Number 1337: Prince Valiant and the Island of Thunder!

As a Sunday comics Prince Valiant fan, even as a youngster in the '50s, I mostly scorned the Dell Comics version of Hal Foster’s weekly masterpiece. They were not reprints of Foster’s pages, but original stories. Looking at them now I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge. I think artist Bob Fujitani captured Foster’s distinctive style.

This issue, the Prince Valiant one-shot, Four Color #900 (1958), was the last of the original adventures of Prince Valiant from Dell. They had begun in ’54 with an adaptation of the Robert Wagner/Janet Leigh movie version. Overstreet credits Fujitani with all of the artwork on the one-shots, but the Grand Comics Database has no information on a writer or cover artist for this issue.

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Number 951


Porky Of the Mounties


Carl Barks did so few non-Disney duck stories for Western Publishing during his long comic book career that all of them are worth noting. Such is the case of Porky Of the Mounties, a story Barks did in 1944 for Dell's one-shot issues series, Four Color Comics #48. 1944.

The story demonstrates that the artist, who also drew a Mickey Mouse one-shot ("The Riddle Of the Red Hat," Four Color #79), drew Barney Bear (an MGM property), as well as these renderings of Bugs, Petunia and Porky (Warner Bros), could draw more than ducks.

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