The comic book Caesar’s Conquests from the series Classics Illustrated has been almost entirely copied from various drawings from the comic series Prince Valiant – without mentioning the source. To be precise, artist Joe Orlando drew at least 150 of the 186 images of the comic book from various Prince Valiant comic strips by master artist Hal Foster (1892-1982) for his Caesar comic.
Lucas Smeets from Venlo, himself a cartoonist, discovered this plagiarism after years of comparing the images of the Caesar comic from 1956 with the Prince Valiant comics from the period 1937 to 1955. Smeets has now published his discovery in an English-language book Prince Valiant meets Julius Caesaran edition of Piet Schreuders’ magazine Furore.
All plagiarism examples are depicted in the book. There is always a complete Caesar comic album page in the middle of the book page. To the left and right of this are the sources: the original drawings from Prince Valiant comics copied in the Caesar comic, with episode number and year.
“That must have been quite a job,” Smeets writes in the introduction, finding all those pictures from Prince Valiant, copying them and adjusting them. Because the adventures of Prince Valiant, as the comic is called in the Dutch translation, is set in the Middle Ages, at the court of the legendary British King Arthur. This means that the helmets and armor of the Vikings, Saxons and Celts against whom Prince Valiant fought must always be changed to those of Romans and Gauls. Because Caesar’s Victories like the Dutch one Classics Illustratedversion is the stripped version of the classic book that the Roman general Julius Caesar himself wrote about his campaigns in Gaul, around 50 BC: Commentarii de bello Gallico. That book was pure “propaganda” for the “genocide” that Caesar committed, according to the British historian Mary Beard in the BBC documentary Julius Caesar Revealed from 2018.
It often happens that cartoonists borrow from other cartoonists. But you rarely hear that practically all the comic images in a comic book have been stolen from another artist. “Shameless,” Smeets calls this scale of plagiarism by cartoonist Joe Orlando (1927-1998). But, he adds, Orlando probably only put the drawings in ink, and another, unknown artist drew all those Prince Valiant copies in pencil.
It was already known that Prince Valiant comics were frequently stolen by cartoonists. Dutch and Flemish cartoonists “borrowed” drawings from Prince Valiant, wrote Rob Møhlmann in 1982 Prince Valiants Black Book on plagiarism. And in a book about the American series Classics Illustrated, one picture is mentioned that for Caesar’s Conquest from Prince Valiant was acquired.
Lucas Smeets recognized more when he bought the comic album in 2013. “When I see what silly pictures he has traced, I cannot imagine that he drew the rest himself,” he wrote in the magazine in 2021 Furore in which he published his first crop of Valiant plagiarism in Caesars Conquest. He got the hang of it and continued to look for plagiarism, with this book, Prince Valiant meets Julius Caesar, as result. Of 35 of the 186 comic pictures in Caesar’s Conquests Smeets has not yet been able to identify the source. He calls on readers to help look for sources – because he suspects, as mentioned, that all pictures in the comic have been copied.