Foster hard at work, influencing hundreds of more artists, in the 1950s.

Today marks the one hundred and thirtieth anniversary of Hal Foster’s birth. Who was Hal Foster? Just the main artistic influence on Frank Frazetta, Joe Kubert and John Buscema. Also, Foster was a big influence on Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Bernie Wrightson, Michael Wm. Kaluta, Alfredo Alcala, Rudy Nebres and Gary Gianni. His overall impact on adventure comic art—especially in the realm of heroic fantasy—is literally incalculable.

Harold Foster was born in Nova Scotia in 1892. He emigrated to the USA in 1920 and became the first artist to render Tarzan of the Apes into a newspaper comic strip. He would illustrate the Tarzan strip until 1937, at which point his Prince Valiant strip began to appear in newspapers all across North America and beyond. Foster finally quit working on the Prince Valiant strip in 1980.

As I noted above, Foster illustrated the Tarzan strip up until 1937. Two legendary artists that we know were reading Foster's strip were Frank Frazetta and Joe Kubert.

Here's what Frazetta had to say about Foster:

"Foster would be my main influence."

In addition to that, in another interview, Frazetta described Foster's Tarzan strips as "perfection".

Joe Kubert had this to say:

"Guys like Foster and [Alex] Raymond and [Milton] Caniff, as I said many times before, have inadvertently fathered an incredible number of cartoonists."

While I don't have the exact quotes to hand, I have definitely read Kubert interviews where he specifically mentions Foster's influence on Joe's signature character, Tor.

Here’s a sample of the Tarzan strip from 1933, which was nowhere near Foster’s artistic peak.

Jack Kirby was a rough contemporary of Frazetta and Kubert. Here's just one example of the praise he gave Hal Foster over the years:

"If you name any of the masters of the thirties; Caniff, Hal Foster, [N. C.] Wyeth, people like that, even Howard Pyle, a fine illustrator who did the Robin Hood series, I cannibalized them all."

John Buscema learned his craft in the 1950s by studying Joe Kubert...and Hal Foster. Here are Big John's thoughts on the subject:

"I think Hal Foster is perhaps the best story-teller in comics."

High praise, indeed, from one of the medium’s elite story-tellers.

Bernie Wrightson was one of the greatest comics artists who came of age in the early '70s. Foster was a fairly late, but important, influence on his work:

"Foster has this timeless quality about his drawing. And I don’t mean the fact that he’s dealing with Prince Valiant, which happens in the past, but it’s the actual drawing itself, you could almost call it absolute drawing. There seems to be very little stylization in Foster’s work. For the life of me, I can’t think of anybody who can draw that well academically, that straightforwardly."

Other authors I haven't quoted who have expressed their admiration and artistic debt to Foster would include Al Williamson, Steve Ditko, Alfredo Alcala, Michael Wm. Kaluta, Rudy Nebres, William Stout, Dave Sim, Tom Yeates, Mark Schultz and Gary Gianni. That is nowhere near an exhaustive list and we're not even considering the legions and hordes of artists inspired by the artists named above.

Happy birthday, Hal.

Jack Kirby admitted that this demon-mask from Prince Valiant was the main inspiration for his Etrigan/Demon character which he created for DC.