Britain
Don Lawrence
Don Lawrence · 1928–2003
- Classification
- Artist. British. The painter of empires, whose best work was published in Dutch.
- Habitat
- Mick Anglo's Marvelman (1950s), Ranger and Look and Learn (1965–1976), then Eppo in the Netherlands (1977 onwards)
- Distinguishing marks
- Fully painted panels, gleaming armour, beautiful people in slightly impractical costumes, and flying machines that look like they were designed by a classical architect
- Often seen with
- Mike Butterworth, who wrote The Trigan Empire; Saul Dunn and Martin Lodewijk, who wrote Storm
- Conservation status
- Stable. Rebellion keeps The Trigan Empire in print; Storm is available through the Don Lawrence Collection.
Field-guide card
Lawrence started out in the 1950s working for Mick Anglo's studio on Marvelman, the British stand-in for Captain Marvel. In 1965 he began The Trigan Empire, a science-fiction retelling of the rise and fall of Rome written by Mike Butterworth, and painted it with a richness that made it the most beautiful strip in British comics. When IPC refused to raise his page rate or share the income from foreign reprints, he left, and took his talents to the Netherlands, where he created Storm and became something of a national treasure.
You've seen his work in any British boy's weekly of the 1960s and 1970s, or on the shelves of Dutch bookshops, where Storm is still in print. His early Marvelman strips are the ancestor of Alan Moore's revival.
The gateway drug is The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, where his painting was at its most gorgeous. The deep end is Storm, which is closer to his personal vision and nearly thirty years in the making. The curio is his 1950s Marvelman, a very long way from the Alan Moore version.
The Crowsnest verdict: the finest painter ever to work in British comics, whose own country let him get away.