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

Century 21 for seven months in 1967, a strip he grew to dislike intensely. “I hated doing that. You can’t get any animation or any expression on a puppet. Their mouth is either open or shut and that’s it. That was awful. I gave that up.” In 1969 he took on another job that he found almost as frustrating: “‘Tarzan’ I hated because of the animals,” he said of his time on ‘The Adventures of Tarzan’ in TV 21 and Joe 90 , which he drew on and off for a year. Over the years there were also occasional illustrations for annuals and adverts, the latter including six ‘Shreddieboy’ strips on the back of packets of Shreddies breakfast cereal and ads for a Corgi model based on the Moon Buggy from Diamonds Are Forever . Don’s best work outside of ‘Trigan Empire’ during this period was probably for Once Upon a Time , a nursery-age paper produced by Leonard Matthews’ for City Magazines in 1969. Apart from a couple of one-off features and covers, Lawrence’s chief contribution was to two text stories, ‘Pinocchio’ and ‘Jason and the Golden Fleece’, both of with were enhanced by the artist’s richly detailed, luminescent illustrations. In 1972, Lawrence found work at the other end of the market in Mayfair , where he drew the sexy, slapstick adventures of ‘Carrie’, who, like the Daily Mirror ’s Jane, seemed incapable of keeping her clothes in place for even two pages in the monthly men’s magazine. The choice of venue for ‘Carrie’ was something of a random selection: having decided that he was going to offer a strip to one or other of Britain’s adult magazines, Mayfair’ s office happened to be closest to the offices of Temple Art. In 1975, after over three years of finding different ways to defrock his heroine, Lawrence wanted to turn to strip into a rival to Harvey Kurtzman’s ‘Little Annie Fanny’ or Ron Embleton’s ‘Wicked Wanda’ and suggested that ‘Carrie’ should embark on a longer, more complex adventure. When his idea was turned down, Lawrence pulled the plug on the strip. A year earlier, Lawrence had produced his first strip directly for the Dutch market. The six-page story, ‘De zoon van de jager’ appeared in the ill- fated Baberiba , which folded after only one issue; however his new connection with the publisher led to Lawrence producing new covers for a number of reprint books, including episodes of the Dutch reprint 23 © Don Lawrence Collection