Don Lawrence

The artist Don Lawrence, who has died aged 75, toiled for more than two decades in anonymity - and for meagre payment - in British adventure comics, most famously painting two colour pages each week of The Rise And Fall Of The Trigan Empire from 1965 to 1976. But he found recognition and reward in Europe, illustrating the 23 albums of the science-fiction series Storm, which has sold more than 2m copies worldwide, most recently in translation in Poland and Indonesia.

Born in East Sheen, London, the youngest of three children, Lawrence went to St Paul's school, Hammersmith, where he took refuge from academic studies by immersing himself in drawing. Evacuated during the war, he completed his schooling in Crawthorn, Berkshire. In 1949, after two years' army service, he studied art for four years at the Borough Polytechnic, where he much preferred figurative art to the vogue for abstract expressionism.

Comics had not occurred to him as a career path until a visiting lecturer spurred him to try breaking into the field. Leading publishers Amalgamated Press rejected his samples in 1954, but when Lawrence approached entrepreneur Mick Anglo's Gower Studios, he was hired on the spot to join a band of freelancers supplying publishers with cheap, ready packages of comic-book stories.

An Anglo client, L Miller & Son, enjoyed healthy sales with their black-and-white reprints of New York publisher Fawcett's superheroes Captain Marvel, Captain Marvel Junior and The Marvel Family. (These American comic books were banned as imports to help Britain's postwar recovery.)

In 1953, when DC Comics finally won a protracted lawsuit claiming plagiarism of Superman, Fawcett had no choice but to cancel the titles. Rather than drop their British editions, Miller engaged Anglo the following year to create virtual lookalikes, and Lawrence contributed greatly to the success of Marvelman, Young Marvelman and The Marvelman Family, arguably the first British superheroes.

Paid only £1 per completed page, Lawrence quickly learned to simplify his rendering to achieve the cartoon look of Marvelman, and could turn out up to 10 pages a week. In a less minimalist style, he also drew cowboys Daniel Boone, Wyatt Earp and Davy Crockett. In 1958, he left Anglo for better rates elsewhere. He developed his meticulous linework and clear story-telling on Billy The Kid and Pony Express, and his ink washes gave an added realism to his strip version of the television series Wells Fargo.

During the early 1960s, reflecting Hollywood's taste for action movies set in ancient times, Lawrence branched out into rugged, historical sagas, featuring a former British slave character, Olac the Gladiator, for Tiger, as well as the axe-wielding heir Karl the Viking, and the Saxon strongman Maroc the Mighty, written by Michael Moorcock, both for Lion.

On the basis of these, he was commissioned to paint a comic story (written by Mike Butterworth), to be printed in full-colour photogravure for the new weekly Ranger in 1965. With its sweeping vistas, battles, and vivid heroes and villains, The Trigan Empire (written by Mike Butterworth) chronicled the blond warrior Trigo's rise to power on the planet Elekton. Continuing weekly in the children's educational part-work, Look And Learn, for 11 years, Lawrence illuminated 950 hyper-realistic pages of this blend of Roman-style epic and science fiction fantasy.

While maintaining this demanding output, he still found time to draw The Adventures Of Tarzan, Gerry Anderson's puppet series Fireball XL5 (for TV Century 21) and Thunderbirds Are Go (for the Daily Mail), as well as the titillating Carrie for Mayfair magazine.

Unlike other publishing spheres, British comics paid their artists only once for their work, and they received nothing for reprints, translations or other rights. When IPC refused to raise his page rate, or pay royalties, for the numerous foreign Trigan Empire collections, Lawrence resigned. That same afternoon, Dutch publishers Oberon offered him the contract he wanted, and he never looked back.

For their weekly Eppo in 1977, Lawrence and writer Philip Dunn created a variation on Flash Gordon entitled Storm. Later, Dutch writer Martin Lodewijk contributed stories and became the regular scripter.

Lawrence could now take the time he needed to craft, in gouache and watercolour, the most imaginative compositions of his career, and to collaborate with Lodewijk in developing each book. Only a handful of Storm stories have appeared in English, although this year the Don Lawrence Collection in Holland will begin issuing limited editions of the series and the complete Trigan Empire.

Failing health and eyesight reduced Lawrence's output in his final years, but he continued to work on new Storm albums. Acclaimed across Europe, appointed a knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Netherlands, yet little known in his homeland, he stands as an exemplar in the remarkable British tradition of fully painted adventure comics.

He is survived by his first wife Julia Wilson and their five children, and his second wife Elizabeth Clunies-Ross.

· Donald Southam Lawrence, artist, born November 17 1928; died December 29 2003