HE'S GOING TO NEED A BIGGER UTILITY BELT

Welcome, once again to the dank confines of the Bargain Basement of Dooooom. In this yellow-fingered rummage through the three-for-a-quid box, I’m going to turn my bloodshot eyes away from the Big Two and turn them towards Dark Horse, and AGE OF REPTILES.    

Everyone likes dinosaurs. This is just an empirically and mathematically verifiable fact. And, as its title suggests, Age of Reptiles is filled with nothing but the prehistoric peanut-brained bastards. It was actually three separate limited series, published in 1993, 1997 and 2009, respectively: ‘Tribal Warfare’ depicts a tit-for-tat clash between a pack of deinonychus and tyrannosaurs; ‘The Hunt’ is an archetypal tale of an orphaned child out for revenge (essentially Batman, if Batman were an allosaurus); and ‘The Journey’ follows a mass migration.

What’s distinctive about all three series is that, given the famously non-chatty and distinctly unsesquipedalian nature of the titular terrible lizards, these are entirely wordless comics. Instead, the storytelling flows entirely from the pencil of artist/creator Ricardo Delgado. Quite a daunting task, but Delgado is a remarkably gifted artist, not only establishing strong narratives and choreographing breathless action, but also bringing real character and personality to his saurian cast.

Naturally, the heightened level of drama involves a fair bit of unrealistic anthropomorphism, in terms of both the animals’ expressiveness and their inner emotional life, though this aspect is pared back with every successive series, with ‘The Journey’ being relatively naturalistic. There’s another kick in the teeth for palaeontologists, as Delgado displays a cavalier disregard for the eras and areas in which his mighty protagonists live, throwing together species that in reality were separated by millions of years and thousands of miles.

But for those of us not elbow-deep in sauropod bone fragments and coprolites, these comics are a real treasure. The stories are fast-paced, explosive and extremely bloody, and the bold, beautiful art is a feast for gluttonous eyes, with sumptuously rendered oviraptors, carnotaurs, mosasaurs and more threatening to burst from the page and chew your puny human face right off. 

These issues have been compiled into a handsome omnibus, but are a regular feature in yer scabby bargain bins (it’s where I got all mine from). This is handy for the cash-strapped comics connoisseur, but also a bit of a shame – Age of Reptiles is no guilty pleasure, but a high-quality book that deserves a wider audience, a true classic of pure, mainlined sequential art.

With dinosaurs.

And dinosaurs are cool.

(originally posted on The Big Glasgow Comic Page)