Mark Schultz on Continuing the Legacy of Prince Valiant

Something very special today to celebrate the 86th anniversary of the Prince Valiant adventure strip.

It’s Jim Lockwood’s wonderfully informative article (with added images and links) on Prince Valiant writer Mark Schultz. Lockwood’s piece was first published last month – January 29, 2023 – in The Times-Tribune of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

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Writer Mark Schultz Hopes to Stay True to Characters
As He Carries Legacy of Prince Valiant Adventure Strip

By Jim Lookwood
The Times-Tribune
January 29, 2023

Mark Schultz has enjoyed Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics pages since childhood.

At that time, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the popular adventure series by comics pioneer Hal Foster [left] was in its 20s, having debuted Feb. 13, 1937.

“Boy, I can remember Prince Valiant, seeing it in the newspapers from the time before I could even read and having my parents read it to me. At a certain point, I started cutting it out and collecting it, pasting it into a big scrapbook,” said Schultz, 67, who grew up in Pittsburgh and the Lehigh Valley and has lived with his wife, illustrator Denise Prowell, in Clarks Summit since 1993.

His early love of comics partly led him to pursue a career in art and become part of the Prince Valiant legacy. In 2004, Schultz became only the third writer of Valiant, which is the longest-running adventure strip in the world. Turning 86 [on February 13, 2023] and among the last of the classic adventure strips, Prince Valiant is syndicated by King Features Syndicate and appears in about 300 Sunday newspapers in the nation.

Above: The opening panel of page 4,120 of Prince Valiant (January 24, 2016),
with art by Thomas Yeates and text by Mark Schultz.

Joe Figured, promoter of the annual Scranton Comic Con, said Schultz attended the convention a few times over the years, most recently in November. Having a noteworthy person in comics appear in person is a big plus, Figured said.

“There’s nothing better than to go into a show and meet the writers and artists. That’s the fun part of it,” Figured said.

The Prince Valiant strip currently is drawn by artist Thomas Yeates [right] of California. While Schultz writes the weekly plots, he also is a noted illustrator and first made a name for himself in the comics industry in the 1980s.

Schultz’s parents both hailed from the Scranton area. His father was from Dunmore and later the Abingtons and his mother was from the Abingtons. In his youth, Schultz’s interest in art grew, also inspired by science fiction, mythology and dinosaurs, among other subjects.

“I’m very much interested in speculative fiction, you know, imaginary stories, kind of adventurous stuff, but I also have a real serious interest in the sciences and paleontology being part of that,” he said.

He attended Kutztown University and earned a fine arts degree in painting in 1977. He pursued a career in commercial art and some of his early work involved illustrating how-to guides. A comics revival of the early 1980s drew him into that art form.

In 1986, Schultz created the comic book series Xenozoic Tales. It found a following within the comic book universe and became the basis for a short-lived cartoon called Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, for which Tyco produced an entire toy line.

“There was a real growth period in the mid-80s. And I was lucky to come on board at that time, because they were looking for artists, they were looking for new ideas. That was hitting a growing business at the right time,” Schultz said.

By the mid-’90s, Xenozoic Tales ended and Schultz freelanced. He wrote and illustrated for comics, including Aliens, Predator and Flash Gordon, and for a few years wrote the storyline for Superman, Man of Steel. Schultz also has given seminars at Marywood University and at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, and has exhibited artwork at Marywood, Penn State and in Spain.

In 2004, the Prince Valiant writing gig arose when Hal Foster’s first successors, John Cullen Murphy and his son, Cullen [right], decided to pack it in. King Features Syndicate then tapped artist Gary Gianni and Schultz to take over Valiant.

Gianni was succeeded by Yeates in 2012. Schultz said his philosophy toward writing Prince Valiant has been to try to stay true to Foster’s legacy.

“Basically, what we try to do now is just not screw things up. We want to stay true to the characters,” Schultz said. “I hope I continue the legacy of Prince Valiant in a manner that is in keeping with the original intent.”

At Valiant’s start, its visual vibrancy provided “an oasis of color in a gray world” of the Great Depression and came during a time when other entertainment options were limited, said Brian M. Kane, Ph.D, a Foster biographer and comics historian of Ohio.

Foster came into Valiant with a fan base from his work doing Tarzan for several years.

“He brought those people along with him and his artwork exploded off the page,” Kane said.

Foster’s realistic command of anatomy also became the mold for superheroes that followed, he said.

Rooted in Arthurian legend and medieval England, the strip also reflected the times in which it was being created, Kane said. Foster’s strip referenced subjects ranging from polio to bullying to strong, independent women to mixed-race couples, Kane said.

The strip’s enduring popularity also stems from its dual-focus on adventure and family plot lines, Kane said. Valiant fell in love with and married Aleta, the Queen of the Misty Isles. In 1946, their child, the first baby “born in the comics,” arrived and was covered in newspapers like a celebrity birth, Kane said.

Twins later followed. The children reflected the post-World War II baby boom, Kane said.

“It’s one of those things that when Hal Foster started it, it was just a plain adventure strip. Then a few years into it, Val meets Aleta and falls in love and it becomes a dual adventure strip and family strip,” Kane said. “There was as much story about raising a family as there was going on adventures,” Kane said.

Sunday’s edition of Prince Valiant [January 29, 2023 (right)] will be number 4,486. Schultz, whose first Valiant appeared Nov. 21, 2004, with edition number 3,537, has authored 949 editions. Schultz said he and Yeates go back-and-forth with ideas, outlines and drawings in fleshing out a strip.

“Mark is very good at writing to the strength of the artist,” Kane said. “He wants to keep the artist interested in order to produce good work.”

Schultz also created a heavily illustrated novella titled Storms at Sea that came out in 2015, and he is now working on a sequel. He also continues to work with Flesk Publications that regularly publishes his collections of drawings.

Schultz also wrote a 2009 book illustrated by others and titled The Stuff of Life, A Graphic Guide to Genetics and DNA, and wrote and co-created SubHuman, an undersea comic book adventure debuted in 1998.

How long might Schultz continue writing Prince Valiant?

“My feeling right now is probably when Thomas (Yeates) decides to cash in his chips, I’ll probably be ready to go, too,” Schultz said. “To get on board with a new artist seems just probably, after this amount of time, it’s probably time for me to move on and let a new writer give a try at it. Who knows? That might be a long time” to come.

Kane hopes Prince Valiant continues for a long time.

“I would love to see it go on for many, many more years. I would like to see it hit 100 years,” Kane said.

– Jim Lockwood
The Times-Tribune
January 29, 2023

Related Off-site Link:
Catching Up With Mark Schultz – Jason Bergman (The Comics Journal, March 14, 2022)

See also the previous posts:
• Mark Schultz on the Art of Hal Foster: “Uniquely Appealing, Innovative and Influential”
• Mark Schultz on Prince Valiant as an American Invention
• Thomas Yeates, the New Illustrator of Prince Valiant
• Thomas Yeates: “My Biggest Thrill is Seeing the Prince Valiant Logo on My Drawings”
• How It All Began
• “Beautiful, Captivating and Utterly Awe-inspiring”
• Commemorating Hal Foster and Prince Valiant
• John Cullen Murphy on Prince Valiant: “It’s My Duty. I’m Responsible For It”
• Former Prince Valiant Writer Cullen Murphy Interviewed by Terry Gross
• Remembering Episode 3000, 8/7/94
• Gary Gianni’s Prince Valiant: Looking Good
• Prince Valiant Celebrates 75th Anniversary
• Something Very Special
• “He Wasn’t a Superhero But He Was a Hero”
• 4000
• Comics’ Sweeping Graphic Novel, Prince Valiant, Turns 80
• Celebrating 85 Years of Prince Valiant
• A Valiant First Effort, Wouldn’t You Say?
• A First for Prince Valiant
• Prince Arn, Son of Valiant and Regent of Camelot
• “We Are the Daughters of the Queen of the Misty Isles and the Prince of Thule”
• The Return of Karen and Valeta
• Galan to the Rescue
• Nathan

Celebrating 85 Years of Prince Valiant

Valiant, Prince of Thule, as drawn by Thomas Yeates (2021),
the fourth and current illustrator of the Prince Valiant adventure strip.

Friends, today marks the 85th anniversary of the Prince Valiant adventure strip, the first “page” of which was published in newspapers around the world on February 13, 1937 (left).

Cited as “one of the finest works ever to be produced in the comic art medium,” Prince Valiant (full title, Prince Valiant in the Days of King Arthur) was created and drawn for 30+ years by Hal Foster (1892-1982). From the start, Foster’s weekly strip set a benchmark in excellence, and has long been regarded as profoundly influential.

Instead of word balloons, Prince Valiant is narrated via captions positioned at the bottom or sides of panels. Because of this, Todd H. Goldberg, in his introduction to the first edition of The Definitive Prince Valiant Companion (1992), says that Prince Valiant is actually “a massive illustrated novel presented in a comic art-like style.” To date, this “novel” has 4,436 pages (or weekly installments)!

For how I first discovered and became an admirer of Prince Valiant, click here and here.

For A Prince Named Valiant’s informative series of posts to mark the 75th anniversary of Prince Valiant, click here, here and here.

For 2017’s special 80th anniversary post featuring an insightful article by Prince Valiant scholar Brian Kane, click here.

Also, A Prince Named Valiant was launched on the 74th anniversary of Prince Valiant. To read the post that began it all, click here.


Right: Current Prince Valiant illustrator Thomas Yeates at Comic-Con 2015 . . . with none other than the Prince of Thule himself!

Yeates took over from Gary Gianni, the third illustrator of Prince Valiant, in April 2012. Gianni, in turn, had taken over from the strip’s second illustrator, John Cullen Murphy, in 2002.


For the latest installment (or page) of Prince Valiant, click here.

Above: Prince Valiant, as drawn by Hal Foster (1943). Foster began drawing Prince Valiant in 1937. He fully retired from the strip in 1980.

Above: Prince Valiant, as drawn by John Cullen Murphy (1984). Murphy’s son, Cullen, wrote Prince Valiant during his father’s tenue of over 30 years.

Above: Prince Valiant and his wife, Queen Aleta of the Misty Isle, as drawn by Gary Gianni (2004).

Above: Aleta, as drawn by Thomas Yeates (2019).

Above: An action sequence from page 4309 (September 8, 2019) of Prince Valiant, with art by Thomas Yeates and text by Mark Schultz.


See also the previous posts:
• How It All Began
• A Valiant First Effort, Wouldn’t You Say?
• Remembering Episode 3000, 8/7/94
• John Cullen Murphy on Prince Valiant: “It’s My Duty. I’m Responsible For It”
• Former Prince Valiant Writer Cullen Murphy Interviewed by Terry Gross
• Mark Schultz on Prince Valiant as an American Invention
• Gary Gianni’s Prince Valiant: Looking Good
• Prince Valiant Celebrates 75th Anniversary
• Something Very Special
• Thomas Yeates: “My Biggest Thrill is Seeing the Prince Valiant Logo on My Drawings”
• “He Wasn’t a Superhero But He Was a Hero”
• 4000
• Comics’ Sweeping Graphic Novel, Prince Valiant, Turns 80
• A First for Prince Valiant
• Prince Arn, Son of Valiant and Regent of Camelot
• “We Are the Daughters of the Queen of the Misty Isles and the Prince of Thule”
• The Return of Karen and Valeta
• Galan to the Rescue
• Nathan

Delighted

Art and text: Hal Foster and John Cullen Murphy (from page 1981, January 26, 1975).
Source: Prince Valiant (Vol. 20): 1975-1976 – Hal Foster and John Cullen Murphy (Fantagraphics Books, 2019).

See also the previous posts:
• The Return of Karen and Valeta
• “We Are the Daughters of the Prince of Thule and the Queen of the Misty Isles”

Thoughtful

Art: John Cullen Murphy (from page 2291, January 4, 1981).
Text: Cullen Murphy
Source: Prince Valiant (Vol. 23): 1981-1982 – Hal Foster and John Cullen Murphy (Fantagraphics Books, 2020).

Bella Grossi

Art and text: Hal Foster and John Cullen Murphy (from page 1981, January 26, 1975).
Source: Prince Valiant (Vol. 20): 1975-1976 – Hal Foster and John Cullen Murphy (Fantagraphics Books, 2019).

Princess Mayana

See also the previous post:
• Parting Words

Art: John Cullen Murphy (from installment #2377, August 9, 1982).
Source: Prince Valiant, Book Two (Kings Features Syndicate, 1986).

“Two of the Best Volumes Yet in the Series”

Following (with added links) is an excerpt from Tyler Tichelaar’s review of Prince Valiant, Volumes 22 and 23 (1979-1982), the two most recent releases by Fantagraphics Books.

Tyler is the author of The Children of Arthur series, which includes the novels Arthur’s Legacy, Melusine’s Gift, Ogier’s Prayer, Lilith’s Love, and Arthur’s Bosom. He has also written the non-fiction scholarly works King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition and The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, plus numerous other novels and non-fiction works.

To learn more about Tyler and his writings, click here, here, and here.

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The Prince Valiant saga continues in the latest two volumes reproduced by Fantagraphics, and I must say these are two of the best volumes yet in the series. Ironically, Volume 22 contains the last of creator Hal Foster’s contributions to the strip. He had already quit doing the final artwork some years earlier, handing it over to John Cullen Murphy, but through 1979, he continued to create the scripts and concepts for the artwork, until at age eighty-seven, he fully retired. The writing was then taken over by John Cullen Murphy’s son Cullen Murphy. With all due respect to Foster – for we would have no Prince Valiant without him, and his incredible work marked the strip’s first forty-two years – I feel there is no falling off in artwork after he left, and the plots, as evidenced at least in the first three years completely in the Murphys’ hands, may well be even stronger than in Foster’s original work. Having your successor keep up the momentum and quality of your work is rare indeed, and countless examples can be provided of works that have retained popularity but still fell off in quality when the original creator was no longer involved. One example is L. Frank Baum’s magnificent Oz novels. The series has continued for thirty-plus volumes after his original fourteen novels, but while they continue to be written and be popular, none of his successors ever really achieved the quality and whimsy of his original novels, as readable and enjoyable as many of those sequels are.

Volume 22 of Prince Valiant continues with one of my favorite elements of the strip, watching Valiant’s children grow up. We see his oldest son, Arn, now a squire to Sir Gawain and setting off on his first quest. Valiant’s youngest and fourth child, Galan, becomes a page so he can learn the manners of the court. The twin girls [Karen and Valeta] get less attention in these volumes, but they are ever present. Among the highlights of this volume are Arn and Gawain’s journey to the Isle of Man to help protect it from Viking raiders. In another storyline, Valiant is captured by brigands and sold into slavery, causing Arn to travel as far as the Sahara to find him, with a dramatic rescue happening during a sandstorm. Perhaps best of all, Mordred moves into the forefront of the plots beginning in this volume. In Prince Valiant, Mordred is Arthur’s half-brother, not his son, but he is just as evil. He begins to poison King Arthur to try to take the throne for himself, but of course, his plot is discovered. After Arthur recovers, he banishes Mordred from court, declaring “May your children scorn you and your grandchildren call you Judas.” This is a significant moment in the storyline, although the reader will not realize it for some time. . . . Several other adventures occur in this volume that I will leave for readers to discover on their own.

. . . What I loved especially about Volume 23 was that often two plots were going on simultaneously, which made the pacing better. Frankly, in some of the earlier volumes the plotting got kind of boring.

Like all previous volumes, there are opening and closing essays. Volume 22 begins with an article by Cullen Murphy first published in The Atlantic in 1994. I loved reading it because I read it when it was first published in The Atlantic at the time I was beginning work on my book King Arthur’s Children. It was my first introduction to the Prince Valiant strip. . . . The final essay in Volume 23 discusses historicity in the Prince Valiant strip, which is interesting because it points out both the depth of research Foster and the Murphys did to make the setting appropriate to the days of King Arthur and where they introduced anachronisms. For example, by providing a timeline of Valiant’s life, he would have to be ninety-nine years old to live long enough to meet the Emperor Justinian. Oh well, the storylines are fun if we don’t try to impose too much historical accuracy on them.

Volume 23 has an essay on art [by artist George Pratt], including the role of nature in the strip. It includes mention of other strips that were influenced by Foster, including mention that he was himself influenced by Howard Pyle. The concluding essay is really a collection of the drawings/scripts Foster created to work from.

Overall, I would say these volumes created a real resurgence of interest in the Prince Valiant strip for me. . . . I eagerly await Volume 24, to be released in December 2021.

To read Tyler Tichelaar’s review in its entirety (though be warned, there are numerous plot spoilers!), click here.


See also the previous posts:
• The Comics Reporter’s Review of Prince Valiant, Vol. 3 (1941-1942)
• A Review of Prince Valiant, Vol.5 (1945-1946)
• “A Timeless Gem”: A Review of Prince Valiant, Vol. 7 (1949-1950)
• Prince Valiant Celebrates 75th Anniversary
• 4000
• Comics’ Sweeping Graphic Novel, Prince Valiant, Turns 80
• Celebrating 83 Years of Prince Valiant
• Something Very Special
• Remembering Episode 3000, 8/7/94
• A Valiant First Effort, Wouldn’t You Say?
• “He Wasn’t a Superhero But He Was a Hero”
• Mark Schultz on the Art of Hal Foster: “Uniquely Appealing, Innovative and Influential”
• John Cullen Murphy on Prince Valiant: “It’s My Duty. I’m Responsible For It”
• Former Prince Valiant Writer Cullen Murphy Interviewed by Terry Gross
• Mark Schultz on Prince Valiant as an American Invention
• Looking Good
• Thomas Yeates: The New Illustrator of Prince Valiant
• Thomas Yeates: “My Biggest Thrill is Seeing the Prince Valiant Logo on My Drawings”

Mistaken Identity

See also the previous post:
• Savior of Turfan
• The Gallery of a Thousand Buddhas
• In the Tomb of Ch'in Shih Huang-Ti

Art: John Cullen Murphy (1988).
Text: Cullen Murphy.
Source: The Sun Herald (Sydney, Australia); from the collection of Michael J. Bayly (1990).

A Role He Relishes

Art: John Cullen Murphy (from page 2272, August 24, 1980).
Text: Cullen Murphy
Source: Prince Valiant (Vol. 22): 1979-1980 – Hal Foster and John Cullen Murphy (Fantagraphics Books, 2020).

Ever Before Him

Art and text: Hal Foster and John Cullen Murphy (from page 1783, April 18, 1971).
Source: Prince Valiant (Vol. 18): 1971-1972 – Hal Foster and John Cullen Murphy (Fantagraphics Books, 2018).

Camelot in Winter

See also the previous post:
• City of Wonder
• To the Very Gates of Camelot
• The Round Table
• “Camelot, You Are Mine!”
• The Relief of Camelot

Art: John Cullen Murphy (circa 1980).
Source: The Sun Herald (Sydney, Australia); from the collection of Michael J. Bayly (circa 1982).

Into the Valley of Death

See also the previous post:
• Waldo’s Tale

Art: John Cullen Murphy (circa 1983).
Text: Cullen Murphy.
Source: The Sun Herald (Sydney, Australia); from the collection of Michael J. Bayly (circa 1985).