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

frame—that Lawrence drew in his nearly fifty year career. He painted in watered down gouache, mixing colours in a small plastic palette box, using bold strokes to wash in an undercoat. He then built upon that coat, altering the mix of colour as he layered the gouache in the same way that some artists would build up textures using watercolours. A single page could take four days to complete and Lawrence, concentrating for so long over these images, would often insert little in-jokes for himself and for the enjoyment of his readers: look out for characters that bear a resemblance to famous actors or politicians or to the artist himself; and keep your eye on walls as his initials might be found amongst the graffiti. Stripped of deadlines, Lawrence would almost certainly have never finished a page, adding tiny detail after tiny detail. It was only deadlines that forced him to stop work and hand over his boards. Patrick Kelleher, Lawrence’s agent, once said: “With Don you were always assured of high quality work when it came in. It was that ‘when’ that caused a little bit of a problem from time to time… “It wasn’t always an easy relationship because the sort of work Don does is such a high quality that it cannot be rushed. Therefore you come across this problem of deadlines, which Don was never happy with. Certainly on a weekly deadline it caused many problems which we had to try and overcome with contact with the editor, to keep the editor happy, whoever it was at that time.” Lawrence’s career could be roughly divided into two: the twenty-two years between 1954 and 1976 when he was working for British publishers, and the following twenty-two years until his semi-retirement, during which period he worked almost exclusively on ‘Storm’, originally for the Dutch weekly Eppo but in time seen elsewhere thanks to its wide syndication. The collected albums, which sold over three million copies, were translated into Malay, Finnish, Polish, Greek, Spanish, German, Serbo-Croat, Rumanian, Italian, Portuguese, Scandinavian, French and more. However, only a handful were translated into English before the appearance of the 12-volume Storm—The Collection in 2004-10. Lawrence was so highly regarded in the 7 © Marvel Characters, Inc.