EXTRACTS: The Art of the Trigan Empire © 2013 Book Palace (76 PAGES in Full edition)

the art of the trigan empire 5 and ‘bodice-rippers’ under various pseudonyms), he left just as science fiction was to receive a boost from the cinema with the arrival of Star Wars . Picking up the reins of the strip was a new creative team. For the last fifty-two months of its run, bar occasional reprints, the strip was written by Ken Roscoe and painted by Gerry Wood, who expanded on the groundwork laid by Mike Butterworth by taking the plots off-Elekton as space travel and the beginnings of a more galactic empire began to develop in the storylines. The strip had, years before, abandoned the idea of it being translated from historical records recovered from a crashed ‘cosmo craft’ and the title had shrunk to ‘The Trigan Empire’ in 1967 and expanded again, to ‘More Adventures of the Trigan Empire’, in 1974. We readers never would see the fall of the empire. Look and Learn came to an end with its 1,049th issue on 17 April 1982. The latest story, which saw the empire once again on the brink of war with one of its neighbours, came to a close with Janno, Trigo’s nephew, helping to save the day – as he had many dozens of times over the past 17 years. A note appended to the story simply announced that “…at this point the annals of the Trigan Empire came to an end.” ‘The Trigan Empire’ remains one of the most popular comic strips ever to appear in the UK. Its appearance in Look and Learn , purchased by parents with ambitions for their children rather than out of the pocket money of the intended audience, meant that it was one of the most widely seen of all picture strips; Look and Learn could be found in many schools and waiting rooms; being an educational magazine, copies were often kept, sometimes in the binders offered by the publisher, for years. The occasional reprint – by Fleetway in 1973, Hamlyn in 1978 and Hawk Books in 1989 – has kept the story alive for a newer generation as has the 48 issue series of the best of Look and Learn which commenced in January 2007. Abroad, most notably in Holland, it is still possible to buy the complete saga in a number of albums and an ambitious project to release the complete Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence era stories as a set of twelve deluxe volumes, begun in 2004, should see completion in 2008. That the strip was – and remains – incredibly popular is beyond doubt. Why it proved so popular is more difficult to pin down. The stories were filled with action and colour and, for the most part, incredibly well drawn and could have attracted an audience for that reason alone. Mike Butterworth’s stories were exciting and drew their inspiration from stories and novels that had thrilled young readers for centuries – from the epics of legend to more modern adventure tales by the likes of H. Rider Haggard and H. G. Wells. To these archetypal stories – of invisibility, alien invasion, impending war and epic journeys – Butterworth added a cast of heroic characters cut from the same cloth as a Sinbad or a knight of King Arthur. Their motives were always unquestionable and for the betterment of the empire and Trigankind. The planet Elekton could be the background for any kind of story: a swashbuckling historical, frontier fiction, a tale torn from the headlines or a journey straight out of Greek myth. The fusion of science fiction and Roman and Greek legend struck a powerful chord with readers. The twin suns of Elekton looked down on a land fit for heroes and the Trigan Empire, by the quirk of ending suddenly, was destined never to fall. Twenty-five years after its demise, it remains as magnificent and glorious as ever, one of the finest stories ever told. Steve Holland , April 2008