"I am a science boy / I grew up on dinosaurs" - It by the Rheostatics (off Melville).Welcome to Dinosaur Week! Now ok, despite the quote above, I wasn't really a dinosaur nut when I was a kid. That was more my little brother's thing. But it's hard to resist these giant monsters from an age long past... Ok, now I sound like a bleedin' BBC documentary. Let's just look at the comics, right?
Age of Reptiles was the first of three silent dinosaur stories by Ricardo Delgado, the production design artist responsible for Deep Space 9 (see how I spiral further and further down into the circles of geek hell?). They were all collected in trade paperbacks, and may be worth getting your young son or daughter interested in the subject. Then again, I'd feed my kids on Fight Club and Doom Patrol, so what do I know about raising kids?
The story revolves around a war between a pack of deinonychus and a family of tyrannosaurs. I don't know how true to science this is, but certainly some liberties have to be taken. Still, this is more Walking with Dinosaurs than The Land Before Time. The art is great, the action is great, but the coloring is a little overbearing. As any pedantic paleontologist will tell you, we can't really tell what colors the dinosaurs were, but in Age of Reptiles, I feel they're too colorful. Just look at the covers above.
But the series more than makes up for it with its action pieces. Maybe due to the medium, the action wouldn't be out of place in a superhero comic! Lay your eyes on this battle royale between the two main dinosaur groups:
So basically, you've got an extremely short read, but an immensely entertaining one. The deinonychus get at the t-rex eggs, then the t-rex counterattack, and before long, it's all very much out of control. In that sense, it's a human story. To make it more readable, some of the dinosaurs have surnames, to be found on the last page (though frankly, I still have a hard time telling them apart regardless at times), and they're drawn in an expressive style.
If you ask me, that's just fun. There's plenty of humor, and many meetings with other dinosaurs that get in the way of the two sides. Counterbalancing the fun is some real pathos as well. You can actually empathize with the characters when they lose one of their own. And in Cretaceous America, dinos tend to live fast and die young. There won't be many survivors, I can tell ya. When the "winner" gets home to its eggs, well, there's a final twist, but I'll put some spoiler space in case you don't want to know (it won't really ruin the overall story if you look though)...>
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>...you ready? You can still turn back... No? Ok...
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OH NO YOU DI-IN'T!!!!! We are a bad, bad genus...
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