You know what we haven't done in too long, here at the SBG? A Dinosaur Week. The release of Jurassic World provides an opportunity to resurrect this proud tradition. Won't you join me? And why not start with a dinosaur comic that just came out?
I've been a fan of Ricardo Delgado's Age of Reptiles since the very first mini-series in the early 90s and have read every subsequent story. Ancient Egyptians is the first in quite a while; The Journey came out in 2010!
The joy of these comics is that they are totally wordless. They're Walking with Dinosaurs without the narrator's voice. But more than a "nature documentary", Delgado creates CHARACTERS. Though his prehistoric worlds are researched and detailed, there's just enough cartooning in there to give its "terrible lizards" personality and expression. You'd think they would be fast reads, hardly worth the cover price, but they are quite dense, and you may just find yourself immediately re-reading an issue to catch what you missed on the first pass.
That's Age of Reptiles in general; what about Ancient Egyptians? It's the story of a loner, a Spinosaurus, whom Delgado treats essentially as a ronin or gunslinging nomad. This I bring up because he does in the back text piece, but I can totally see it. This is a dinosaur narrative told as a western. Have tooth & claw, will travel.
Because our "anti-hero" is traveling down the Nile (not really, but then I don't know enough about the Cretaceous' geography to see the difference), there is a lot of interaction with other species, but no ongoing relationships, which could prove a problem down the line. Then again, the way the Spinosaurus with No Name deals with certain species is pretty much the relationship with that entire species, and these do recur within the same ecosystem.
The Picaresque, where the plot is replaced with a loose collection of adventures or encounters, isn't my favorite mode of storytelling, but Delgado certainly offers a lot of variety in the span of a single issue. Spinosaurus is an alpha to some, to be trodden on by others; he sits somewhere in the middle of the primeval food chain. And he's a survivor, already scarred like some saurian Jonah Hex. Will he swim off into the sunset at the end of this 4-issue mini-series? Or is he doomed to tragic extinction?
I, for one, intend to stay in the past long enough to find out.
The joy of these comics is that they are totally wordless. They're Walking with Dinosaurs without the narrator's voice. But more than a "nature documentary", Delgado creates CHARACTERS. Though his prehistoric worlds are researched and detailed, there's just enough cartooning in there to give its "terrible lizards" personality and expression. You'd think they would be fast reads, hardly worth the cover price, but they are quite dense, and you may just find yourself immediately re-reading an issue to catch what you missed on the first pass.
That's Age of Reptiles in general; what about Ancient Egyptians? It's the story of a loner, a Spinosaurus, whom Delgado treats essentially as a ronin or gunslinging nomad. This I bring up because he does in the back text piece, but I can totally see it. This is a dinosaur narrative told as a western. Have tooth & claw, will travel.
The Picaresque, where the plot is replaced with a loose collection of adventures or encounters, isn't my favorite mode of storytelling, but Delgado certainly offers a lot of variety in the span of a single issue. Spinosaurus is an alpha to some, to be trodden on by others; he sits somewhere in the middle of the primeval food chain. And he's a survivor, already scarred like some saurian Jonah Hex. Will he swim off into the sunset at the end of this 4-issue mini-series? Or is he doomed to tragic extinction?
I, for one, intend to stay in the past long enough to find out.
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