Prince Valiant (2009)

Hal Foster's Arthurian saga premiered on February 13, 1937, and it reads like an illustrated history book that happens to move. There are no speech balloons: narration and dialogue sit in short captions near the panel edges, which leaves every image free for castles, longships, crowded battles and forests drawn with a draftsman's patience. Foster plotted, wrote and drew it himself for decades, and his anatomy and horses set a standard later adventure artists measured themselves against. Fantagraphics' restored volumes, starting with 1937 to 1938, are the edition to look for. The prose is formal and the early pages take time to find their pace, so treat it as a book to dip into a Sunday at a time.