Deep in the Trigan Empire

While Don Lawrence's art in the Trigan Empire comics is never less than absolutely rock solid and often breathtaking, the comics are a bit stodgy, full of cliche, and an aggressive ode to colonization. There's no characterisation to speak of, and the main protagonists never seem to suffer any regret or trauma.

But they fucking move when read in one go, man. They've been collected by Rebellion and inhaling each of the 300-page books is a jolt. The entire empire is constantly under threat from aliens and old enemies and the entire fucking universe. The main characters are sold into slavery, escape, and are imprisoned again and again. They are constantly having their personalities wiped after eating the wrong thing ,and endless waves of evil foreign types are falling from the skies. They have to overturn entire regimes multiple times, just  so they can be back home in time for tea

The second volume starts with triplets being born, which fucks up the succession plans, so the emperor, the hero of the whole damn thing, selects one at random and sends the other two out into the world to be raised as orphans. But the one he keeps gets his mind mutated into evil by an alien dude form another galaxy who radiates malevolence, and then the other two come back, and one of them takes over as emperor for two minutes before getting murdered and then the evil one blows himself up and the one that is left rocks off to be king of some other land, so he can train up to be emperor.

That's one story. It's fucking rad. I can't wait to get cracking on volume three.