THE RISE AND FALL OF THE TRIGAN EMPIRE: VOLUME ONE / WRITER: MIKE BUTTERWORTH / ART: DON LAWRENCE / PUBLISHER: REBELLION / RELEASE DATE: MARCH 19TH
Incredibly, The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire ran from 1965 (initially in the short-lived Ranger UK magazine before moving to Look and Learn in 1966) until 1982, but it’s quite likely that many of those who remember it today do so because of one of the gorgeous hardback treasury edition collections released in the 1970s even as the story was still being told. Excitingly, Rebellion is now repackaging the entire saga – and what a saga! – across four full-colour volumes so fans can finally revel in the whole story perhaps for the very first time. Unlike many cultural memories resurrected in the 21st century, the story of The Trigan Empire is as gripping and enthralling as it was when it first appeared. We might smile at the simplicity of its storylines and scoff at its lack of equality and diversity (there are perhaps two speaking female characters across the whole of this first volume), but we can still marvel at the extraordinary visual flair and detail of Don Lawrence’s stunning artwork and the wonderful world-building demonstrated by Mike Butterworth’s exciting scripts.
The story begins when an unfortunate-looking space vessel crash-lands in a swamp on Earth. Inside are a trio of unusually tall dead humanoids in spacesuits, and what is clearly an archive history of the species written in an indecipherable language. Scientist Peter Haddon devotes his life to a translating the volumes and eventually, as an old man, he cracks the code and the story of the Trigan Empire begins to unravel. So begins the history of the Planet Elekton and its five continents and, specifically, the continent of Vorg where Trigo, the leader of the nomadic Vorgs, dreams of building a mighty city across five hills, a city that will last for ten thousand years and give his people stability and security. But their warlike neighbours in Loka have dreams of dominion across the whole planet and their leader King Zorth launches a brutal attack upon the Vorgs with his fleet of crescent-shaped atmosphere craft. In time the Lokans are thwarted and Trigo builds his great city but the Trigan Empire comes under repeated attack from those who regard it enviously and plot to bring down Trigo and destroy the new Empire.
The Trigan Empire saga is heavily influenced by classic Greek and Roman Culture, the Trigan civilians wearing togas and the military in heavy armour and the city itself is clearly based on ancient Rome with its pillars and colonnades and extravagant architecture. The stories collected here are fairly basic tales of good versus of evil, oppressive conquerors cut down to size by square-jawed, smooth-skinned heroes and they’re charming in their naïvety. But they are brought to life by Don Lawrence’s breath-taking fully-painted artwork, which lifts the stories and the characters off the page with stunning vivacity and a clarity and scale that’s almost cinematic. Battle scenes are extraordinarily detailed, aerial dogfights thrillingly depicted, strange alien creatures wonderfully designed – especially the creepy alien space-beetles that lurch across the planet exerting a strange and baleful mental influence upon all those who stand in their way. The characters may be one-dimensional and the occasional story – Crash in the Jungle and The Legend of Hellas – little more than simple ‘capture and rescue’ adventures, but the combination of Butterworth’s direct writing and Lawrence’s beautiful art creates a world that’s genuinely fully immersive and classic adventure stories that can’t help but captivate even the most jaded and hardened comics aficionado. Wonderful stuff and we can’t wait to feast on the rest of this magnificent, towering British comics series.
