3 out of 5

If not for the sudden THE END on the last page of issue 4, Prince Valiant is, I reluctantly admit, the way to do crossovers.  Reluctant because I didn’t want this to be a crossover – which it is, with Dynamite’s other King re-imaginings (e.g. The Phantom, Jungle Jim, etc.), and following up (I think) on the King’s Watch series and some kind of cosmic world-ending something something event.  Whatever.  I hate crossovers and their forced conflicts.  Especially when Prince Valiant’s cheeky sword and sorcery mash-up was so much spirited fun in Cosby’s hands, with a fluid, simple art style from Ron Salas and an appealingly varied but grounded color palette from Luigi Anderson, I just didn’t want the other shoe to drop and turn this into a different story, that required reading other books and other writers.  But it turns out the crossover was happening the whole time – which is why it feels done right, Cosby wending in the right elements from the start so that the ride is smooth – only really giving away its hand as a piece of a larger pie on that last page.  And not so much like an “aw dang I can’t wait for more” last page, but more like a “remember all those plot lines we were developing?  Well they won’t be resolved here, suckas!  Peace XOXOX THE END” way.

Nate drops us in the past, a young, pre-awesome Valiant a battle-hungry upstart attacking all the wrong folk and spitting in the face of authority.  …Only this is just a tale being told by old man Valiant to Father Time in a mysterious cave, the scenes in which are always drawn in landscape format for some reason which is presumably not to distract the reader, which is sort of ends up doing.  Anyhow, maybe that’s not Father Time, and then Flash Gordon comes from another era with a bat and whisks Valiant away to the time of the dinosaurs so they can meet up with Mandrake and get a spell from Merlin to bring to a prisoner who’s in the process of being rescued by The Phantom…  See?  Crossover.  But, magically, Cosby always makes it feel like Valiant’s tale, with flashbacks to his past grounding us in the character’s history… even when he’s flying through space in issue 4.

It’s a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of build-up such that you’re wondering how it can be resolved by that last issue…  Which is why it’s not.  And this really does come as a last page Thump to the guts.  I can only hope / assume this continues elsewhere, and hopefully it will be scripted by Cosby (since I read the first issue or two of almost all the other King books and didn’t care), but billing this as a mini-series really doesn’t properly prepare the reader for that drop-off.