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

could make something come to life from a blank piece of paper and I think that’s what hooked me on it. He wasn’t very good, but he was good enough… I thought it was magic.” Favourite subjects for Lawrence were Spitfires and Heinkels, which he had seen flying overhead during the Blitz. The nightly bombing raids by the Luftwaffe meant a disrupted education, the school eventually moving to Crowthorne in Berkshire. “I think because of the war and being evacuated, you tend to lose your relationship with your parents because you spend more time away from them than with them,” Lawrence later recalled. “In the end, school became more of a home than home itself. I came back during the holidays, obviously.” At school he received complimentary reports from his art teacher, Erik Lawrence’s two earliest stories featuring Marvelman (above) and a page of original artwork by Lawrence for ‘Marvelman and the Rival Inventors’, from the Marvelman Annual 1956 . Previous pages: The ‘Indian Rope Trick’ image was from Lawrence’s debut Marvelman strip, ‘Marvelman and the Indian Rope Trick’, Marvelman 36 (21 April 1954). The image of Storm, Ember and Nomad climbing Lawrence’s face first appeared as a poster accompanying a 1990 touring exhibition. 9 © Marvel Characters, Inc.