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At heart I am a simple man easily satisfied. I have learned in collecting books, comics, etc. that patience is indeed a virtue. I have regularly discovered that it's the thrill of the hunt or long waits that make a collection interesting to me and not necessarily the completion.

Right now my e-bay pal Nikki is working a bid on King of the Royal Mounted Sunday strips from the 1950s for me. I always have competition for those and lose more often then I win.

Besides King I have been collecting Hal Foster's Prince Valiant strips from the Sunday paper starting with Sunday #2311 dated 24 May 81. From that point on I missed 9 Sundays--the last being #2512--31 Mar 85.

That was until Pendragon received a frantic PM from me in March 2007 or so. I had an unbroken run until 24 Dec 2006. I was in the habit of tossing them in a pile in my library and about three times a year cutting them out and moving them to a holding box to be mounted in photo albums later which I am permanently behind on. In March I discovered I had for the first time in years forgot to add that week to my stash. I had hopes Pen had newspapers handy for paper drives. Pen was sympathtic but had no copy. A frantic call to Columbus and Dayton newspapers was meant with the bitter revelation that newspaper morgues keep news not entertainment files on microfilm. Now I had occassionally over the years missed a week and had the newspapers send me one (warning this only works if you do it very quickly. So my over 20 year streak was ruined.

But---

In about three months a publishing company (Andrew and McNeel) are printing Gianni's (the third regular and current artist) run on the strip and the missing Christmas Eve strip will be provided me. Yes God has been thanked and He is in the details.

As to the other nine missing ones-- I actually have two black and white reprint volumes that accounted for six of them.

Fantagraphic Books published a paperback series in color of 50 volumes reprinting strips 1 (Feb 13, 1937) through #2271 (Aug 17, 1980). So I am missing ultimately a 39 week stretch plus three miscellaneous strips here and there for a total of 42 weeks out of as of today 3725 Sundays produced.

Yes you could say I love Prince Valiant and you'ld be right.