EXTRACTS: Don Lawrence Art (illustrators special) © 2018 The Book Palace (144 PAGES in Full edition)

Matthews’ attempt harked back to a paper he had worked on twenty-five years earlier, Knockout , which mixed adventure and humour strips with text stories. A modern element to Ranger was photography and features, but everything else was rather old-fashioned: adaptations of the classics (Macbeth, Treasure Island), a story set in a boys’ boarding school and a western text serial all featuring in the launch issue. Where Eagle had Dan Dare, Matthews planned his own science fiction saga, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire’. Created by scriptwriter Mike Butterworth, the title was inspired by its author’s fascination with history; Butterworth fused science fiction with the scope of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to create the feudal societies found on the planet Elekton. Trigo, the head of a civilised but ever roving tribe, sets out to found a fabulous city which he has to defend against the technologically advanced, empire-building Lokans. The story of swords and spears against sleek jet fighters and hover tanks was unlike anything seen before in British comics and, when Ranger failed to find an audience, the Trigan Empire was quickly transferred to Look and Learn where the high concept of the story and the intelligent, exciting storylines kept the strip running for 17 years, only ending with the demise of Look and Learn in 1982. The strip remains one of the high points in British comic strip history and Lawrence’s two fully painted pages per week were unrivalled during his tenure between 1965 and 1976. Artistically the strip was based mostly on Roman and Greek architecture and clothing. “I thought of empires and thought of anachronisms and thought let’s have a Roman type costume,” Lawrence would later say. “It developed from the original idea as the years went on with the characters. They changed… It was what I loved doing and it was very exciting. “I thought all the stories were good. They were very well written. I tend to judge them by the artwork, because that’s where I’m involved. I look at them now and sometimes it’s quite pleasurable—I’m quite surprised at what I’d done because I’d forgotten—and other times I say, ‘My God, I was in a hurry when I did this page.’ But I quite enjoy looking at them.” D uring this period, Lawrence was also constantly on the lookout for other work. During the 1960s his family had grown to include five children as Ian and Karen were joined by Philippa Jane, Amanda Clare and Kai Alexander. “Don was always short of money—as every artist is—and we used to pay him as soon as we got the work, before we got the money from the publisher, which we didn’t have to do,” recalls Patrick Kelleher. Lawrence echoed that fact: “The agent paid on delivery—the other way is being paid on publication which was probably six to ten weeks later—and all artists are always broke!” “I didn’t like the pressure of deadlines,” Lawrence recalled. “Two pages a week in full colour is quite difficult year after year.” But to survive he had to produce more than that. In 1966 he drew the short-lived ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’ strip for the Daily Mail . His Gerry Anderson connection was cemented when he took over the artwork for ‘Fireball XL5’ on the back cover of TV 22 © Don Lawrence