Story and Art by: John Byrne
Color by: Ronda Pattison
I have a hard time respecting artists that aren’t capable of monthly artistic duties. If you can’t handle 9-12 comics a month you should be in another profession. In the old days artists drew multiple comics in a single month. If they couldn’t keep up, the work dried up. Today there are too many artists that have no output whatsoever, but people fawn over their super-pretty work. I’m sure most professional artists can up their game if they spent four months working on a single comic.
John Byrne is outspoken and burned many bridges in his creative life. I wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan, but he’s produced some fantastic comic art over the course of his career. Byrne’s also a pretty good writer. In fact, the only writer/artist so prolific in my comic reading life would have to be Mike Grell. I may not love everything that Byrne says, but at 60 years old he’s still capable of writing and drawing multiple comics in a single month. I doubt too many artists today could draw two comics in a month, let alone write them.
The first two films in the Jurassic Park series are among my favorites. I have an extra special affinity for the Lost World since it features a very special cast with outstanding chemistry. As a quick aside, I was saddened by the passing of Pete Postlethwaite earlier this month. His performance was far beyond the typical acting seen in franchise sequels. Topps produced decent JP comics in the ’90s, but they were never anything to speak of. I was excited when IDW announced the license. I gave a look at the debut issue of the first series “Redemption” when it hit the shelves. Unfortunately, Nate Van Dyke’s artwork was so poor I couldn’t bring myself to sample it.
This, on the other hand, is the Jurassic Park comic that I’ve been waiting 18 years to read. John Byrne is by no means the greatest artist in the history of comics, but he’s a strong storyteller and capable of translating multiple characters, lots of action, and various settings in an interesting way. The layouts are simple and tell the story without any flashiness. Byrne uses four rectangular panels on each of the first twenty pages leading to the reveal of the dinos on the final two-page spread. It’s simple but excellent sequential storytelling.
Byrne’s words match his strong artistic showing. “The Devils in the Desert” is set up like an old school horror movie. The action takes place in a small cattle town where mutilations are becoming a problem. We meet a varied cast of locals and quickly get to know them through an ample amount of dialogue. Byrne hits a near perfect balance of words and pictures. You don’t fly through the comic nor does it ever feel like a slog. The dinosaurs are only seen in glimmers until the final pages. It all builds up to reveal that the series will feature Pteranodons as the “villain.” Nice choice of dinos considering the T-Rex and raptors lost their specialness a while back.
This is a strong start to a four-issue miniseries. John Byrne’s sets up the characters, situations, and opposition in the space of 22 pages. The cast of characters are interesting and seem worthy of rooting for over the course of the next few issues. That’s a really great trick. If the characters are so bad that you root for the dinosaurs, then what’s the point of reading. Thankfully this is shaping up to be the best Jurassic Park comic ever produced. Put me down for issue #2.
