Harold ("Hal") Rudolf Foster (August 18, 1892, Halifax, Nova Scotia – July 25, 1982, Winter Park, Florida) was a Canadian-American cartoonist most famous as the creator of the comic strip Prince Valiant.
Foster worked as a staff artist for the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg and moved to Chicago in 1919 where he studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He subsequently worked as an illustrator before getting involved with Tarzan, an adaptatio...
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Harold ("Hal") Rudolf Foster (August 18, 1892, Halifax, Nova Scotia – July 25, 1982, Winter Park, Florida) was a Canadian-American cartoonist most famous as the creator of the comic strip Prince Valiant.
Foster worked as a staff artist for the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg and moved to Chicago in 1919 where he studied at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. He subsequently worked as an illustrator before getting involved with Tarzan, an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's novels. Foster's Tarzan comic strip first appeared January 7, 1929. However, he was not interested in continuing the strip, so it was passed on to Rex Maxton for six months. Foster returned after Maxton's inept tenure and quickly restored gravitas to the Tarzan franchise.
He soon grew tired of adaptation and began planning his own creation. William Randolph Hearst, who had long wanted Foster to do a comic for his newspapers, was so impressed with Foster's pitch for Prince Valiant that he promised Foster the...
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