Cretaceous Carnage with Lobo

Tags

Alan Grant, Carl Critchlow, DC Comics, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, hunting dinosaurs, Kamandi, Lobo, Mark Propst, time travel

Here at Mars Will Send No More, one of our favorite things is traveling time to hunt dinosaurs. We just can’t get enough of prehistoric poaching, saurian slaughter, terrorizing pterosaurs, and wrestling a ramphoryncus. We relish riding rexes, accosting ankylosaurs, and disturbing the dimetrodons. It’s just what we do.

But nobody does it better than DC Comics’ Main Man: Lobo!

In issue 38 of Lobo’s 65-issue series that began in 1993, the homicidal heathen runs amok in a masterpiece of Mesozoic mayhem. The opening splash page parodies DC’s Kamandi, a Jack Kirby creation about the “last boy on Earth” in a post-apocalyptic dystopia populated by anthropomorphic animals.

But the parodies pile up as different characters arrive on the scene, including cowboys thrilled to be in Ray Harryhausen’s Valley of Gwangi and a bunch of aging 1970s rock stars ready to embark on a “Dinosaurs of Rock” tour.

With a cover date of April 1997, this issue was timed to appear just before the release of Jurassic Park: The Lost World in May, complete with a “Jurassik Pork” action figure of writer Alan “Judge Dredd” Grant. Somehow, this series was published without the “Intended for Mature Readers” warning on the cover, and the creative team pushes that boundary. It substitutes “frag” and “bastich” for more common profanities, creatively poses a butt-naked Lobo to avoid full-frontal nudity, and couches Lobo’s sexual exploits in puns and innuendos.

Even when Lobo gets his hand chopped off, there’s something cartoonish about it all. He can’t really be hurt for too long, and his hand is soon re-attached to his arm without explanation, much in the same way that no matter what horrible fate befell Wile E. Coyote, he always got patched up and came back for more senseless violence.

According to Lobo’s co-creator Keith Giffen, the character was originally intended as a satire of grim-and-gritty, hyper-violent comics. But the satire was so over-the-top that it was hilarious, and the more insane Alan Grant made the character, the more fun it was to read. Devoid of restraints such as ethics and empathy, and physically immune to any long-term consequences of his actions, Lobo is like a heavy metal Bugs Bunny with an attitude problem.

As you might suspect, things in issue 38 don’t end well for the dinosaurs, nor for anyone else who encounters Lobo.

The creative team seems to take just as much childish glee in the wanton destruction as the Main Man himself, and the illustrations are both gorgeous and silly at the same time. I have only read a handful of issues from this series, despite having read many more of the Lobo limited series and one-shots, but they were consistently entertaining, and I’d like to hunt them all down eventually. Just like the dinosaurs.

Collector’s Guide: From Lobo #38; DC Comics, 1997. I don’t believe the issue has been reprinted in any TPBs yet, but you might also enjoy the first Lobo TPB that collects several four-issue series and one-shots, including outrageous work by Alan Grant, Keith Giffen, Simon Bisley, Denys Cowan, and Kevin O’Neill.

Indie Box: Steak

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dinosaur, dinosaur comics, eating dinosaurs, hunting dinosaurs, indie box, Indie Comics, Marc Olivent, science fiction, Steak, time travel, Will Conway

Steak is an independently published comic from the UK that explores the personal and political ramifications of traveling back in time to hunt dinosaurs for their meat. Author and educator Will Conway reports that when he started out, he had not heard of the Flesh series from 2000 AD, and that Steak is an entirely different beast. While Flesh sprung from the violent imagination of Pat Mills and focused on brutal chaos in a prehistoric setting, Steak delves into more psychological dimensions of the dino-hunting enterprise. But there’s plenty of Cretaceous carnage, too!

The main character, Benjamin Buckland, comes up with the idea while recovering from a brain injury, and he and his scientific partner Roger Dukowicz conceive the means of time travel after eating “a rare cactus”—presumably peyote. If that sounds like a mentally unhinged way to start a business, then it should come as no surprise that by the second issue, Buckland’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic. It doesn’t help that his more even-keeled partner gets abducted, and a shadowy organization is spying on him.

As a self-proclaimed “zoophage” who gets a thrill from eating exotic animals, Buckland asserts that his main goal is to eat dinosaurs. He pays for his hobby by opening restaurants and doing licensing deals to expand the market for his Mesozoic meat. This leads to hilarious narration about how different dinosaur species taste, several gory yet coldly factual pages about how to butcher them like cattle, and pun-filled products such as “Apattiesaurus” burgers and “Psit-taco-saurus” food trucks. Dukowicz sports T-shirts with dinosaur-themed pop-culture references such as “Iguanodon Corleone”.

Nature is brutal, indeed.

But with corporations trying to steal his technology for profit, and militaries trying to obtain it for a pre-emptive advantage in warfare, Buckland is beset from all sides. How it will all play out remains, at the time of this writing, a mystery. Issue number three of this five-issue series is currently in production, so now would be a good time to subscribe and see what happens next.

Marc Olivent’s artwork is a lot of fun, especially in the scenes of dinosaur hunting and how they go horribly wrong. The dinosaurs are impressive and energetic, whether they are chomping someone’s head or stampeding off a cliff. The narrative structure is creative, jumping around a bit in time in the first issue without much guidance as to when things take place other than intentionally vague captions like “Now then” and “Meanwhile”. It works well for a time-travel story, and piecing together the puzzle is part of the pleasure.

Steak considers the ethics of killing animals that died off millions of years ago. Are they endangered species because they are now extinct or, as one character puts it, is it “morally okay” because “They were already dead before they were already dead, I guess?” And when members of a hunting party get killed by dinos, the lawyers struggle with the question of how to handle someone dying millions of years before they were born. But these philosophical conundrums don’t bog down the narrative, which remains fast-paced and lively, and lets you draw your own conclusions.

So far, the series has avoided the complications of potentially altering the future by killing animals in the past, an idea most famously explored in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. But who knows? Maybe we will get there eventually, because Steak is a smart, funny, and exciting romp that serves up a unique and unpredictable take on a classic concept.

Collector’s Guide: You can order print copies at the Steak website, and subscribe to updates about upcoming issues. Currently the first two issues are available for Kindle in the USA and in the UK.

Fear Walks on Four Feet!

Tags

bernard krigstein, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, golden age, hunting dinosaurs, Strange Tales

So many things work against this piece of golden-age nonsense: disastrous dinosaur depictions, colors fading into putridity, and lots of development to squeeze into four pages. Somehow, they pull it off. This is Bernard Krigstein, isn’t it?

Collector’s Guide: From Strange Tales #61; Marvel, 1958.

2000AD: Flesh Finale – The Cover Gallery!

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2000AD, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, eating dinosaurs, Flesh, hunting dinosaurs, Pat Mills, time travel

We hope you’ve enjoyed the raging dinosaur time-travel madness of Flesh as much as we’ve enjoyed sharing it with you. To wrap things up with a bang, let’s rock these three 2000 AD covers that featured Flesh!

Collector’s Guide: From 2000 AD magazine, #1-19. Collected in Flesh: The Dino Files TPB; Rebellion, 2011. Originally printed in 2000 AD #1-19; Fleetway, 1977.

All I’ve Got to Worry About Is Shooting My Dinosaur!

Tags

Al Williamson, dinosaur, dinosaur comics, EC Comics, golden age, hunting dinosaurs, Ray Bradbury, science fiction, Sound of Thunder, time travel, tyrannosaurus rex

Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury may be the most re-published science-fiction story of all time. Despite that grand title, you might not have seen this whole story before, so check it out! The guys at EC Comics loved Sound of Thunder so much they adapted it for comics. But they didn’t credit Bradbury at all. Legend has it that Ray saw the story and sent them a nice note about what a great adaptation it was — a diplomatic way to get credit, for sure! Notice Ray’s name appears on this printing.

Collector’s Guide: Originally published in Weird Science-Fantasy #25 by EC Comics. Reprinted in Weird Science Fantasy #3 by Russ Cochran/Gemstone. Reprinted in Ray Bradbury Comics #1, also with a Richard Corben adaptation of the same story; Topps, 1993.

We hope you will enjoy more from our EC Comics Gallery!