Bikinis, Beasts, and Bloodshed: Frank Cho’s Jungle Girl Omnibus

Tags

dinosaur, Dynamite Entertainment, Frank Cho, indie box, Indie Comics, jana, Jungle Girl, octopus, omnibus

I used to have a few of the single issues of Frank Cho’s Jungle Girl from Dymanite, and I admit they were a guilty pleasure. There is so much wrong with the classic jungle girl trope that I hardly know where to begin. On the other hand, how can I not love this idealized, bikini-clad beauty punching a pterodactyl in the frickin’ face—with a crowbar!

So, what the hell. Last month, I got the Omnibus edition that collects all three “seasons” of the series, and I was not disappointed by the lush depictions of savage dinosaurs, giant sea krakens, and other monstrosities in physical combat with Jana the jungle girl. I like heroines who kick major ass, and Jana kicks countless miles of ass in a non-stop adventure that takes her from one peril to the next in fast-paced action.

In fact, she fights so hard that her bra almost comes off, and that tells you just about everything you need to know about the vibe of this series.

Early on, the creative team lampshades their pandering to the male gaze by showing the screen of a video camera held by one of the male supporting characters. The screen is filled with Jana’s boobs in one panel, then her butt in the next. It’s a tongue-in-cheek self-reference for a series that clearly indulges the readers’ desire to look at Jana in all her unattainable glory, and I would be surprised to discover that any of those readers are women.

Despite the gratuitous yet awesomely rendered cheesecake, I can’t see this series as sexist or inherently degrading. As a character, Jana possesses a keen intelligence and a deep knowledge of the flora and fauna in her environment, even if she is ignorant of technologies and terminology of “the outside world”. She holds the moral high ground, proving herself ethically superior to the scumbags she encounters. Jana is strong both physically and in terms of her unassailable will power and confidence. Other than her portrayal on the cover, she is never really a “damsel in distress”, even though she does get into some jams—as every hero should. Jana is kind and loving to those who earn her trust, yet absolutely ready to end any human, animal, or monster who messes with her. Jana is both a protector and a destroyer, and though she parades through these pages in pin-up poses, she gives readers many reasons to respect and admire her character. She is like a female Conan.

The creative team, helmed by Frank Cho who draws the covers and co-plots the series, leans hard into the typical aspects of a jungle girl trope. Jana is a white girl in an animal-print bikini who has hairless legs and armpits despite never shaving, and picture-perfect, dirtless feet despite constantly traveling over rough terrain in her bare feet. Let’s not even discuss how she never has a stray pube despite the total lack of bikini waxing in her jungle. The bikini trope is leaned into so hard that Jana reveals she has various bikinis stashed in secret caches across the landscape, sometimes pausing the plot to change into a new animal print for no good reason.

As the series progresses, it incorporates other classic tropes and concepts dating back to around a century ago when the jungle girl became a mainstay of American fiction. The series has been compared to earlier “Lost World” stories, and the second and third seasons are rife with Lovecraftian beasts. Jungle Girl is like a story from 100 years ago, but produced with modern, high-quality artwork.

I agree with other reviewers who had “WTF” moments with the third season. For the entire third season, Jana ditches her bikini and wears a full-body wet suit after a dive, which makes sense, except that the other characters who needed wet suits lose them almost immediately. The plot veers from the absurd into the completely nonsensical, and it ends on a nearly incomprehensible note. It’s a weird stew that gives the impression that the creators wanted so much to incorporate all the vintage tropes that they forgot to have it make sense. I would say that Jungle Girl “jumps the shark” at a certain point, if not for the fact that the entire series consists of shark jumping.

While the Jungle Girl Omnibus: The Complete Collection will never be considered one of the great literary works of our time, it’s an action-packed ride for readers who want to see an ass-kicking beauty ride a mammoth, spear a T-Rex, fight a giant octopus, and bash the living daylights out of hordes of creepy weirdos. What it lacks in terms of plot coherency is made up for with dinosaur stampedes. What it lacks in sensitivity to female readers, it mostly makes up for by giving Jana such an admirable characterization that she is more than mere eye candy.

Though there’s plenty of that, too.

Collectors Guide: This Omnibus collection is easily found on Amazon in print and digital formats, and often in stock at MyComicShop.

Learning to Love the Monster: Tadd Galusha’s Cretaceous

Tags

cretaceous, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, indie box, Indie Comics, Oni Press, tadd galusha, tyrannosaurus rex

The Cretaceous graphic novel is the most recent addition to my collection of pure dinosaur comics, and it is non-stop awesome. Like Ricardo Delgado’s Age of Reptiles series, it is a wordless dino adventure, though Tadd Galusha does drop in the occasional text-based sound effect or growl. Cretaceous delivers a wildlife documentary from hell, with nearly every page being full of brutally violent dinosaur fights and dinos eating other dinos. This tale of carnage and mayhem is not a cute book for toddlers!

If you’re like me, you wish that Godzilla movies and comics would just get rid of all the stupid human parts and show more monster battles. Galusha—who worked on some Godzilla comics for IDW—must feel the same way, because Cretaceous is all killer and no filler. Early on, I wondered if the book even had a plot, or if it was just an endless stream of savagery, with different dinos weaving in and out of each other’s lives on the way to their doom.

Although that’s a fairly accurate statement about Cretaceous, a plot does emerge. The protagonist is an adult male Tyrannosaurus Rex, a fearsome monster who, in the first scene, attacks a herd of Parasaurolophus and slaughters one of them. He carries the fresh corpse back to his home, where the meat feeds his juveniles first and then his wife. The mother Rex waits patiently while the children feed, and this detail of her characterization takes us on the first step down the path of learning to love these murderous beasts. Yes, they are killers, but within their family unit is affection, devotion, and tenderness.

But not even these rulers of prehistory can escape the eat-and-be-eaten web of life, especially when smaller predators have developed the skill to hunt in packs and accomplish what a lone individual cannot. Tragedy befalls the Rex family, and the remainder of the book resembles an old-fashioned revenge tale. A classic Western, almost.

The daddy Rex hunts his enemies and searches for his surviving child. The perpetual horror he encounters earns him our sympathy, and his mastery of unarmed combat earns him our respect. Step-by-step, as we follow him through the forest primeval and other resplendent landscapes brought to life by Galusha’s pen and colors, we learn to love this monster.

The environment is so much a part of the action that it’s practically a character itself. Galusha doesn’t just draw pretty backgrounds. The earth, the trees, the fog, the ocean—they are all more than mere settings. They are both friends and foes to the dinosaurs, often at the same time. Plus, their visual splendor is a counterpoint to the sheer terror that drives Cretaceous. And is that any different from our real lives? We are fragile creatures, even the toughest of us, inhabiting a beautiful universe where life often feels like a relentless string of one ugly event after another.

Yet life goes on, and though we know exactly how all our stories will end, we persist. By boiling down the dinosaurs’ lives into their most primal aspects, Cretaceous seems to comment on our human lives. Galusha presents an unflinchingly brutal vision of life and death, a narrative of ceaseless struggle illuminated occasionally by the moments of hope, triumph, and even love that keep us going—despite knowing all too well the cards are stacked against us. We come to love the monstrous Rex, because the monster is us, and everything around us. His quest is ours.

Cretaceous blew my mind and earned a spot among my all-time favorite dinosaur comics, a pantheon which includes Ricardo Delgado’s Age of Reptiles, Steve Bissette’s Tyrant, and Jim Lawson’s Paleo and Loner.

You can find Cretaceous on Amazon in paperback or Kindle/Comixology ebook formats.

black-and-white art from Illustration Age’s Tadd Galusha page.

indie box: Terrorsaurs!

Tags

black and white, commandosaur, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, indie box, Indie Comics, Mirage Studios, Peter Laird, Steve Bissette, terrorsaur

Today’s entry in the Indie Box is one I have never owned nor even seen in the flesh. But with insane, sci-fi dinosaur art from Steve “Tyrant” Bissette and Peter “Ninja Turtles” Laird, who could resist? These pages come from the Mirage Mini Comics Boxed Set, a treasure so long out-of-print that I don’t mind if you post a link to buy it in the comments!

Now behold the legend of the Terrorsaurs!

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indie box: Teknophage

Tags

Bryan Talbot, dinosaur, indie box, Indie Comics, Neil Gaiman, Rick Veitch, Tekno Comics, Teknophage

Inside the indie comics box today, it’s Teknophage: a walking, talking, totally evil dinosaur who rules a world much like ours, only infinitely more terrible. Teknophage feeds on souls, which he extracts from helpless humans in the horrifying vats of his mobile city. He cruises his planet spreading misery every where he goes. Many have tried to overthrow him, only to have their souls ripped from their tortured bodies and consumed.

Rick Veitch created this evil bastard reptile for Tekno Comix, a Neil Gaiman venture. With artist Bryan Talbot, Veitch blends horror, science fiction, and a cynically hilarious social satire to make Teknophage a story you will never forget – assuming you survive!

Here is a preview of the pages where Teknophage recounts his earliest days as just another evil telepathic dinosaur, and how he discovered the multi-dimensional technology that made him master of the planet.

Collector’s Guide:
– From Teknophage #4-5; Tekno Comix, 1995.

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dinosaurs of the tellus science museum

Tags

dinosaur, exhibit, georgia, museum, planetarium, Prehistoric Animals, tellus science museum

This month, my mom and sister took me to the Tellus Science Museum in Georgia, and I was spoiled with an afternoon of prehistoric life and outer space! The museum lobby showcases a huge apatosaurus skeleton, and my sister snapped a photo for me to share with all the dino geeks who frequent this blog.

The camera on my phone isn’t as nice as hers, but I snapped a few pics, too. Here is the apatosaur’s head in a position where he might be eating a planet.

The planets in the pic appear over the entrance to the planetarium where we enjoyed a presentation about how Earth was formed. This was fortuitous timing, because the film showed something I was reading about that very day: how an ancient proto-planet named Theia crashed into an early version of Earth, a cataclysmic collision that enlarged Earth and resulted in the formation of our Moon, our tilted axis of rotation, and eventually our ocean tides.

The film presented this event as a known fact, but it’s a hypothesis that best explains how things got the way they are now. The Theia hypothesis is explored in more detail in the book I took on my trip, an amazing and often poetic exploration of geology, chemistry, and cosmic history that begins with examining a single pebble found on a Welsh beach.

The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History by Jan Zalasiewicz is a bit wordy at times, being written by a lecturing professor. What it lacks in concision, it makes up for in its flowing language that links many scientific disciplines to each other and gives insights into how big-picture events like the origin of Earth relate to small-picture events at the atomic level, all to create the rocks we sometimes ignore beneath our feet but which, upon examination, reveal so much about our world.

The prehistoric exhibit at Tellus Science Museum showcases specimens found in Georgia, and it features some fossils visitors are invited to touch (including Megalodon teeth and Triceratops poop). The Appalachiosaurus pictured below was new to me.

This fearsome beast shares exhibit space with a pair of Dromeosaurs whose informational plaque needs a bit of an update. The plaque mentions feathers and the relation of dinos to modern birds as a kind of hypothesis, but these things are now known with about as much certainty as we can get. After all, we’ve found the feathers, and paleo-artist William Stout was among the first to depict them in his mural paintings for the San Diego Natural History Museum. You can read more about that in Prehistoric Life Murals by William Stout, which includes amazing reproductions of his paintings in a glorious hardcover volume.

Tellus also has aquatic beasts, including a Mosasaur and a sea turtle, the two main characters in one of my favorite stories, Archelon and the Sea Dragon by Francis K. Pavel. You might enjoy the short essay I wrote about the book for an undergraduate project a few years ago.

For flying reptiles, Tellus has a trio of Pterosaurs. Here’s one of them.

Tellus has prehistoric mammals, too, including this Smilodon.

These are just a few of the wonders in the prehistoric life exhibit. And I didn’t even photograph any of the awesome space exploration stuff. Tellus Science Museum has a bunch of other exhibits, too. I didn’t see them all, but I loved what I saw. If you go, you might call ahead to find out the showtimes in the planetarium, because several shows play at different times throughout the day. The Birth of Planet Earth is well worth seeing, and I’d have liked to see the other features if we had more time.

On your way out, you can visit the gift shop and get a cuddly ammonite and a few of his stuffed trilobite friends!

If you can’t make it to Georgia any time soon, Amazon also carries critters from this plush toy line called Paleozoic Pals.

T. Rex Generations: a book review

Tags

dinosaur, dinosaur books, dinosaur comics, graphic novel, rextooth studios, t rex generations, ted rechlin, tyrannosaurus, tyrannosaurus rex

T. Rex Generations stars four young rexes we meet under the watchful eyes of their parents as they hatch from eggs. In their youth, the rexes learn to survive, scavenge, and hunt. They meet a beautifully illustrated assortment of cretaceous creatures they must battle or escape. Author and artist Ted Rechlin creates even more dramatic page and panel layouts than in his 2017 brontosaurus book, which makes for great fight scenes. And in a world of monsters just as fierce as they are, not every rex will survive.

This book will delight dinosaur enthusiasts and comic book fans, and though it has a lot of physical conflict, it isn’t graphic or gory. Adults and kids can enjoy this all-ages action-packed story together.

My dislikes are mostly minor details: seeing the same double-splash page of empty landscape repeated where more story pages would be welcome; anachronistic phrases such as “so the siblings ease off the gas” that seem out of place millions of years before cars; and a couple spots of clunky exposition such as saying “as was previously noted…” when repeating something from a few pages prior.

My only major concern: why do the young rexes not get named until the final page? Characters we care about in a story usually get identified by name right away, and the parent rexes are identified just after the babies hatch. It isn’t clear why the younger rexes don’t get names until late in their adolescence, unless we see their climactic edmontosaurus kill as a rite of passage into adulthood. But even though a caption describes that as a “first kill”, it seems more likely that a predatory reptile who has been larger than a pickup truck for years has killed more than a few things. After a wild romp in the cretaceous, the last page left me with more confusion than conclusion.

None of that stopped me from enjoying this adventurous addition to my library of dinosaur books and comics. T. Rex Generations is a fun read and a joy to look at. The full-page and two-page illustrations of the rexes and dakotaraptor, edmontosaurus, and ankylosaurus would make great prints or posters.

Get some dinosaur in your new year at Ted Rechlin’s store or on Amazon!

 

Big thanks to Smith Publicity for the review copy of T. Rex Generations, and to Comicon.com for the images in this post.

Matthew Kalmenoff painted dinosaur postcards

Tags

ankylosaurus, brachiosaurus, brontosaurus, dinosaur, dinosaur books, Matthew Kalmenoff, ornithomimus, painting, plateosaurus, postcards, tyrannosaurus rex

Reader Ed Dietrich sent us these postcards as a follow-up to what we’ve shared of the late Kalmenoff’s artwork for The Golden Stamp Book of Animals of the Past and Sinclair Oil’s Exciting World of Dinosaurs booklet. Ed says these cards from publisher Dover bear a 1985 copyright date, which means they come from a book you can still get inexpensively on Amazon: Dinosaur Postcards in Full Color. The complete set contains 24 postcards. Here are five to whet your prehistoric appetite!

Animals of the Past as Painted by Matthew Kalmenoff

Tags

animals, charles mcvicker, dinosaur, dinosaur books, golden books, Matthew Kalmenoff, painting, Prehistoric Animals, prehistoric birds, prehistoric fish, prehistoric mammals, stamp book, trading cards

Today’s images come to us courtesy of reader Edward Dietrich, who recently discovered a 2012 post with my scans of a 1960s booklet, Sinclair and the Exciting World of Dinosaurs. Another reader had informed me that the artist was Matthew Kalmenoff, and Ed added that Kalmenoff did the full-color paintings on the stamps in a book I loved when I was a kid: The Golden Stamp Book of Animals of the Past.

The cover, featured above, has art by Charles McVicker. Ed sent the following scans of Matthew Kalmenoff’s paintings for us all to enjoy. He included notes about different versions of this book, of which there were many!

Though the blog Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs has scans of some pages from a 1950s version of this book, the art was apparently recycled into many editions. Ed says he’s owned a third printing from 1968 (priced at 59¢), plus an eleventh printing from 1975 and an eighteenth printing from 1980 (both priced at 89¢).

Most of Ed’s scans are not from the stamp book edition, but a 1961 version called Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals Trading Cards, and branded “Golden Funtime Trading Cards”. Instead of printing the artwork on sheets of lickable stamps to affix to the pages, this version presented the images on heavy cardstock and had oversized pages. This version only had 45 paintings, compared to the 48 in the stamp books, so Ed thoughtfully scanned the remaining stamps from the other editions.

Some updates to the captions happened between the 1950s stamp book version and this 1960s trading card version. For example, the Protoceratops is clearly labeled as such in Ed’s scans, but was labeled “horn-faced dinosaur” in the 1950s version. Also, the Ichthyosaur is named in this edition, where it was labeled “fish-like reptile” in the 1950s book. “Winged reptile” got updated to Rhamphoryncus. Other captions changed, too, but why should I ruin all the fun of letting you find them?

If you’re like me, you now want wall-sized prints of several of these gorgeous (if somewhat scientifically outdated) paintings. If you’re willing to settle for something smaller, I’ve seen some of them on Amazon repackaged into a 1988 book called Ready to Frame Dinosaur Paintings. I hope Kalmenoff got paid well for this artwork, considering how many times it was repurposed into different publications over the years.

If you’re digging these paintings and want to see more of Matthew Kalmenoff’s vintage artwork, cruise back to the original post that started all this madness, because I updated it with more images and links. I was excited to learn about this connection to one of my childhood treasures via total strangers’ commenting on a post about a book I randomly found on eBay. Talk about going full circle!

A big “thank you” goes out to Ed for taking the time to scan and share these images! This blog would be nothing without the people who have dropped by over the years to share my enthusiasm about dinosaurs, prehistoric animals, comic books, poetry, and mutant brains from outer space. Happy New Year to you, and may your dreams be filled with prehistoric mammals!

The next three images are the ones from the stamp books that did not appear in the 1961 trading cards version.

If I ever get around to recording another album of guitar instrumentals, it’s going to be called “Skull of the Uinta Beast”. Hell yeah!

Here are two images of the cover from the 1961 trading cards version!

 

indie spotlight: tomb of the triceratops

Tags

dinosaur, dinosaur books, fiction, michael ajax, science fiction, tomb of the triceratops, young adult

Click the cover for a free Kindle preview of Tomb of the Triceratops.

Tomb of the Triceratops takes you on a dinosaur dig where researchers and a group of young students uncover a realm where dinosaurs are still alive. The boys selected to go on this archaeological expedition risk their lives to free a triceratops from the clutches of its brutal, otherworldly tormentors.

And that’s just the beginning.

Author Michael Ajax seasons the story with plenty of dino facts that will surely please any dino-maniac. Between the action scenes, the characters are just as likely to discuss the biology of a Stygimoloch as they are their interpersonal conflicts. The people in this story are passionate about dinosaurs, and that makes it especially fun for those of us who share that enthusiasm.

Though action-packed, Tomb of the Triceratops keeps its language and violence in the “family-friendly” range. Even as an adult reader, I was pulled into the nightmarish struggle of the captive triceratops, but the level of detail and word choice did not venture into overly graphic territory. If you thought Jurassic Park and Rex Riders were fun, this is a good addition to your bookshelf.

The boy heroes of the story casually banter with each other, keep secrets from the adults, and have an unforgettable adventure in this first novel by Michael Ajax. Discover the mysteries inside the Tomb of the Triceratops in paperback or for just 99 cents in Kindle.

Author website: http://www.michaelajax.com/

The World Around Us #15: Prehistoric Animals

Tags

Al Williamson, Classics Illustrated, dinosaur, dinosaur books, dinosaur comics, Gilberton, illustrated story of prehistoric animals, Prehistoric Animals, prehistoric mammals, Sam Glanzman, vintage dinosaur books, World Around Us, World Around Us 15

Gilberton published The World Around Us #15: Prehistoric Animals in 1959 as part of its Classics Illustrated line. World Around Us is a must-have for any collector of dinosaur comics. Despite the way current advances in understanding dinosaur anatomy have made much of this book obsolete from a scientific perspective, it has a quaint historic charm and many stunningly rendered pages. It features uncredited artwork by Sam Glanzman and Al Williamson, according to Steve Bissette’s essay on PalaeoBlog. While dinosaurs take up much of the book, it also features prehistoric mammals, the origin of the planet Earth, and biographies of important biologists and paleontologists.

Collectors can often find a low-grade copy of World Around Us #15 at MyComicShop in the $5-15 range. Copies in various grades appear on eBay, with Fine and Fine+ grades listed in the $30-50 range.

In our second year on this blog, we presented the individual stories in this book as a series of posts. But now, here it is all in one shot for you prehistoric animal enthusiasts. Enjoy!

Flesh: The Dino Files TPB

Tags

black and white, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, dinosaurs, Flesh, flesh dino files, Indie Comics, Pat Mills, UK comics

This isn’t the first time Flesh appears this blog, so let’s keep it brief and look at some awesome dinosaur art! We got our copy at MyComicShop but you can also find it on Amazon. You can see more pages in our Flesh Archives. Okay? Wow, what a beautiful volume this is. Check it out!

kingfisher dinosaur encyclopedia

Tags

Dino books, dinosaur, dinosaur book, dinosaur books, Dinosaur Encyclopedia, dinosaurs, Kingfisher, kingfisher dinosaur encyclopedia

Kingfisher Dinosaur Encyclopedia brings readers up to date on many current developments in dino science. Lavishly filled with photographs and paintings, and easily-read charts, it is a visual feast worthy of a hungry Allosaurus.

One of the best features: a focus on certain regions of dino discoveries. You will visit specific digs, sites in England, Portugal, and China, that yielded new discoveries in the last 10 to 20 years and pushed dino science forward. Many books lack this regional organization, making this one special. You get a picture of each unique biome certain dinos inhabited, where some books simply list dinos alphabetically or historically. The grouping also gives the writers a chance to share about current leaders in the field in these countries.

Kingfisher breaks up its pages into small blocks of text that the reader can take one at a time, or in chunks. Like any Megalosaurus could tell you, it’s easier to digest things when you break them into smaller peices first! This makes the book entertaining and light, but by no means insubstantial. A reader can simply enjoy highlights, or dig deeper.

From the 2000 specimens of a single Cretaceous bird unearthed in China, to the confident resolution of an old myth about Oviraptors, to the solid presentation of the meteorite impact site, Kingfisher gives new dino fans a great introduction, and updates us old dino fans about several solved mysteries.

Criticisms? Calling the book an Encyclopedia may be stretching it. It is not an exhaustive tome of the history of paleontology, or dino physiology, or even a complete list of all known species. I have several “encyclopedias” and scientific texts that are more intensive. They’re also a lot harder to read! So, although I wouldn’t call it an encyclopedia, it’s a worthy and exciting book.

The one missing bone in this skeleton is a pronunication key. Dino books lately have thrown this idea away, and Kingfisher’s isn’t the only culprit. Some help pronouncing the latest Chinese dinos would really help us read this out loud!

Glad to have this on my shelf with the other great dino books. Recommended for all ages, young and old.

Buy the Kingfisher Dinosaur Encyclopedia on Amazon.

World of Dinosaurs by Edwin Colbert and George Geygan

Tags

dinosaur, dinosaur book, Edwin Colbert, George Geygan, Home Library Press, vintage dinosaur books, World of Dinosaurs

Some time ago we posted an ad for World of Dinosaurs from a vintage issue of The Brave & the Bold. We went looking for the book after finding that ad, and got an affordable copy. Colbert, a respected paleontologist who among other things discovered Coelophysis, would no doubt want to update some of the science in World of Dinosaurs, from the swamp-dwelling sauropods dragging their tails to the extinction theories. Nevertheless, we always get a kick out of the art in vintage dinosaur books, and George Geygan’s painterly approach is no exception.

Collector’s Guide:
– from World of Dinosaurs by Dr. Edwin H. Colbert and George Geygan; Home Library Press, 1961.
Note: an edition published in 1977 had the title The Dinosaur World.

 

He Could Hit Tyrannosaurus Rex with a Stick – the Biggest Stick He Could Find!

Tags

Danger in Dinosaur Valley, dinosaur, dinosaur books, diplodocus, Joan Lowery Nixon, Marc Simont, Putnam, vintage dinosaur books, World Series baseball game

 
Danger in Dinosaur Valley portrays the intelligence and adaptability of a child who teaches his parents some important life skills. A young diplodocus observes a World Series baseball game when time travelers come to visit, and he uses baseball to save his family.

 

 
As with many older dinosaur books, Danger in Dinosaur valley gets some things wrong: pterodactyls are not birds, television signals do not travel across time with their televisions, and brutal hand-to-hand combat is not always the best option. But the story works in its own cute way, and this vintage dinosaur book entranced us many times as young Martians. Treat yourself and your dino-loving kids to this entertaining tale by Joan Lowery Nixon, with artwork by Marc Simont!

Collector’s Guide:
– from Danger in Dinosaur Valley; G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1978.
Note: most existing copies of this out-of-print children’s book are ex-library copies.

 

dinosaur toy

Tags

dinosaur, iphone, photography, plastic, toy

dino cards: tuojiangosaurus

Tags

dinosaur, postcards, Tuojiangosaurus

Intrepid internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ.

As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber.
Witness today the awesomeness of Tuojiangosaurus!

 

 

dino cards: hadrosaurs

Tags

dinosaur, hadrosaur, postcards

Intrepid internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ.

As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber.
Witness today the awesomeness of the Hadrosaurs!

 

 

dino cards: parasaurolophus

Tags

dinosaur, parasaurolophus, postcards

Intrepid internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ.

As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber.
Witness today the awesomeness of Parasaurolophus!

 

 

Dinosaurs Washed My Dishes!

Tags

dinosaur, dishes, plastic dinosaurs, toys

We woke up the other morning to find dinosaurs hard at work, scrubbing and stacking the dishes.

 

A Striking Example of Centuries of Progress!

Tags

big news, chicago, chicago world's fair edition, dinosaur, Sinclair, Sinclair dinosaur, Sinclair Oil, Sinclair World's Fair Dinosaur, worlds fair

Today we’ll share with you a publication nearly a century old now: the Chicago World’s Fair Edition of Big News. Published by Sinclair Oil, it showcases their dinosaur exhibit at the World’s Fair in 1934.

Yes, we have shared with you some other Sinclair memorabilia in our Sinclair Archives, and specifically some things from this same World’s Fair. But this monstrous tome takes the prehistoric cake. Though our copy has damage, the images and text remain intact for the most part. Allow us to mention a few notes, or just scroll down to our gallery today and dive right in!

But first, a word from beauty and the beast:

Notes: We spliced a few things, but the front cover has a tear requiring more digital reconstruction than we care to do right now. To keep the file sizes at 1 MB or less, we reduced our original scans by 90%. You will find you can still enlarge them on your screen a great deal and retain clarity.

One image we did not bother to splice together in our restoration efforts: the silly Sinclair Minstrels musical act with members in blackface. Some parts of American history just don’t merit the pixels they are printed on. These embarrassing racist depictions stick out like a sore thumb among the dinosaur sculptures. But, they also remind us of the cultural attitudes of the dominant class in this time period.

We know there was a second edition of this magazine with different images, but we don’t have it… yet! We also know many of these dinosaur depictions have what we now consider gross scientific inaccuracies. We could point them out to you and play dino expert, but it’s really more fun finding them for yourself!