Preface To Avalon: King Arthur & Me

(The cover of Camelot 3000 # 1 found here)

As a child, I loved fantasy & sci-fi more or less equally, though when it came to old stories of Britain, I was much more attached to Robin Hood than to King Arthur. It took the comic book above, Camelot 3000 by Mike W. Barr & Brian Bolland, to draw me into that legend. It was of course both fantasy & sci-fi - it took place in the year 3000 - but the story was great & Bolland's art remains magnificent. What really hooked me to the Arthurian legends was the essay Barr wrote in the back of the first issue about Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, which I checked out from the library very soon after I read that piece, &... Never finished. It was written in difficult old English & not all that gripping. I was just fourteen, I wasn't really going to suddenly go nuts for something written like the Canterbury Tales. I might have mentioned this to my tenth grade teacher, who might have suggested T.H. White's The Once & Future King to me. That was more my speed. I think I read that book twice in a row.

Golly I had so much time when I was young.

We did have movies we could turn to when we liked legends - sometimes old ones, like Errol Flynn in Robin Hood - but while there were lots of Arthur movies out there - I was too young to watch Excalibur but would see it later - I think my favorite Arthur movie of the ones I've seen remains Monty Python & The Holy Grail.

This website ranks the Arthurian movies worst to best. I am surprised I never saw The Sword In The Stone. But I guess by the time I was off to college I had consumed as much King Arthur as I wanted. Tho now looking at that list it appears I want more. Dang it.