The Thing from the Sea

« | »

Episode 24 of The Trigan Empire

The Thing from the Sea
aka The Menace from the Sea
Menace from the Deep (the Collection)
Dreiging uit het heelal (Dutch title)
Threat from Outer Space (Dutch title, translated)

Written by Mike Butterworth
Illustrated by Don Lawrence

The Thing from the Sea was originally published in 13 instalments in issues 461 (14 November 1970) to 473 (6 February 1971) of Look and Learn magazine.

It is reprinted in Volume 6 of The Trigan Empire—The Collection (the Don Lawrence Collection).

It is reprinted in Volume 3 of The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire (Rebellion).

Plot summary

The new ship, the Daveli, sinks in the Tibor Sea. Janno and his friends investigate why the ship went down. On the seabed, they see a perfectly straight cut along the bottom of the vessel. No one knows how this happened. A few days later, the bridge over the Gulf of Trigan collapses—the pillars have also been cleanly severed. When Janno, Keren, and Roffa are flying over the ocean, they see a Trigan submarine surface, sliced in half. They land to rescue the men, but are attacked by a gigantic green disc attached to a tentacle, wielding a huge blade. They manage to take off again and attack the disc, but cannot even damage it.

Afterwards, the disc destroys many bridges, cities, ships, and even Trigan tanks. One night, a strange group of divers comes ashore. One of them, Zatti, joins the Trigan army. At night, he sleeps in the swimming pool. Peric has invented a supersonic diving suit, which Janno, Keren, Roffa, and the volunteer Zatti use to investigate. They discover, deep in the sea, a large mothership with many tentacles, each ending in a green disc with a blade. When they try to return, Zatti paralyses them with a mysterious power from his fingertips. They are brought aboard the mothership.

Trigo has a new secretary, Sorra. At night, she sleeps at the bottom of a palace pool. Janno is taken to the leader of the people aboard the mothership. His name is Ura Zircon, ruler of the planet Thalla. This planet has abundant water, but it is evaporating because the planet is being pulled toward the Sun. The mothership was built to bring the Thallans to Elekton, and the discs are meant to destroy the local civilization. UraZircon’s daughter is now working as Trigo’s secretary—she plans to kill him soon.

The destruction by the discs continues, but Janno and his friends overpower their guard. They seize control of one of the discs and use it to destroy the others. They also attack the mothership, causing it to explode. They are picked up from the ocean by a Trigan aircraft and brought back to Trigo along with Ura Zircon. When they arrive, Sorra is there too. She fires her mysterious fingertip beam at Janno, but he dodges and she strikes her father instead—he survives.

Trigo grants the Thallans an uninhabited area of the Great Ocean. UraZircon tells Trigo that Earth would also have been a suitable planet for them, but it was already too densely populated.