Before DC’s The Brave and the Bold became an audition title like Showcase, it focused on sword-and-shield fantasy.
The genre was popular during the 1950s in films like Knights of the Round Table (1953), The Black Knight (1954) and The Vikings (1958) and in TV series like The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-1960), The Adventures of William Tell (1958-59) and Ivanhoe (1958).
“(S)imultaneous with his work on DC’s war comics, Joe Kubert drew the swashbuckling feature Viking Prince, set circa 1,000 A.D., with a hero first written by Robert Kanigher and probably inspired in large part by Harold R. Foster’s Prince Valiant,” noted Roy Thomas.
“Prince Jon, a noble warrior suffering from amnesia, originally appeared in BB 1-5 and 7-24,” wrote Michael T. Gilbert. “His most unusual adventure may have been a unique two-part story pairing the Viking Prince and Sgt. Rock in Our Army at War 162-163 (Jan.-Feb. 1966). Rock discovered the Prince frozen in a glacier.”
This full-page house ad for BB 23 (April-May 1959) emphasized mysterious elements to hook the potential reader.
So why did Prince Jon fight to protect that carving in the Bob Haney story The Figurehead of the Burning Sea? Because the evil sorcerer Jarl Eric had imprisoned the spirit of the beautiful Asa inside it. The Viking Prince escaped with the figurehead as a volcano set the sea ablaze.
That particular brand of heroic fantasy would take a decade-long break from comic books as superheroes proliferated, returning with a vengeance in Conan the Barbarian 1 (Oct. 1970).
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