

In many ways, the serial became a perfect reflection of the contents of the educational pamphlet enclosing it. One imagines that this mishmash of historical themes was created at least in part to fulfill an educational mission, to stimulate the curiosity of young children in the direction of the progress of European man. The aircraft themselves would vary from vague facsimiles of Harrier jump jets (the British fighter elite of the day) to World War 2 heavy bombers fitted with jet engines-all this with little concern for the aerodynamic stability of this confluence of design. The Trigans are descended from the Vorgs, a nomadic race compelled to choose the ways of civilization due to the encroachment of their perennial enemies, the Lokans.Įlekton was a world of wayward scientific evolution where individuals wore the armor and togas of the Roman empire while piloting modern day battleships, fighter jets, and rockets.

From the documents a history of the world of Elekton emerges and the history of the rise and fall of the Trigan Empire. Here are the initial stirrings of The Trigan Empire as related on the second and third pages of its opening story (from the pages of Ranger magazine, its initial home).Ī cosmo-craft crash lands in Florida and the documents retrieved from it are translated after decades of research.
#Trigan panini series#
For these children, The Trigan Empire became an education in what comic books could look like, never once realizing that Lawrence’s work on the series was in fact a high point in British comic art, one which has been rarely equaled. There were other artists who followed in Lawrence’s wake once he broke with IPC (the magazine distributors) over pay but he was the good Trigan artist just as Barks was the good duck artist. However, there is no doubting that Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence’s The Trigan Empire was the king of the heap-the solitary reason why kids forced their parents to buy Look and Learn week in week out. I distinctly remember that the stories from various ballets (like Giselle and Petrushka) were presented in the form of comics for example. There were other comics in Look and Learn of course. It was the story of something a lot like an SF Roman Empire on a distant planet, and was gorgeous.” It was called The Trigan Empire - two comics pages a week, in the otherwise comicsless and dryasdust children’s magazine “Look And Learn”, which even schools who banned comics allowed. “When I was a boy, Don painted a comic I loved. Neil Gaiman had this to say about the comic some ten years back: The Wikipedia page for Don Lawrence, the strip’s most revered artist, suggests that he was an influence on the likes of Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons, and Chris Weston. No one outside the British Commonwealth is likely to have heard of The Trigan Empire. In its prime, it serialized the single most popular feature in the entire magazine- The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire. In its dying days, it hosted Tony Weare’s comic Rookwood of which I remember very little.

The home of cutaway technical drawings of everything from hydroelectric dams to airplanes the repository of one page synopses of the venerable classics of literature, opera, and ballet and the sanctum of illustrated lessons in history and geography. The Discovery Channel before people had even thought of the Discovery Channel.
