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Know Thy History: Prince Valiant

There must be something in the waters of Nova Scotia that makes its residents really embrace history. Kate Beaton, one of the most prominent names in webcomics currently, made it big by sticking modern slang in the mouths of respected figureheads of history.

She’s not the only one, though. Once upon a time, a resident of Halifax became a staff artist for the venerable retailer, Hudson’s Bay Company, in Winnipeg, where he drew ads for ladies’ corests. Later, he would move to comic strips. His first job was illustrating the adventures of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan. However, being a true artist, what he really wanted to do was work on something that was his own creation.

Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst loved this man’s pitch so much that he offered him ownership of the strip, a rarity for the earlier work-for-hire era in comics. Incidentally, this is the third time Hearst factors into this feature. It’s kinda uplifting to know that one of the world’s biggest media tycoons was deep down inside a huge comic nerd.

That cartoonist went on to pen the adventures of a knight in King Arthur’s Court, someone whose adventures are still featured in newspapers to this day. His name was Hal Foster, and that comic strip is Prince Valiant.

(Incidentally, this piece is going to lack the usual links, mainly because my main reference site for newspaper comics — the I Love Comix Archive — went down because the hosts got spooked by SOPA. Sigh.)

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Posted in comics, Know Thy History, The Webcomic Overlook

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Metapost: Well… here it is … the 2012 theme comes to the Webcomic Overlook

Switched over to the new 2012 theme… and, surprisingly, pretty painless. Admittedly it’s a little bland, but that just means there’s a canvas with which to pain new things on. I actually could’ve stayed with a look similar to the old one: it turns out the header is a crazy adaptable type where you can change it to be any size you want. The other thing is that the column widths are wider in this format… which is something that I like since I tend to do a lot of image posting, and a larger width means better-looking images.

With the 2012 template, the sidebar returns. This is a bit of a relief for me, since I was doubling down on some of the widgets just because the sidebar disappears when you click to read a full piece. (WordPress, by the way, likes to advertise the elegance of “no sidebars.” Poo to that, I say.) In addition, the site looks pretty great on the iPad. There’s also more options if I want to run with a static home page… but I’ll forego that until I figure out what I want to do with it.

I’ve actually been looking to change the theme since, oh, about February. Changing things around on this site energizes me. It also keeps me up to date. I remember back in the days when I had the original format, and I’ve come to the realization that if I didn’t change things around once in a while, the site would end up looking like one of those zombie blogs that haven’t been updated for years. So whenever sexy new templates come my way, I grab the opportunity by the hand and choke it down like Thanksgiving dinner.

A little peek behind the curtain: I put together some concept ideas before settling on the header that I decided to go with. Check out a few of my ideas behind the cut.

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