When I was a kid I had a book that I loved, as I think about it I'm pretty sure it would be characterized as a graphic novel although I was unfamiliar with that term at the time - it was a large hardcover comic book but a full-length story, probably a few hundred pages.

This would have been about 25-30 years ago. I recall a little about the plot, it starts with a spaceship crashing somewhere, I remember one of the first panels had the phrase that the ship "yawed wildly" - I always remembered that because I had to look up the word "yawed" :)

The rest of the story is told in flashback form of the rise of an empire, I'm pretty sure there's a guy who's a slave or otherwise in the lower strata of society who rises to be the ruler of the world or something like that.

I thought that the title had the word "titan" or "empire" in it (Empire of the Titans, or Rise of the Titans, or something similar), but google searches have been unfruitful.

When I was a kid I had a book that I loved, as I think about it I'm pretty sure it would be characterized as a graphic novel although I was unfamiliar with that term at the time. It was a large hardcover comic book but a full-length story, probably a few hundred pages long.

This would have been about 25-30 years ago. I recall a little about the plot: It starts with a spaceship crashing somewhere, I remember one of the first panels had the phrase that the ship "yawed wildly". I always remembered that because I had to look up the word "yawed".

The rest of the story is told in flashback form, with the rise of an empire, and I'm pretty sure there's a guy who's a slave or otherwise in the lower strata of society who rises to be the ruler of the world or something like that.

I thought that the title had the word "titan" or "empire" in it (Empire of the Titans, or Rise of the Titans, or something similar), but Google searches have been unfruitful.