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.