Tales of the Trigan Empire
In one of his recent journal entries, Neil Gaiman mentioned the Quotable Neil blog, wherein selected quotes from his journal are collected by subject and reposted. And in an entry entitled Memorial Day, compiling the entries where he records the passing of various people who were important to him, either for their work or in person, he recorded the death of artist Don Lawrence:
When I was a boy, Don painted a comic I loved. It was called The Trigan Empire -- two comics pages a week, in the otherwise comicsless and dryasdust children's magazine "Look And Learn", which even schools who banned comics allowed. It was the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet, and was gorgeous. (And has, I've just discovered, its own web page at Trigan.com.) The Trigan Empire was the most popular thing in Look and Learn, and when, after a decade, Don asked if he could have a royalty, he was simply sacked by IPC. So he went on to do "Storm", his own comic.
When I was young, possibly not yet into double figures, my parents brought home a handful of copies of "Look and Learn", so I saw a few parts of one storyline and, like Neil, loved it and longed to read the whole story. The success of the rest of the magazine may be judged by the fact that I couldn't even remember its title until I read the above. A few years ago it sprung to mind unbidden and I did a websearch for it but found nothing. And now here it is. The passage of time shows it up as the pulp SF it always was; the prose is purple and so is the dialogue. Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to reading through it and discovering the full story around the segments I read all those years ago.
When I was a boy, Don painted a comic I loved. It was called The Trigan Empire -- two comics pages a week, in the otherwise comicsless and dryasdust children's magazine "Look And Learn", which even schools who banned comics allowed. It was the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet, and was gorgeous. (And has, I've just discovered, its own web page at Trigan.com.) The Trigan Empire was the most popular thing in Look and Learn, and when, after a decade, Don asked if he could have a royalty, he was simply sacked by IPC. So he went on to do "Storm", his own comic.
When I was young, possibly not yet into double figures, my parents brought home a handful of copies of "Look and Learn", so I saw a few parts of one storyline and, like Neil, loved it and longed to read the whole story. The success of the rest of the magazine may be judged by the fact that I couldn't even remember its title until I read the above. A few years ago it sprung to mind unbidden and I did a websearch for it but found nothing. And now here it is. The passage of time shows it up as the pulp SF it always was; the prose is purple and so is the dialogue. Nonetheless, I'm looking forward to reading through it and discovering the full story around the segments I read all those years ago.