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

Although semi-retired by the late 1990s, his artwork continued to be exhibited, at Lucca in 1997 and at the Gardner Arts Centre of the University of Sussex in 1999. He continued to visit Holland, supporting the release of his books at the annual Stripdagen convention in Haarlem. Fans queued for over an hour to offer their best wishes for Lawrence’s upcoming 75th birthday during his last appearance at a two day convention at Alphen aan den Rijn in October 2003. Lawrence, a heavy smoker, suffered from emphysema and was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia on Sunday; he died on Monday, December 29, 2003, surrounded by his family. Lawrence was divorced in 1978 and married Elisabeth Clunies-Ross in June 1979, who had a son from a previous marriage. His brother, sister and children also survived him. F or an artist so noted for his comic strips, Lawrence was not a regular reader of comics for fear that he would be too heavily influenced by them. He did like the work of some of his contemporaries, notably Ron Embleton, and a trip to Lucca in Italy introduced him to the work of a number of European artists. “It was staggering… it blew me away, that did. Moebius, Bilal and all those people. It was just another world, so much better than anything British.” Equally, for an artist so noted for realism, Lawrence never used photo reference if he could help it, preferring to let his imagination run wild. “I hate any kind of accuracy. I hate being tied down,” he said. Occasionally he was forced to, building an Airfix stage coach for reference when he produced ‘Wells Fargo’. The other major aspect of the strip also caused problems. “I couldn’t draw horses and after a long time I got together a cliché of a horse, of what I thought a horse looked like. Obviously it convinced a lot of people, but it was terribly distorted. It seemed to work for most people but it was completely wrong.” The Don Lawrence Fan Club was formed in 1984 nad began publishing Thunder at the end of that year. This led eventually to Don Lawrence The Collection , a series of 12 hardback books gathering some of Lawrence’s hard-to-get strips and illustrations published in 1989-99. Thunder was relaunched as Pandarve in 1990, became Don Lawrence Magazine in 1992 and was again relaunched as Pandarve in 1999. Between 2004 and 2010, DLC also published Storm–The Collection , a deluxe, 12-volume set translating the full story into English for the first time. 31 © Don Lawrence Collection