Could anybody please proofread my text? [Archive]

Culturist

10-21-2006, 07:53 AM

The text below is also intended for my Prince Valiant presentation, and I do know that it is lengthy. But nevertheless, please proofread it. Thanks in advance.

Harold Rudolf Foster was born in Halifax - a town on the Canadian peninsula New Scotland. When he was ten years old, he used to go cruising before the coastline by a sailing small boat. His being always dressed neatly provoked the rowdy classmates of Hal to either bully or beat him up, until he finally grew tired of it. It was then that he decided to take boxing lessons, with the result that he would soon live on that com-bative sport. Temporarily, he also became a paperboy before he was later employed as both an errand boy and stenographer by an editorial office.

At the age of 14, he had to leave school for earning money to support his family, which had lived in severe misery since his father´s early death in 1896, financially. In 1906, he, for example, made his living out of setting traps in the dense Canadian for-ests. As he had loved drawing ever since his childhood, he accepted the offer of a Canadian mail-order company to illustrate its advertisements; that job had been his first as an advertising designer by then.

Meanwhile, his family had moved 2500 kilometres farther into the west, where the Canadian province capitol of Manitoba, Winnipeg, was and is, of course, still located. In the years to come (1911 to 1921), Foster would travel by canoe through Manitoba and Ontario, often paddling on rivers yet to be mapped at that time.

With the Great Depression arising also in Canada, Foster had to face severe difficul-ties in finding work as an advertising designer and, consequently, was wanting in or-ders. In order to survive, he freelanced for numerous magazines.

Around this same time, he met a blonde, brown-eyed girl from Kansas, who was to marry him half a year later, on a dancing evening of the Winnipegian canoe club. But then, when he had a wife and two sons to feed, the money did not suffice. Conse-quently, Foster took up a job as hunting guide for the most remote regions of Ontario and Manitoba, so exploring first the Rice-Lake District in 1917, among other natural phenomena. He would later remember those years well, because it was then that he had accidentally been shot from a pump gun fired by a drunken half-caste Red In-dian, and, unfortunately, the pellets were to remain stuck in his leg for the rest of his life.

In 1917, he would have made a fortune, unless his marked-out Gold Claim had been lost again after 3 years. Having learnt from all those enterprises, he considered them closed, in 1921, only to concentrate fully on his artist career in future. He even cycled approximately 1500 kilometres from Winnipeg to Chicago, where he let his drawing techniques be refined by the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Academy and Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. In addition, the autodidact Foster designed adver-tisements for advertising companies. In 1928, one of his clients recommended him to Joseph H. Neebe - a comic-book publisher who had recently acquired the copyright in Tarzan from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Foster joined the project of translating Tar-zan´s adventures from a book format into that of comic books, and so “Tarzan of the Apes” was printed as a serialised comic novel in 13 American broadsheets, but also coincided with the publishing of the other, then revolutionary adventure series drawn by Dick Calkins, “Buck Rogers”.

Foster hated his job, as he regarded himself as a traditional craftsman and not be-longing to the daily “Funny Pages” of the newspapers, which he initially considered inferior to “genuine illustrations”. Thinking like that, he, however, fulfilled his contract to adapt Burroughs´ novel “Tarzan of the Apes” in 60 episodes at 5 pictures each; afterwards, he returned to designing advertisements.

The stripes caught surprisingly well on the readership which soon demanded the se-ries to continue, so that Foster, although initially disapprovingly, had to come back for illustrating new adventures of Tarzan (he had ultimately returned due to the decreas-ing number of orders he received to design advertisements in the wake of the “Great Depression”.). With Foster illustrating for United Features Syndicate again, the pub-lishing house printed Tarzan episodes to appear in Sunday papers.

At the request of Burroughs himself, Foster, having meanwhile settled down in Evanston, Illinois, took over the creative charge of the Tarzan Sunday page from Neebe, trying to combine art with commercial success.

Ideas and plans for an own comic-book series and the desire for creative freedom had taken shape in Foster over the years. He had ever been dissatisfied with drawing a series he had also never been authoring for. Eventually, he inserted some Vikings once in a Tarzan adventure, so trying to sell his own idea of a comic book. In 1935, Foster began negotiations over the publishing of an own series with King Features Syndicate, but he should not find interest for his plans as early as in 1936. It was, above all, the media mogul William Randolph Hearst who had learnt Foster´s work from Tarzan and who, therefore, would like Foster to create his own comic-book se-ries for King Features. One year later, Foster accepted Hearst´s offer to publish an own project in the “New York Journal”. So, after long 8 years, his dream of writing and illustrating own stories had finally come true.

Hearst allowed Foster to have a nearly absolute creative freedom, but for the name of the new series´ main character: Instead of Derek the Son of Thane, Foster was supposed to name him otherwise – Hearst had wanted him to bear a Christian name, after all -, and so he happened to be renamed Valiant. While illustrating Tarzan´s ad-ventures months ahead of their actual publishing, he completed approximately 8 pages of “Prince Valiant” and drafted the stories for the following two to three months. Even as his Tarzan illustrations were being printed, readers could enjoy the first “Prince Valiant” episode published, on 13 February 1937, in the newspapers´ week-end editions. Around that time, Foster was 45 years old.

Similarly to Tarzan, “Prince Valiant” went down in history immediately as one of the most successful comic books ever. Foster was to author it until his retirement from the comic scene in the 1970s. As his elaborate illustrations consumed much time and working 50 hours on the series was normal practice for him, Foster hardly had the opportunity of writing and illustrating other comic books, but Prince Valiant, which also depended on his travelling to nearly all of those countries which, as the story continued, served as an arena for Prince Valiant´s adventures. The only non-Prince-Valiant story to be ever published was the short comic book “the Song of Bernadette” in 1943.

Due to a paper shortage during the 2nd World War, the format of the comic books had often been diminished. That was why, in 1944/45, Foster supplemented the strip “The Medieval Castle” to the under third of the Valiant page. “The Medieval Castle” told the adventures of two young squires. It also secured that Prince Valiant could appear uncut in every newspaper. In 1957, Foster won the Reuben Award by the National Cartoonist´s Society, that is, in some respect, equal to being knighted by the Queen, and then there were still more awards to come.

At the age of 78, Foster had realised that it was time to seek assistance, because he could not continue the Valiant epic any longer by himself due to his fragile health (he suffered from Arthritis). He also had to reduce his 53-hour week, as a result.
Subsequently, he tested several artists – Gary Morrow (11 October 1970, page 1757 or page 1765), John Cullen Murphy (1 November 1970, page 1760), Wallace Wood (15 November 1970, page 1762) and Murphy again (a series of pages: 1764 to 1767; 1769 to 1772 and 1774 to 1778.). He finally selected John Cullen Murphy to be tak-ing over his legacy in a gradual 10-year process. The first Murphy episode was printed on 23 May 1971 (page 1789), whereas the pages 1788 and 2000 were those Foster had completed still by himself. Foster kept on designing the layouts, writing and illustrating them until 20 January 1980 (page 2241). In the following week, the first Murphy only episode was printed, and, for the first time, also, there was a subtitle added to the Valiant logo, “Created by Hal Foster”. Foster died on 25 July 1982 in Spring Hill (Florida). All his life, he had detested self-obsessed people and lived by a simply hunts- and fisherman´s rule: “Never aiming at a sitting bird!” “Never take more fish than there is space in the frying pan!” “Never drink more than a gentleman can take”!

The artist who had also embodied this idea in Prince Valiant could rightly say so to have reached his highest goal in life: “To contribute something eternal to the sum of human knowledge or joy, that means for me real success.”

In 1995, the U.S. postal service dedicated a stamp from the series “Comic Strip Clas-sics” to Hal Foster´s hero.