Comic Cuts

I've spent all day, on and off, working on the Trigan introductions. I finished typing up the text to the last two stories that I hadn't quite completed for volume 12 and then went back to the introduction of volume 1, which may sound a little strange but there's a good reason. The books were published out of order so that there was an opportunity to track down original art boards. When we started this project back in 2003, the most complete volume was chronologically volume 8, followed by volume 11, then 10, 9, 4, 7, 3, 2, 6, 5... and now we've reached volumes 1 and 12.

Ducking back and forth around the chronology has made writing the introductions an interesting experience. Since I now expect newcomers to the series to start with volume 1, I've got to presume that they know nothing written for later volumes, so I've gone back to square one to introduce the whole series.

Which has proven trickier than it sounds. After writing quite a few tens of thousands of words about The Trigan Empire over the last few years, it's almost impossible to find new ways of approaching the same subject, so I spent most of the morning writing openings, scrapping them, writing different versions, scrapping them, and, finally, coming up with something I liked... just before lunch, which brought everything to a grinding halt. This evening I've put together two articles, one about Don Lawrence and one about Mike Butterworth and now I'm going to leave it for a few hours. With any luck, the little grey cells will be working behind the scenes while I'm watching Poirot and I'll get back to the computer knowing how all the bits of articles can be pieced together. Or I may just have an early night and worry about it tomorrow.

One day it will be nice to revisit all that introductory material and put together a book about the series. One of the problems with the series is that the author, Mike Butterworth, invented things as needed, played around with geography and every second story seemed to introduce a new race that lived on the far edges of the Plain of Vorg. We've jumped through some hoops just trying to make the Trigan Empire work! I've certainly stretched my knowledge of astrophysics to breaking point with the latest volume and there's a whole chunk of text about binary systems that we won't have space for. So a book might be a possibility. Definitely something to think about.