Prince Valiant may be a mere newspaper comic-strip character, but in his heyday, he commanded such popularity that the (fictional) birth of his first son, Arn, on Aug. 30, 1947, made the (real) birth-announcement columns in hundreds of papers across the country.

Prince Valiant, a Sunday strip launched in 1937 by the great Canadian-born illustrator Hal Foster (1892-1982), continues to have a fiercely loyal - if aging - following after nearly three-quarters of a century. But its future is less than certain given the economic woes and changing readership of newspapers.

The release Tuesday of Prince Valiant, Vol. 1: 1937-1938, the first in a new series of gorgeously printed, hardcover Valiant collections from Fantagraphics Books (www.fantagraphics.com), served as a bittersweet reminder of the century-long rise and eventual decline of a great American art form, the comic strip.

Valiant tells the ongoing story of a knight of the Round Table, from his childhood through his early adventures, his marriage, his family life, and his role as a high-ranking official at King Arthur's court.

Armed with the Singing Sword, twin to Arthur's Excalibur, Val defends the defenseless.

"At its height, in the 1950s, [the strip] was carried by 550 newspapers and had a fan base of over 25 million readers," said Foster's biographer Brian Kane, author of Hal Foster: Prince of Illustrators, Father of the Adventure Strip.

Times have changed. Today, "you have a generation that has grown up without newspapers," said Rick Norwood, publisher of Comics Revue magazine and a mathematics professor at East Tennessee State University. "None of my students reads the paper. . . . If they did, they would tremendously enjoy" Valiant.

One wonders if the name Prince Valiant means anything to Generations Y and Z beyond the name of the oddball haircut Jessica Alba sported earlier this year.

"Ultimately, [the strip] is doomed," Norwood said. "But ultimately, we are all doomed," he added, laughing.

Kane said Valiant already has survived longer than most other continuity strips - comics that have one continuous storyline from their inception. And, he said, its classic, realistic illustration style has all but disappeared.

"Comics originally were vehicles to sell the paper," he said. "If you didn't subscribe to a Hearst paper, you wouldn't get Prince Valiant." Today, editors treat them as liabilities, as extra features that eat up space and revenue dollars, Kane added.

The strip demands enough space to accommodate its sweep and detail, but to cut costs, many newspapers have reduced the size available from the full page of its prime to a half, quarter, or even smaller part of a page.

If the strip does die, it will still be remembered as one of the finest and most influential forms of graphic arts, and its creator will become part of art history, said Valiant's current illustrator, Gary Gianni, a Chicago-based painter who has produced the strip - with writing partner Mark Schultz - since 2004.

"Foster was one of the great - arguably the greatest - comic-strip artists of all time, and his work should be hanging in museums," said Gianni, 54. "The detail and good figure drawing and interesting compositions in Prince Valiant set the gold standard" for all comics art.

Harold "Hal" Rudolf Foster was born Aug. 18, 1892, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 1919, Foster moved to America to study at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. After a job in advertising, he won a commission to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan tales as an illustrated strip. His work on Tarzan so impressed newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst that Hearst gave Foster the rare chance to create an entirely new comic.

Norwood said that, as a teen, he had met Foster. "I was young and gushing. I told him, 'You are the greatest artist in comics,' " Norwood said. "He had a sly smile on his face. He said, 'There's more than one person in this room who is of the same opinion.' "

Donald Ault, founder of the University of Florida's Interdisciplinary Comics Studies program, said that, while many comic strips refer to current events, Foster stayed away from politics. "He wanted to evoke a timeless world open to all possibilities," Ault said.

But not even Foster could resist sending up the Germans during World War II, with a storyline that had Val fighting Huns.

And, boy, did it make waves: The strip got Hitler so angry that whenever Germany overran a country, he had Prince Valiant canceled in every newspaper.

In 1971, Foster handed off the strip's illustration to his protégé, painter and illustrator John Cullen Murphy. Foster continued to write it until 1979, when Murphy's son, Cullen Murphy, took over as Valiant's scrivener.