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.

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

London born Ken Bulmer was a prolific writer who made his mark in a number of genres and mediums. By the end of his career he had over 160 novels published alone. Writing for American science fiction magazines like Amazing Stories whilst in his teens, he contributed to the small British fan magazines of the 1940s, and had his work published alongside such luminaries as John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke. In the 1950s he worked for a small number of UK SF novel publishers and started to get some recognition which eventually led to him selling stories directly to Ace Books in New York. It was in the same decade that he started to submit scripts to Amalgamated Press and began his comics career. He wrote several of the War Picture Library stories as well as several serials for Lion and Valiant, including the famous Steel Claw for the latter.