Prince Valiant (1937)

As a body of work, Foster’s Prince Valiant celebrates the paradoxical. Essentially modernist in its oeuvre, the strip is set in the ‘days of King Arthur.’ Ostensibly American in its outlook, the setting is mostly European. Undeniably democratic in its politics, the principal character is, after all, a prince. That the strip should prove so successful for so long attests to the power of its wistful and melancholic nostalgia. It is this nostalgia that has fuelled an American obsession with medievalism and a continuing engagement with the promise of Camelot, a promise that interpreted the poetry of Tennyson through the art of Howard Pyle, refashioned that interpretation into comics and movies and musicals, and finally divested itself into the brief tenure of an assassinated president.

Red Sonja (1973)

In the chapter on Red Sonja, we track the fortunes of the “she-devil with a sword” against the complex narrative of a renaissance in female superheroes during the 1970s, a disturbing backlash against them in the 1980s, and a gradual movement towards equilibrium in the years that have followed.

The Stories Upon Which We Agree

This chapter consists of an extended meditation upon the nature and historical expression of medievalism and the historiographical links between medievalism and feudalism, a term more commonly encountered in European, especially French, commentary.

Beowulf: Dragon Slayer (1975)

Failure can be just as illuminating as success, and so this looks at the alarmingly short-lived Beowulf: Dragon Slayer. By the mid-1970s, when the Anglo-Saxon hero appeared in his own title series, Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon poem, was yet to transition from an academic to a popular milieu, and a continuous and steadfastly nationalist interpretation made it very difficult for the poem’s eponymous hero to get the sort of traction enjoyed by folk heroes such as Robin Hood or Thor. Subsequently, Beowulf: Dragon Slayer, despite the innate worthiness of its subject and despite the efforts of DC heavyweights like Michael Uslan, was doomed before issue one hit the newsstands.

Conan the Barbarian (1970)

With the chapter on Conan the Barbarian, the focus of this study shifts away from the inter-translation of this earlier medievalism towards the establishment of the mythopoeic visions that dominate medievalist discourse today. Robert E. Howard’s pulp-fiction heroes were born out of his experiences in the flint-hard mining towns of Depression-era Texas and out of his desire, perhaps, to escape them. This chapter will contextualize that work within a greater analysis of fantasy literature, focusing in particular on the inter-relationship of Howard’s creations with those of J. R. R. Tolkien, and with the genesis of new and immersive fan experiences that included comic conventions, costume-play and fantasy role-playing games.

The Mighty Thor (1962)

In exactly the same way that Prince Valiant permits an analysis of American Arthurianism and Green Arrow illuminates the American engagement with Robin Hood, so too an analysis of The Mighty Thor will allow us to shift our focus to the German and Scandinavian immigrants of the American Mid-West and the transmission of their folk heritage through the scholarship of men like Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm and through the questionable partisanship of men like Richard Wagner.

The Green Arrow (1941)

The stories of Robin Hood constitute the collective memory of popular counter-culture. The chapter entitled “Green Arrow” posits the legends of the green wood as the antecedent for this successful comic book series, but any look at Robin Hood leads also to the contested medievalisms of James Macpherson and Thomas Percy, the relationship of these men with Samuel Johnson, and the democratization of their vision through the work of the American scholar Francis James Child. Child, in turn, brings into our gaze the Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton and, through him, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow before we return once again to Howard Pyle whose singular vision, perhaps more than any other person, has shaped so much of how the 20th century sees the Middle Ages.

Northlanders (2007)

The final of the comic book chapters is a study of the 21st-century series Northlanders. What makes this comic book so interesting for the purposes of this study is not its medievalism, but rather its lack thereof. The characters in Northlanders think, behave and speak like film-noir gangsters, as the blood feuds and conquests of the northern Dark Ages mutate into barrio-style turf wars and gangland vendettas. The writer of the series made no attempt to portray the ontology of his Norse subjects or to represent historically the multifaceted culture from which they sprang—his goal was to produce a crime series based on seminal Yakuza films from the 1970s.

Medievalist Comics and the American Century

A general overview of the monograph that unpacks some of the technical apparatus, contextualises the argument, and gives a chapter-by-chapter run through.