Storm

When Don Lawrence left The Trigan Empire in 1976, after IPC refused to raise his page rate or give him any share of the money from the strip's many foreign reprints, he took his extraordinary painting skills to the Netherlands, where he created Storm. An astronaut is thrown into a far future in which the oceans have gone and the Earth is a wilderness of tyrants and monsters. He teams up with a red-haired woman called Ember (and, later, a hairless, red-skinned strongman called Nomad), and together they fight their way across the world.

It was a huge hit in the Netherlands, where Lawrence became something of a national treasure, and less known in his native Britain than it should be. The art is the draw: Lawrence painted every panel, and at its best Storm looks like a series of Roger Dean album covers that have learnt to move.