Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians

Story/Art: Ricardo Delgado
Colors: Ryan Hill
Design: Sandy Tanaka
Digital Production: Christina McKenzie, Chris Horn

Popular interpretations of the Mesozoic Era have leaned so heavily on North American dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex or Apatosaurus, that most people might even believe that the entire Cretaceous was populated by the same dozen species. So it's a bit off the beaten track when the focus moves elsewhere. In Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians, award-winning artist Ricardo Delgado shines the spotlight on North Africa. This gives him an excuse to draw a completely different ensemble of prehistoric creatures, which he portrays in his characteristic obsessively-detailed fashion. At this point, anyone who follows Age of Reptiles is primarily there to look at pretty art portraying some rather vicious animals locked in a life-and-death struggle.

Delgado's art hasn't significantly changed since working on The Journey, but the new setting allows him to expand his visual vocabulary. In contrast to the vast open spaces with its parched minimalism found the earlier work, Ancient Egyptians takes place in what looks to be a lush rainforest. The comic is positively bursting with life in every panel: Trees tall enough to hide the largest sauropod. Rivers teaming with coelacanths, freshwater sharks, rays, turtles, mollusks, and a wide variety of early crocodile species. All this gives colorist Ryan Hill more opportunities to explore a richer color spectrum, though he still ties everything together with the usual earth tones. Hill lends a much needed clarity to Delgado's art as the extra amount of detail can sometimes obscure the action. He tends to render everything with the same fine line, whether it's a cloud in the sky or an adult theropod, and this can flatten the perspective when all the reader has as a reference point is the dense underbrush.

Delgado's approach to storytelling also remains the same. His overt inspirations are spaghetti westerns and samurai tales, in this particular case Yojimbo. The hero of Ancient Egyptians is a wandering male Spinosaurus (the only dinosaur he positively identifies in the afterword. I'm guessing the species of the rest). Shortly after entering the forest, he runs afoul of its largest denizens, a very belligerent Paralititan herd. These are a species of super-sized sauropod, FYI. He tries to steer clear of rival gangs of Carcharodontosaurus and of Afrovenators. And he finds time to mate with a female of his species. The story culminates in a bloody showdown that alters the local power balance.

Whatever his creative influences, Delgado has become too devoted to the naturalistic mode to apply a lot of anthropomorphic attributes. His eschewing of any dialogue eliminates any distraction from his art, but it renders opaque the interior lives of his subjects. There isn't anything that could be recognized as conscious thought or character development in the conventional sense, though it's still apparent that dinosaur actions are compelled by a tangle of powerful drives which are either satiated or thwarted. This straightforward behaviorism is reinforced by a linear approach to storytelling and deliberate pacing. The one thing Delgado does to break up the monotony is to shift attention away from the Spinosaurus at regular intervals. The narrative simply moves through the course of several days as the cast eats, hunts, fights, kills, sleeps, or copulates. Ancient Egyptians is about as Darwinian a comic being sold right now.

Age of Reptiles: The Journey, and Tyrannosaurus Rex

There's one school of thought that unequivocally believes that dinosaurs are awesome. The opposing side thinks they're overrated. The truth is that dinosaurs couldn't care less what we think of them. They are beyond us. Not that this stops us from imagining them in fiction as a potential threat to our very existence.

Age of Reptiles: The Journey
by Ricardo Delgado, Jim Campbell, Tony Ong

Ricardo Delgado's previous Age of Reptiles outings were wordless soap operas full of murder and revenge, starring realistically drawn dinosaurs. But in The Journey, he pulls back from those pulp storytelling devices and turns towards a more familiar animal concern: the annual migration. In this case, a migration of herds of large Cretaceous-era herbivorous dinosaurs moving between different grazing grounds, not unlike today's migrations of megafauna in the Serengeti and Maasai Mara. And as with todays animals, the dinosaurs must run the gauntlet of hungry predators and rough terrain.

As always, the main attraction of the comic is Delgado's art. He gets to draw an astonishing variety of animals. The thundering herd of herbivores is composed of all manner of saurapods, ceratopsids, hadrosaurs, ankylosaurs, and who knows what else is included. It's veritable eye-candy for dinosaur enthusiasts and a Mesozoic version of a National Geographic special, sans the portentous narrative voice-over. There's a dangerous river crossing that's reminiscent of the wildebeest crossing of the crocodile-infested Mara River. But despite this wide-angle perspective, Delgado never shakes off his sympathy for carnivorous therapods. The only individuals who are differentiated throughout the entire story are a mother tyrannosaur and her children as they try to keep up with the herd. Their more intimate struggle for survival serves as a counterpoint to the entire herd's movements, and they end up stealing the show. Emphasizing the family drama is a traditional method for anthropomorphizing animal behavior, and it's something Delgado has used in the past. Delgado also resorts to uncharacteristic facial expressions to more easily convey his subjects emotions. On the whole though, he remains on the bleeding edge of dinosaur research - his multi-colored creatures are among the most anatomically accurate portrayals in comics.

While the story is often punctuated with flashes of violence, this is ultimately a deliberately paced comic. Everything, even death, gives way to the steady beat of the herd's migration. The conclusion provides no catharsis. Just a quiet end to all that wandering. Admittedly, this kind of grand-scale storytelling will not appeal to everybody. Delgado's one concession to Hollywood's traditional portrayal of the prehistoric environment occurs when the herd crosses a desert, reminiscent of America's wild west, while fighting off a large pack of dromaeosaurs. But by following the herd through an ever-changing landscape, he does manage to evoke a more lush and alien world that existed millions of years before humans would walk the face of the earth.

If The Journey is a prestigious documentary shot in widescreen, then Tyrannosaurus Rex is a cheesy B-movie deliberately injected with bad dialogue, acting, and full of cheap imitation gore.

Tyrannosaurus Rex
by Mark Kidwell, Jay Fotos, Jeff Sornow, Jason Arthur

The advanced publicity to Tyrannosaurus Rex states "These aren’t your granddaddy’s dinosaurs!" Granted the comic hews closer to the fast, lean, birdlike creatures of the Jurassic Park franchise than to the tail-dragging lizards of yore. But in most other respects, its denizens come from old-world Hollywood - the one where man and dinosaur coexist uneasily, and women were clad in revealing fur bikinis. Actually, that's one area where the comic unfortunately disappoints. Anyone hoping for more cavegirl-style fanservice should just skip this comic. While the cover shows a dinosaur eying a skimpily-clad brunette, it never quite happens. At least not within the panels. At best, the humans are secondary characters who only bear witness as the dinosaurs run amuck.

As for the dinosaurs themselves, they're okay I guess. They're drawn in that fussy mainstream style that contains a copious amount of line hatching to suggest tiny details, but exaggerates anatomy for dramatic purposes. The overall effect is that every figure appears somewhat rubbery, especially the dinosaurs when they're being contorted into all kinds of odd combative poses. The comic reminds me of the island scenes from the 1933 film King Kong, but sans the love interest - the titular character stalks the jungle while being hounded at every opportunity by rivals bent on its destruction. The only thing that matters is getting the message across that the t-rex a total badass (interestingly, the tyrannosaur is similarly colored to the one in The Journey). In contrast, the environment it inhabits is unremarkable. The dinosaurs are often crammed into barely fitting panels and closed-in on all sides by generic jungle foliage. The unrelenting close-ups do create a constant sense of claustrophobia. Whatever background details that do get drawn remain fairly sketchy and only supply minimal information about the setting.

This leaves the humans with the role of odious comic relief, especially the lone hunter tracking the t-rex. He's got no chance and he knows it. So all he can do is complain incessantly, and provide the set-up for the lame gag that ends the story. But who's going to care about that bozo?