Please tell me this is not another webcomic
Dinosaur comics is a webcomic that features the same six panels on every delivery. I wish I could tell you that at least these panels were beautifully hand-drawn, colored and inked by a professional on the comic industry, but I'd be lying: the panels were made with clipart software a few years ago.
Do not be fooled, though. Having the same layout for every entry on the comic is a unique creative challenge, as the dialogue and stories have to be different enough to be interesting and funny in themselves. And they are.
Does it feature original characters?
The main cast is:
- T-Rex: a Green Tyrannosaurus rex, in case you were wondering.
- Dromiceiomimus: a yellow-ish Dromiceiomimus that is also a nautical engineer.
- Utahraptor: an orange Utahraptor that is gay but has many other interests besides "gay things"
Also featuring every once in a while:
- God, who has some issues with punctuation. Also, a master of Hide-and-seek.
- Satan he likes videogames.
- William Shakespeare who likes to listen his MP3s. In Tudor England
- Other dudes such as the house that T. Rex stomps on, a tiny woman that T. Rex also stomps and maybe other characters which are not dinosaurs.
Why on God's Green Earth would I be interested in this?
The comic holds vast amounts of knowledge and meaningful discussion on a very wide selection of topics of human interests. For example:
- The perceived awesomeness of lost technology (#1500)
- The theoretical perfection of a woman (#2350)
- The balance between being grammatically correct and not being a jerk(#609)
- The Cotard Delusion (#973)
- The problems of being raised by only one parent (#210)
- An explanation of humor (#631)
What kind of loony would write this?
The comic's author is
Ryan North. He's Canadian, which is awesome I think
1. He studied
something about computers on Carleton University and also has a Master's Degree from University of Toronto for
speaking to PCs. He has also written for the comic book version of the series
Adventure Time
Why?
In the words of Monsieur North
2:
I was finishing up my undergrad degree, and just starting up grad school. It was a class assignment. The class was divided into thirds, and we had to do something "interesting with the Internet" with randomly assigned domain names. After a couple of weeks, my group had done nothing, and I was like, "Screw you guys, I'm putting up these comics!"
They'd basically come from wanting to write a comic, but being unable to draw. My first idea was a comic where it was always the same story, told with different pictures, which was precisely the wrong project for me to be doing. So I flipped it. What if we had the same pictures with different stories? Those initial couple of months it was just me and my mom reading the comic, and she lost interest at some point... so it was several years before I had an audience to speak of, people who'd email me and say "nice comic" and stuff like that.
Three years later, I'd finished my grad degree, and I had a choice between getting a real job or being an Internet cartoonist. And it was really easy. All I had to do to become an Internet cartoonist was to fail to get a real job, which is the easiest thing in the world to do, right? I didn't even send out any resumés! I just didn't apply for jobs, and then I had this new job.
Where is it?
You can find the comic on its main website
here, but it's also present in
Twitter and
Facebook and
Google+. Mister North's twitter handle is
@ryanqnorth
More, more!
- qwantz.org is a small tool that takes panels from random releases of DC to create a new one. Results may be awesome or a total mess that is neither funny nor interesting.
- Ryan North has been involved in other projects:
- He wrote "To be or not to be", a "chooseable path" version of Hamlet which is the same Hamlet you probably haven't read, only that it's in a format that, uh... has different adventures and you get to choose which one3
- Along with David Malki! and Matthew Bennardo, he co-edited the book Machine of Death, a collection of short stories about a machine that predicts one's death but is hilariously/tragically ambiguous about the results. The sequel, "This is how you die" will be released shortly4 after this writeup has been finished.
Footnotes
1 I'm not Canadian myself, but I find it awesome that, while some countries have national anthems that talk about war, Canada just said 'screw this' and his National anthem is called O Canada. They also have Canada Day because everybody's got an Independence Day or something.
2 From Ryan North's interview on Bookslut
3 Apprently, "Choose your own adventure" is trademarked
4 Some online libraries give the date of July 13 2013, but take it with a grain of salt.