The Trigans' clothing was similar to that of the Romans, with many of the populace dressed in toga-like garments, or in the case of the soldiery, in Greek or Roman-style armour.

According to Butterworth: "The original Impetus was from that veritable genius Leonard Matthews, then my senior group editor when I was editing Sun and Comet.

The first strip told of a spaceship crashing into a swamp on Earth, the crew frozen to death, with many written volumes inside in an unknown language.

Eventually, at a very advanced age, a scientist—Peter Richard Haddon—who has studied the books from the spaceship as a young man manages to translate the volumes, and begins to relate the tales.

The Trigans began as a nomadic tribe called the Vorgs, with no technology, initially under the leadership of three brothers, Trigo, Brag and Klud.

Trigo persuades his more conservative brothers that in the face of changing events, namely the ambitions of the Lokan Empire, they must settle.

The fledgling Trigan nation is established via a merger of the nomadic Vorgs and the technically advanced people of Tharv (who arrived as refugees to the Plains of Vorg after they were defeated by the Lokans) under the leadership of Trigo, with the trappings of a Romanesque civilization with swords, lances and Roman-style clothing, but with high-tech ray guns, aircraft and a high-tech navy.

In addition to the weekly strips, a very small number of Trigan Empire stories were published in Ranger annuals and a Vulcan summer special.

They were not reprinted from Look and Learn; in many cases they were printed from the original artwork, and used revised fonts to make the text easier to read.

A fifth volume (2023) completed Lawrence's own sequence in order of original publication and also included six of the ten stories illustrated by Oliver Frey.

[7] The stories have been collected into volumes a number of times: Two radio plays were produced in Dutch, "The Mysterious Meteorite" and "Lumbwabwa the Usurper".