The Prince Valiant Connection

It is not an uncommon practice amongst comic strip and comic book artists to "borrow" layouts and drawing styles from other artists. In an interview published in King Comic Heroes (James Van Hise, Pioneer Books, 1988), Lee Falk tells an amusing anecdote from the early days of his Mandrake strip:

"When I was working with Phil Davis doing layouts very early in the game, we had a Sunday page which had some rearing horses. Now these are illustrative artists and they use photo references and whole files of other artists' material. When I indicated a rifle or a gun or a tank, he had a model or something to copy from. They didn't copy it -- they used the file to get something for a model and they sketched from it. They didn't trace it or anything like that. They had to have a model just like they'd have a model for a woman. At that very moment, in I think it was Flash Gordon, they had some rearing horses. We used that as inspiration, but we didn't copy it. About a year later I moved to New York, and I went up and I had dinner with Alex Raymond up in Stamford where I'd moved to in Connecticut and he was showing me through his studio in his beautiful house and there on his drawing board was the Flash Gordon he was working on and next to it was the Sunday page of Mandrake with the rearing horses -- he was using it as a model. I said, 'But Alex, we copied that from you!' He said "Oh, for Christ's sake!' He'd forgotten."

It is perhaps not too surprising to find that Sy Barry and his team of assistants also borrowed from the masters. In particular, it appears they had a certain affinity for Hal Foster's work on Prince Valiant . One such example, from Queen Karola of Kula-Ku (D150) was recently discovered by a Scandinavian reader whose letter was published in Fantomet Nr.23 1997. Since then, Dietmar and I have uncovered many more Prince Valiant panels that were the basis for subsequent panels in The Phantom. In particular, the 1979 Sunday story The Name featured no less than FIVE such panels! Scans of these Phantom panels and their Prince Valiant source are shown below.

The Phantom: The Name (S110)

Prince Valiant

Oct 7, 1979 (Panel 5)

Feb 19, 1939 (mirror)

Oct 7, 1979 (Panel 8)

Feb 11, 1940

Oct 14, 1979

Jun 5, 1938

Oct 21, 1979

June 19, 1938

The Phantom: Queen Karola of Kula-Ku (D150)

Prince Valiant

Jan 6, 1983

Jan 7, 1939

To find that so many of those panels from Phantom strips were based on original layouts from Prince Valiant was one thing. But while reading through some original Prince Valiant Sunday pages recently, we made an amazing discovery.

One of the most memorable panels used throughout Sy Barry's tenure on The Phantom, shows The Phantom fighting off pirates aboard a sailing ship. This panel first appeared in 1967 and has been repeated numerous times since then, often as part of a "For Those Who Came in Late" sequence. The layout of this panel has also been used as a basis for others. For example, it was used to illustrate a panel where The Phantom is fighting off "demons" in The Name . The common thread in all cases is that the layouts were prepared by George Olesen. Even after the retirement of Sy Barry in 1994, George Olesen has continued to use this famous panel, now inked by Keith Williams or Fred Fredericks.

And now the discovery ... you guessed it, all of these panels were originally based on an old panel from Prince Valiant (see below). In doing so, George Olesen made a truly wonderful tribute to Hal Foster, one of the greatest adventure strip artists of all time!

The Super Jet Pirates (S71)	Walker's Table (S75)
Aug 13, 1967	Jan 5, 1969

The Name (S110)	Crook's Haven (S113)
Oct 21, 1979	Nov 23, 1980

Captain Amazon - Pirate Queen (S134)	Raiders of the Eastern Dark (D185)
Jul 30, 1989	Sep 6, 1995

Prince Valiant
Jan 12, 1941