onto dangerous sands.
By the bottom of the page, the king has brought his wife, the young prince and most of his men ashore. The tide is coming in behind them. Armed men wait ahead. He decides they will have to fight for somewhere to live. That is where the first installment leaves its readers.
What’s striking is how much of the opening belongs to Val’s father. The boy whose name fills the title is caught up in decisions made by adults, dependent on them to get him safely ashore. Readers familiar with the capable, sometimes exasperating knight he becomes get to meet him when his future is terribly uncertain.
There’s also a great deal of storytelling to watch in those twelve panels. Foster moves from riders on a ridge to the crowded boat, then pulls back far enough to show how exposed it is on the water. The cliffs offer the prospect of shelter until we see who is standing above them. By the time the king reaches for his sword, we understand why he feels cornered. Try following the pictures before reading the captions; the journey is remarkably clear.
Foster had already spent years drawing Tarzan, but he had much more in mind for his own strip than an exciting escape. Syracuse University’s account of his early preparations describes extensive notes and sketches following his proposed hero from childhood into old age. Foster was thinking about a whole life before readers had seen its first week. The history of the Foster papers makes fascinating reading alongside the debut.
That ambition helps explain why there is so much to celebrate. Readers came to know Val through years of changing responsibilities and relationships. Artists and writers after Foster took on the demanding weekly work of continuing that life. Road to 90 will give their contributions room, too, including the Murphy family’s work and the later collaborations of Gary Gianni, Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates. The current strip continues with Schultz writing and Yeates drawing.
The road ahead has a few milestones of its own: the next archive releases revisit Foster’s later years, then the Murphy era, then the modern strip, before the complete archive arrives on the anniversary. See the Road to 90 release schedule.
We hope longtime readers will find something they’ve missed, or enjoy revisiting a page they remember well. If you’re meeting Val for the first time, you can begin alongside us. Visit Road to 90 for the release schedule and follow the earliest adventures. We’re looking forward to getting into them with you.
~ Comics Kingdom