System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Hal Foster, Cartoonist - Tarzan & Prince Valiant
August 16, 1892 - July 25, 1982
Harold Rudolf Foster was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia on August 16, 1892. Foster's father died when he was four. His mother remarried eight years later. Hal's stepfather had little business sense, but he imbued Hal with a love of the outdoors and fishing in the untamed wilds around Halifax. At just eight years old, he captained a 12-foot raft (actually a plank) across Halifax Harbour. By ten he was skippering a 30-foot sloop in the Atlantic. Hal never became seasick. "It was the sea, " he insisted, "that became Foster-sick."
In 1906 the family business failed which prompted a move to Winnipeg, Manitoba where they hoped to rebuild their fortune in the western land boom. Hal was 13 and ended his formal education at the ninth grade. He immediately began a course of self-education at The Winnipeg Carnegie Library. To learn anatomy Hal would go to his room and sketch himself nude in front of an old cracked mirror. He got fast out of necessity. "You learn to quick-sketch, " said Foster, "because it's 20 to 30 (degrees) below zero."
In 1910, he became a staff artist with the Hudson Bay Company. Hal drew women's underwear, the kind with numerous buttons and lace, for the mail order catalogue. Canada's pre-war depression forced him into freelancing in 1913. Hal met and married Helen Wells in 1915. The couple worked as hunting guides in Ontario and Manitoba and in 1917, they found a "million dollar claim" in the Lake Rice region and began prospecting. They worked the gold mine for nearly three years before claim jumpers stole it from them.
At twenty-eight, with a wife and two sons to support, Foster decided to seriously learn to be an artist. Hal talked a friend into joining him on a 1, 000-mile bicycle trek from Winnipeg to Chicago. It took the two men fourteen days across dirt and gravel roads but on August 28th, 1919, they reached Chicago.
Foster took a job with the Jahn & Ollier Engraving Company and enrolled in evening classes at the Chicago Art Institute. He later supplemented this education with night classes at the National Academy of Design and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Eventually Foster went to work for the prestigious Palenske-Young Studio illustrating ads and magazine covers. He produced work for Northwest Paper, Popular Mechanics, Jekle Margarine, Southern Pacific Railroad, Illinois Pacific Railroad, and others.
While in Chicago, Foster also became an assistant to J. Allen St. John, one of the top illustrators of the time. St. John was the artist whose work was most closely associated with Edgar Rice Burrough's "Tarzan", and in 1928 when Joseph Neebe acquired the rights to produce a Tarzan comic strip, he went to St. John's studio to persuade him to draw the strip. St. John refused, but Neebe reportedly spotted Foster, who he had previously worked with and signed him to illustrate only the first episode in the first few months of 1929 at which point he went back to advertising illustration.
Foster's "Tarzan" was one of the most beautifully drawn strips and became an immediate smash. Foster's artistic style was copied by many at the time. But in 1936 he began to tire of illustrating the droll scripts he had to work with and his fertile imagination began to swirl with new ideas, so in February 1937 his "Prince Valiant" premiered. He was far enough ahead with his Tarzan pages that his last Tarzan did not appear until May 1, eleven weeks after Prince Valiant began to appear in the same papers.
Prince Valiant became one of the most successful comic series of all time, winning the prestigious Banshees' "Silver Lady" award (1952) and both the National Cartoonists Society's coveted "Reuben" award (1957) and "Gold Key" award (1977). When he was 73, Foster was elected to membership in Great Britain's Royal Society of Arts Foster’s virtuosity with pen and brush techniques made each page an amazing conglomeration of lines. His dry brush style was an inspiration to the young Alex Raymond before the first Flash Gordon page was a spark in Raymond's imagination. Foster's use of dialogue also took on a unique form. His text was not to explain the story as much as to compliment the artistic visuals. It is known that Foster took some sixty hours weekly to produce each Sunday episode (there was never a daily), and he never included a local that he had not personally visited for thematic accuracy.
In 1971, he drew his last Prince Valiant Sunday page, handing over the artistic chores to John Cullen Murphy. Foster had illustrated 1789 Prince Valiant pages. He made appearances at many comic book conventions and was a fan favourite for years. On February 10, 1980, just three days shy of 43 years, the last Prince Valiant strip written by Foster saw print. Foster died only two years later on July 25, 1982, three weeks before his 90th birthday.
