Trigan Empire, The

The Trigan Empire is set on the world of Elekton, which orbits the star of Yarna.

Elekton is home to diverse cultures, all modelled to some degree on ancient cultures. Elekton is also home to some fearsome creatures.

The Trigan Empire was a comic strip which first started in the magazine Ranger, then joined with the popular weekly educational magazine Look & Learn. Don Lawrence, when he found out how popular his works were tried to negotiate new royalties but failed. He later left for Holland and found success there. Presumably he held the rights to the Trigan Empire, except in the UK at that time as he managed to get them reprinted in the Netherlands and found more fans there.

The opening sequence of events shows an interplanetary spacecraft, seemingly out of control, with a dead crew inside. The strip says that they are the last of the Trigans, once the pride of the planet Elekton. The ship crashlands in the swamplands of Florida and is salvaged. The Trigans look similiar to humans though they seem to be far taller (A subtle hint of this is given in the university scene where it suggests that the Trigans were about 12 feet tall). Despite all the research, no sense can be made of the alien language that is in the books carried onboard the spacecraft. A young student devotes his life to decoding the books and eventually manages to decipher the language. It is through his thoughts the first few stories are told.

The Trigan Empire is a world of contrasts. The lead character, Trigo is the head and founder of an empire that bears some resemblance in structure and appearance to Ancient Rome, yet there are also supersonic atmosphere craft, energy weapons and other technologies more familiar to science fiction. The technologies used seem to hark back to the early Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers era, with some distinctly retro looking craft. Considering the strip started in the 1960's, this is not surprising.

Mike Butterworth wrote the vast bulk of the various stories and Don Lawrence was the artist for most of the run of the Trigan Empire. Other artists included Oliver Frey, Gerry Wood, Philip Corke, Ramon Sola and Rom Embleton.

Don Lawrence died in late 2004 and his works are now being reprinted.

Record 504 - universe - Last update 28 Mar 2007, 23:06:36

Entry written by: Jadefalcon

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