Monday, May. 17, 2010
Prince Valiant
Canadian cartoonist Hal Foster had been working on his Tarzan comic strip for about eight years when publisher William Randolph Hearst asked Foster in 1937 to create a comic for the mogul's newspaper chain. A fan of the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Foster developed the character Derek, Son of Thane. Hearst loved the idea but hated the name and made it Prince Valiant instead. The epic adventure story, which is appropriately distributed by King Features Syndicate, has been adapted into two films and has more than 44 million readers around the world.