Karl the Viking Volume One: The Sword of Eingar

Don Lawrence's first masterpiece, from the artist of The Rise and Fall of The Trigan Empire comes the epic historical fantasy of Karl the Viking!

"Lawrence [is] celebrated for his richly coloured, highly detailed visions of fantastic worlds." - The New York Times

Originally serialised in Lion, Karl the Viking is a sweeping historical fantasy story of an orphaned Saxon boy, adopted and raised by the viking Eingar after his raid on Britain. Upon coming of age Karl succeeds Eingar and leads his tribe into battle in Britain against wild tribes of Picts, and re-connects with his old Saxon family, gaining an ally in his cousin Godwulf, and making an enemy of the Earl of Eastumbria.

These fast-paced stories were drawn by Don Lawrence shortly before he revolutionised painted comic art with The Trigan Empire, when he was already a master of pen and ink, and his Karl the Viking series was the pinnacle of black and white comic art.


About the Author
Don Lawrence was born in 1928, and worked for Mick Anglo on the Marvelman comic produced for Amalgamated Press, and then Billy the Kid in the comic Sun. When Sun was absorbed into Lion he moved on to illustrating Olac the Gladiator, Karl the Viking and Maroc the Mighty. In 1965 he teamed with Mike Butterworth to create The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire for Ranger magazine, and continued to paint the comic through its transition into Look and Learn through to 1976. During this period he also worked on Fireball XL5 and The Adventures of Tarzan comic strips for TV Century 21. After leaving The Trigan Empire he worked with a Dutch publisher to create Storm, a post-apocalypse sci-fi series, which he would draw through to his retirement in 1999

Before entering the comic industry Ted Cowan worked as a lab assistant at Shell-Mex then enlisted into the RAF as WWII broke out. Forced to re-enlist with the army after a crash, he became a dispatch rider, but another accident saw an end to his career in the services.
After picking up a comic and being unimpressed by the writing inside, Cowan wrote to Stan Boddington, then editor of Champion. Boddington gave him a chance and Cowan started on Ginger Nutt - a successful strip about a young Australian boy, which ran for almost seven years.
Cowan's next strip - The Jungle Robot - appeared in the first issue of Lion. Many adventures featuring Robot Archie were to follow. While working for Lion, Cowan scripted many popular strips including Paddy Payne, Adam Eterno and of course The Spider which he co-created and wrote the first two complete stories for.