Dinosaur December Part 1: Age of Reptiles
The best dinosaur comic ever?
What’s your favorite dinosaur? I know you have one. Everyone has one. Mine is Allosaurus. I’m not entirely sure where my love of Allosaurus started, but I think it probably stems from a trip to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History as a kid when I got to see a fully assembled Allosaurus skeleton on display.
How could any child see that towering behemoth at 28 feet (8.5 meters) long from nose to tail and not immediately become a fan?
Clearly I’m not the only one whose imagination was captured by seeing an Allosaurus skeleton. One features prominently in The Lost World (1925) directed by Harry O. Hoyt, one of the very first and most influential feature length films about dinosaurs.
That film’s success along with the success of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name published in 1912 helped fuel demand for dinosaur-related fiction that hasn’t waned since.
This rambling preamble was just to get us here: I’ll be spending the month of December celebrating the history of dinosaurs in pop culture. Each week I’ll be looking at a specific property dealing with dinosaurs that I think deserves to be highlighted. I considered just doing movies, but I decided it would be more fun to branch out across multiple media types. To kick things off, I’ve decided to take a look at a comic book series that I loved as a kid. That would be Age of Reptiles by Ricardo Delgado. The first volume (now collected under the name “Tribal Warfare”) was published by Dark Horse Comics in 1997 as a four issue miniseries.
Delgado wrote and illustrated the entire series himself with James Sinclair providing the colors based on color concepts communicated to him by Delgado. In other words, this is Ricardo Delgado’s vision made manifest.
So what is that vision? Age of Reptiles is essentially the story of a war between a pack of Deinonychuses and a family of Tyrannosauruses set within the Cretaceous period. One interesting fact about the Cretaceous is that no humans were alive at that time. That means there are zero human characters in this story. That means there is also no dialogue whatsoever in this series. Not only that, but there are no captions or omniscient narrators explaining what is happening. In other words, the entire story is conveyed by Delgado’s art. To tell an engaging story with no sentient or anthropomorphic characters or narration is a staggeringly ambitious goal, and Delgado manages to succeed.
The one instance where Delgado actually provides written text on the page is at the beginning of each issue where he provides the names he has given to each dinosaur to appear in that issue. I’m going to focus on just the Tyrannosauruses and Deinonychuses since those are the major players. The family of Tyrannosauruses is composed of Blue Back, Climber, Long Jaw, Talon, and Short Tail. The pack of Deinonychuses consists of Dark Eye, Leopard, Maya, One Claw, Quetzal, Sina, Snake Eye, and Three Tooth. I don’t expect anyone to memorize those names, but I’ll use some of them from time to time for the sake of clarity. Also, kudos to Delgado for giving Quetzal some feathers. This comic came out the same year as Spielberg’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and even he didn’t give any feathers to the raptors.
The comic commences with four of the Deinonychuses (Quetzal, Snake Eye, Leopard, and One Claw) hunting and killing a large sauropod. As they start to chow down, a Tyrannosaurus (Blue Back) shows up to lay claim to the meal and scare off the band of smaller predators.
It’s kind of like a lion stealing a kill from hyenas. Instead of merely running away, Snake Eye decides to go full badass and attempt to slash Blue Back’s throat with his massive claw. While I applaud the bravery, this was a poor decision. Blue Back quickly and easily kills Snake Eye, and the remaining three Deinonychuses flee. This is the inciting incident that kicks off the war between the two groups. The Deinonychuses respond by quietly infiltrating Blue Back’s lair, and they steal the eggs laid by his mate (Climber) and abscond with them to be eaten. We call that an escalation. The first issue essentially ends with the two sides both hellbent on destroying the other.
I don’t want to spoil the rest of the story for those of you who haven’t read it, but the remaining three issues primarily revolve around the two groups launching attacks on each other as casualties mount on both sides until we get a full fledged war between all of the remaining dinosaurs in a climactic battle during a massive rainstorm. I’m honestly not doing it justice for just how cool and epic it is.
Interspersed between these battles are glimpses into the Cretaceous world these dinosaurs inhabit. We see gloriously illustrated Pteranodons, Icthyosaurs, Parasaurolophuses, giant crocodiles, and many more.
It is an absolutely gorgeous comic book that needs to be seen to truly appreciate the breathtaking artwork.
It isn’t always the most scientifically accurate comic. There’s a level of emotional intelligence ascribed to these animals in order to make them more relatable that simply doesn’t have any evidence supporting it. There are also dinosaurs that show up in the story that didn’t live during the same time period or same geographical region as the Tyrannosauruses and Deinonychuses, but I’m willing to forgive artistic liberties in the name of good storytelling. I also want to give kudos to Delgado for using Deinonychuses instead of Velociraptors. Jurassic Park (both the novel and film) popularized Velociraptors even though the animals that appear in them much more closely resemble Deinonychuses than Velociraptors. There is an interesting reason for this that I’ll get into during a later Dinosaur December entry, but I appreciate that Delgado uses the correct name for his dromaeosaurids than the name of the much more popular ones at the time.
Ricardo Delgado would go on to write and illustrate three more volumes of Age of Reptiles after this. They are all worth reading (the second volume even follows the story of an Allosaurus!), and they have all been collected in both trade paperback and omnibus formats. I think this series really shows how the comic book medium can be used to tell thrilling and unique stories that simply can’t be told in other formats. It’s mandatory reading if you love dinosaurs, comic books, or both.
Next week we’ll pivot from dinosaur comic books to dinosaur video games. I’ll be highlighting one series of games in particular, and I’m excited to dust them off and see how well they hold up.