THE TRIGAN EMPIRE

My introduction to the legendary Sir Don Lawrence's astonishing 'The Trigan Empire' collected edition.

Don and myself, around 2000, when I was working with him on the last ten pages of the final ‘Storm’ book.

It would have been around 1976 or ‘77, I was 8 or 9 years old. Park Farm is a small shopping centre in the 60’s-built suburb of the city of Derby called Allestree. My parents would walk my sister and I through it on our way to school, and we would pass the small library by the main road, that still exists as part of that concrete complex. After school, sometimes, we would be deposited in there so important grown-up tasks, involving plastic bags and food, could be completed un-encumbered. 

In an open space near the window at the front, as I recall it, there was a low table, on which sat a collection of the largely forgotten children’s weekly ‘Look and Learn’ magazine from Fleetway. It was a wholesome publication full of informative illustrated articles on... well, it could have been anything! I barely recall them. But there’s a reason for that, and it’s the reason I became obsessed with finding every copy they had. The magazine featured a double page spread in full, hand-painted colour, called ‘The Trigan Empire’, and it was the most astonishing art I had ever seen.

If comics are modern mythology, that was when I became an archeologist. The picture was incomplete. I did not know, then, who the artist was. I did not have anything near a complete picture as to what this ‘Empire’ was. There was a leader called Trigo, that much was certain. The clothes they all wore seemed largely to be Romanesque, and classical, but this was not our world. There were people with blue skin, and creatures and technology I did not recognize. I did my best to try and put the collection they had in order, and to make sense of it, but in those half-hour windows of time my efforts were futile. There were, I noticed, other artists that drew the story too, but one stood out for me. That was the work that resonated, that utterly captivated me.

I could not have known it was the beginning of a relationship – at first with the art, and later with the man – that would eventually profoundly shape my career and the rest of my life.

Trigan Empire Art by Sir Don Lawrence

Not long after that we moved, and the library was no longer available to me, but somehow I managed to acquire a few copies of a short-lived, glossy comic called ‘Vulcan’, which had been cancelled in 1976 after only a year. It, too, contained stories from ‘The Trigan Empire’, and featured one involving a furry giant on the nearby moon eating the protagonists. The jagged teeth outlined against a sky as the heroes were swallowed remains etched in my memory, but it would be a few more years before I would discover what befell them. Regardless, I would copy in pencil the faces of Janno, Keren and Trigo. Whilst still only meager pickings I knew I was looking at something extraordinary – an elevation of the medium. This was art.

At school my own art was marking me out, and eventually it led to a scholarship at a boarding school in Eastbourne called St. Andrew’s – the first scholarship of its kind. Comics were not allowed there, but my parents were adamant. I wanted to draw comics, and so should be allowed to read them. The rules, necessarily, were relaxed, and eventually changed. A small, but important contribution to that culture!

(It’s astonishing to me now that there prevailed a very real prejudice against the medium, echoes of which persist in a form of snobbery. Comics, as with all mediums, can be sublime and enlightening. I liken the missing of the experience of comics to living in a world without film, or books, or music. But I digress!)

While I was away at school my parents fell on harder times, moving to the High Peak on the borders of Derbyshire and Cheshire. It was on one of my holidays at home that I stumbled across the huge Hamlin collection of ‘The Trigan Empire’ in WHSmith’s in Stockport. It was like a lightening strike! I would often spend an hour or more in bookshops looking for obscure illustrated titles that, it seemed, nobody else wanted. I was, I now realize, discovering and becoming part of a counter-culture of keen enthusiasts, but back then it was an entirely solo pursuit.

Don’s cover to the collected edition from Rebellion.

I realized immediately that I could finally find out – at last! - who these people were, and what their history was. I felt like I was Peter Richard Haddon, the man at the beginning of the story, who labored to translate ‘The Rise and Fall of The Trigan Empire’ – those enigmatic tomes discovered with the twelve-feet-tall frozen and preserved bodies of the alien astronauts in the crashed ship. I was elated, and begged my mum to buy the book for me – a big ask, because it wasn’t cheap! Fortune was kind, though, and it being the last copy we got it for a song and a prayer.

Don Lawrence and Mike Butterworth (there were other creators, but for me at least the book belongs to them) created a masterpiece together. Mike wrote a vast, hokey and imaginative adventure splicing a multitude of cultures together and adding new and alien ones to the mix. But Don Lawrence is the towering genius here. His contribution is so committed to excellence, and realizing the story’s vision in a way both believable and cinematic. Don never cuts corners, and the quality never drops. At the time he was painting in inks, and you can see the influence of ‘Dan Dare’ artist Frank Hampson and more so ‘Heros the Spartan’ artist Frank Bellamy. But Don drops the underlying black and white base art, taking it to an entirely painted finish, more closely associated with straight-up illustration work. It has gravity, it has atmosphere, and it breathes. The same story, in less talented hands, could have seemed preposterous and utterly unbelievable. Don’s contribution made it mesmeric and absorbing. Slight characterizations become rich. The superficial becomes seminal. We end up believing in characters that somehow pull themselves out of a nomadic and primitive existence, build a city on five peaks that rivals Rome in scale and architectural achievement, and construct rockets that take them into space – all in little more than a decade, and yet we buy it! And we buy it solely because of Don’s incredible art.

In time I would go on to meet my hero, Don Lawrence, and to work with him and grow to love him. I would become dear friends with his other apprentice Chris Weston, and amazing artist in his own right. Don’s work would challenge and inspire me throughout the decades to come, and still does to this day. He will forever be standing behind me, casting a wise and critical eye over my efforts, questioning my choices, and pushing me always to be committed, to strive harder, and to do my best to respect and elevate every job I ever do. But that’s another story.

For now, enjoy this book. Tell your friends about it. Buy a copy for them, and insist they do the same for their friends. ‘The Trigan Empire’ should be on the bookshelves of every person who ever loved adventure stories, and should be remembered as the seminal and legendary work it truly is.

Liam Sharp June 7^th 2019.

My variant cover for ‘The Trigan Empire’ volume One collection.