Karl the Viking Volume One: The Sword of Eingar

About E. George CowanTed Cowan

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 1999Before 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.Cowans 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.