The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire – Mike Butterworth and Don Lawrence

I am reviewing this for one reason and one reason alone. Because life is hard sometimes, and I don’t always get as much reading time as I would like. So when my brain was cooked by some 12 hour work days, instead of rotting my brain watching YouTube videos, I would begin and end my work days reading this (as well as some other graphic novels). In other words: “This review is brought to you by – my abusive boss!”

Well, it was also brought to you by the fact I recognized the title from Jeroen’s blog, I didn’t want to read Moebius like everyone else on the Earth currently seems to be doing, and the serendipity of finding it pretty cheap in a used book store. I hadn’t actually read Jeroen’s review (or hadn’t remembered it that well), and that was my downfall. Now that I have read it, part of me feels like I should just put another link to his post in a massive font and call it a review. He sums up this same issues I had with this pretty well. But let me try to put this in my own words.

As far as plot goes: a UFO crashes to earth and humanity finds some alien history books. That frames the story that is to later come, but I missed the part of it where this framing device is meant to excuse the outlandishness of the story within. The rest of the plot is rather off of its medication. It’s opening feels a bit like ‘What if Conan the barbarian, but there is an evil empire with airplanes and guns?’ I felt as if the writers just wanted to write some pulpy stories and then cram it into whatever the hell genre later. The stories really only make sense if you are reading it in the coffee deprived early hours of the morning, which I often did. That gave me a slight bit of forgiveness, but I really got the impression that the creator’s of this work had deadlines, and their attitude towards those deadlines was ‘let’s just do whatever, no one is taking this shit seriously anyway’.

You have to really get past all of that to enjoy this. And that is only the surface of the issues. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that each of these stories is the same. But if each story is a cousin to the next, there is some Hapsburg level inbreeding between them. And the repetition isn’t just at the plot level – it’s also at the sentence level. Count how many time someone is accused of taking ‘leave of their senses’. It got pretty bad after a while.

Should you read this? Maybe not. It is an interesting relic of a past time when genre fiction wasn’t taken all that seriously. Those were sad times.