With the occasional break, Lawrence drew the strip until 1976. Impressed, Matthews asked to meet the artist and Lawrence was invited to draw the strip. Don Lawrence had produced a story in colour for the 1964 edition of Lion Annual which led to a colour strip for Bible Story. It was Matthews who found an artist to provide the two colour pages each week. Butterworth, who had recently turned freelance, worked with Leonard Matthews-head of the juvenile publications department-to create a range of strips for the new paper. The story was written by Mike Butterworth, a thirteen-year veteran of comic scriptwriting and long-time editor at Fleetway Publications, the publishers of Ranger.
Ranger was absorbed into the educational magazine L ook and Learn after only 40 weeks, but the adventures of the Trigan Empire were to continue until 1982, a run of 17 years. One man, Richard Peter Haddon, spends seventy years on the task before he is finally able to translate the first of these records, the first book that related the founding of the Trigan Empire. The craft and its dead pilots are studied intensely, as are a collection of records written in a wholly alien language. A spacecraft of alien design crashes in the Florida Everglades… the inhabitants are humanoid but twice the height of the average human. On 18 September, in the debut issue of Ranger, readers were introduced to ‘The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire’ in one of the most bizarre openings of any comic strip. In 1965, one of the finest of all British comic strips began with a bang… or, rather, a crash.
Frank Bellamy's Complete Swift Stories (limited edition).Frank Bellamy's The Story of World War 1.Essential Cult Books, with Gina McKinnon.Gwyn Evans: The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet.Peter Jackson's London Is Stranger Than Fiction.The Men Behind the Flying Saucer Review.The story of Harry Bensley's "Walking Round the World" Hoax The Complete Eagles Over the Western Front.Hurricane and Champion: The Companion Papers to Valiant (new edition).