Tag: swords

What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? Did Prince Valiant get Excalibur? September – December 2024


I can’t swear that never in his adventures has he gotten hold of Excalibur. But no, in the current storyline he pulled his own sword out of a stone. That’s the one he’s had since the 40s, the Singing Sword, which turns out to be named Flamberge, which turns out to be a particular style of sword design that I never knew before it got held captive by the Snake People, the “Tuatha”, early this year (reader time).

I’m hoping here to catch you up to early December 2024 in Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant. If it’s after about March 2024, there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap here.

Prince Valiant.

8 September – 1 December 2024.

Last time, the captured minion Sygbald reported that Witgar had fled yet again, with the Black Stone that Prince Valiant has to return to the Tuatha. And just as the Tuatha remind Valiant of the premise — he’ll get his Singing Sword back if they get their Black Stone — Sygbald goes missing. The best speculation: the Tuatha stole him. Maybe so. Valiant and company continue on to the sea cliffs, getting to Clochán An Aifir, created by an ancient race of giants.

It’s not just a good bet for where Witgar went, it’s even right, based on the boulders cascading down on them. They find an enchanted door and what do you know but Bronwyn has an enchanted spear that’s good for one admission. That admission: Valiant, of course. There’s one last warrior for Valiant to fight off before getting to Witgar and the Black Stone and some weird ritual Valiant is interrupting yet again.

[ Valiant looks over the rocky shore, distraught ] All lost! To regain his Singing Sword, Val has chased and finally caught Witgar, the man who would be king; but, as if in one final act of spite the mad Saxon has plummeted to the depths below the angry sea, at the foot of the giant's causeway, still grasping the stolen black stone. But there are forces in the sea of which Val could never dream ... [ we see a selkie take the Black Stone and the Enchanted Spear ] ... and now the waves seem to take an almost human shape before Val's weary eyes. They rise and crash over the basalt columns leaving behind two remarkable gifts --- the spear called Adar Llwch Gwin, and the Black Stone! Through the tumult he seems to hear whispered voices: 'You have done well, O Prince! The balance between the two worlds will be restored! Go in peace --- and never again befoul us with that accursed spear!'
Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’sPrince Valiant for the 3rd of November, 2024. I wanted to say something positive about the little plot filigree that has the Black Stone lost to the sea and returned right away. It doesn’t read as padding, nor does the resolution read as a deus ex machina to me. It feels more like an old-fashioned sort of story, like Schultz and Yeates are trying for, where the world is bigger and more arbitrary than modern narrative conventions are. There’s things going on that, even when it deigns notice and help Our Heroes, doesn’t care about them, and could as easily have swatted them senseless. I guess that’s what makes it work; it feels like a lucky break while keeping danger nearby.

It’s another fight as the sea comes rampaging in. Witgar can’t beat the sea, the spear, and Valiant all at once and he plunges into the waters, taking the Black Stone with him. Is the Singing Sword, Flamberge, out of the comic for good?

Nope. A selkie snags the Black Stone, and the enchanted spear, and tosses both back to Valiant with a warning about tossing enchanted spears into the sea. Valiant and company travel back to where Sygbald vanished, and fall suspiciously fast asleep. When they wake, the Black Stone’s been torn from Valiant’s clutches, but the Singing Sword is right there in a stone ready for Our Hero to lift it easily.

Everything’s looking swell, right up to the big festival with Mary Worth bringing over her salmon squares and everyone agreeing to just not acknowledge Wilbur Weston. In the drunken revels Valiant gets into a rap battle with Gallchobar, one of his new Gaelic raider pals. This spins out into a challenge in “a raiders’ fire contest”, which looks to be like that battle between Robin Hood and Friar Tuck on the log over the river, except in this case the river is a fire. That’s how December is starting for Prince Valiant: with his son Arn rolling his eyes all the way to Flash Gordon.

Next Week!

Interplanetary adventures! A robot coming up short! A pair of unlikely heroes finding a crashed spaceship! It’s of course Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley next week, unless something goes wrong. See you then.

What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? Who is this Flamberge that’s been captured? January – March 2024


“Flamberge”, held captive by a tribe of cave dwellers in the current Prince Valiant story, is Prince Valiant’s named sword, the one that until this story I thought was just called the Singing Sword. But it’s a real class of cool-looking swords, based on named swords that appeared in various romances and epics and such.

With this, I hope to bring you up to late March 2024 in Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant. As ever, if you’re reading these scrolls in the future — say, after June 2024 — there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap at this link. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the first of my What’s Going On In … posts to cover entirely material revealed to us this calendar year.

Prince Valiant.

7 January – 24 March 2024.

Valiant, his son Arn, and their party were ashore, in a deserted fishing village, with Valiant’s Singing Sword getting all vibrate-y. Valiant follows a stag’s lead to a strange cave, where he finds his perception checks failing and a flock of small, shadowy creatures who grab the Singing Sword. Bronwyn says it’s the snake people. In any case, the shadowy figures leave a message on a rock. It says they have Flamberge and orders Valiant’s team to come to the high point tonight.

Baedwulf believes they’ve got a case of Tuatha here, creatures driven underworld by the Gaels at the dawn of time, and still seeking revenge. The Tuatha, though, say they were living peacefully until the humans violated their world. A mad Saxon attacked them, killing many Tuatha, and stealing their sacred Black Stone. So Valiant can see their side of things. Also Witgar rounded up the population of the fishing village and drowned them all. They claim the thief and war criminal was Witgar, a name Valiant recognizes but I don’t seem to have in my notes. Fortunately Witgar turns up soon enough; he’s the chief at Dyfflin, where they’d been heading before this abandoned village and all.

The leader of the Snake People continues his tragic tale: 'The Mad Saxon slaughtered many of my people to capture our sacred Black Stone, which holds the power to proclaim a new king. Then he returned to the place of the fishermen, who had lived for many years in peace with us. When they objected to his evil actions he rounded them up and took them away from the land, and had them all drowned before sailing north, with our Black Stone taken far from us. We called to our gods, and they sent a wind that delivered you and your charmed sword to us! Return the stone to us, o prince, and we shall return Flamberge to you. ... If you fail us, Flamberge shall be gifted to the mountain dwarves who forged her. Now, go to the place called Dyfflin and find the mad chieftain named Witgar!' Val gasps --- he knows that name!
Mark Schulz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant for the 18th of February, 2024. Between stealing the sacred Black Stone, and drowning a whole village, and I infer being responsible for sending just enough soldiers to Gwynedd to not lose a war but not enough to win it, I’m getting the vibe this Witgar is not a good person.

Witgar is all weird and paranoid about seeing Baedwulf again. The peace in Gwynedd that they’ve negotiated thanks to Valiant and Arn sounds to Witgar like enemies gathering against him. Also, maybe they heard about the drowned village or something. Our Heroes, plus Baedwulf’s fiancee Bronwyn, are treated to quite nice apartments as long as they don’t leave or anything so you know what’s up. But they notice the cat who’d stowed away on their boat is able to sneak through the walls. Turns out there’s passageways hidden behind the tapestries.

Valiant and Baedwulf follow the cat, and a tunnel, and find Witgar doing some weird mumbling incantation stuff with the Black Stone. Witgar notices them, and flees with the stone, sending a party of 1d4+2 guards after Our Heroes. Then Witgar goes to the women’s apartment, declaring that Bronwyn is going to marry him instead, on the grounds that Baedwulf and Valiant et al are traitors and going to be executed. Right after the ceremony. And that’s where we are now.

Next Week!

But enough of tales of old-timey folks and their old-fashioned ways. It’s on to Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley next week — if it still is Gasoline Alley by then! Confused? I’ll explain soon.

When Swords Dance And Porridge Explodes


Jerome Friedman’s The Battle Of The Frogs And Fairford’s Flies keeps being a source of just wonderful incidents and I had to share some more with you because you’ll just see at that. This one is drawn from the 1645 chapbook Strange And Fearful News From Plaisto In The Parish Of Westham, Plaisto being a totally real place and not the result of someone being challenged to say where it took place and bluffing, desperately, “Place … uh … to” and feeling bad for getting stuck with that answer. According to the Strange and Fearful News for one month Paul Fox, silk weaver, “a man of an honest life and conversation” suffered from a haunted house. I don’t know where his conversation enters into things.

The first problem was that a sword started dancing around the house. Fox handled by locking it up. I suppose if I saw a sword dancing around my house I’d try locking it out of the house altogether, but that strategy didn’t really work with a pretty determined mouse that kept getting into the kitchen last year. It didn’t work so well for Fox, though, because the sword came through the door and continued to dance.

The sword got joined by a cane, that hopped around the sword, and here I’m stumped. I can imagine putting an enchanted sword to some practical use, if it could refrain from dancing some. After all, 1645 was before documents had begun to protect themselves by warning not to fold, spindle, or mutilate them, so if you got, say, a phone bill you could chop it into tiny bits because it was obviously a scam, it being the mid-17th century and all. But a sword with a cane just seems one long dancing inanimate object too many to use. Maybe we aren’t getting the whole story. Maybe the sword, despite love of dance, was getting up in years and needed the cane for support. Or maybe the cane feared for its safety in the rough community of 1645 Plaisto.

But the sword and cane settled down — I bet they were friends and got into chatting about old times — and Fox seemed fine with all this until he started hearing a hollow voice banging on the door and demanding, “I must dwell here”. Told it could just go off and dwell somewhere else, it came back the next day and smashed his windows by hurling bricks, canes, oyster shells, pieces of bread, and “other things” at the house. I suspect the spirit didn’t quite know what it was doing. Breaking windows by using bricks is efficient enough, but, oyster shells? That’s a hard way to break a window, and pieces of bread? Was the spirit unable to find wads of kitten fur to throw instead? Or maybe bread meant something different back then, and throwing a “piece of bread” was slang for throwing a Roundhead or a Member of Parliament or something. Also, whose side was the dancing cane on?

Possibly the cane danced this one out, since a boulder weighing “half a hundred weight”, which if I know anything about English measures means it could weigh anything except fifty pounds, jumped out of the garden where it’d been content to all appearances for decades and tumbled up the stairs into the middle of the room. Fox had someone take it back out into the yard, but it just came right back up the stairs again. I assume the rock had just had enough with all the cane-dancing and bread-throwing and decided to pick a fight with scissors.

Fox stuck it out a while, suggesting you could just haunt a silk-weaver’s house for weeks before he’d get impatient with it. Or maybe he figured dancing swords were more interesting than the other pastimes of 1640s England, such as dying of plague or accusing people of being Anabaptists. But there’s limits to anyone’s patience, and his was reached sometime after a pot of porridge got splattered around the room and the spirits started pulling his family’s hair and knocking their heads. He eventually moved to a new house, where the spirit followed, and he moved back to the first place, figuring, I guess, why not?

By the time the pamphlet was written, Fox was still having trouble with house-haunting, but everyone was confident it wasn’t witchcraft. I don’t know what became of him or his house; maybe he came to appreciate having a bread-throwing ghost around. Hard to say.

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