Luke Owen looks at Dinosaurs Attack! #3 from IDW…
Is anyone on Earth safe from the time-displaced, flesh-hungry dinosaurs, phased into modern-day reality by Prof. Thorne’s particle beam experiment gone awry? Will a dream-like conversation with a sentient humanoid dinosaur spark a plan to end all this global destruction, or actually hasten humanity’s demise?
Last month, Dinosaurs Attack! impressed readers with it’s hyper-violent scenes of death, destruction and reptile madness. However, in the review I mentioned that while the action and artwork was superb, the story was beyond weak and acted as a deterrent from the dino carnage. Sadly, Dinosaurs Attack #3 is a comic which is 100% focused on the story – getting out all of the exposition so we can get back to the violence next month.
The problem with this is that story surrounding Dinosaurs Attack! isn’t that interesting – it’s in fact completely dull. The characters are either cardboard cutouts or just there to be dino fodder and as such, it’s hard to invest any emotion in them. Panels blend into the next without little thought or care and the story is so mundane and too-overly cliché that the comic just becomes a slog to sit through. It shows how little you care about Gary Gerani’s work when a talking dinosaur shows up mid-comic and you barely batter an eyelid.
Dinosaurs Attack! is the complete opposite of the most recent Mars Attacks! run from IDW. John Layman and John McCrea got the balance right in that comic where the plot was as interesting as the violence, meaning it never felt tiresome to read when the Martians weren’t blowing humans up. Dinosaurs Attack!‘s biggest problem in terms of being a success is that Gerani’s story is so much weaker than the artwork of Flint Henry, Earl Norem, George Freeman, which is simply gorgeous to look at. The painted styling of these artists perfectly replicates the artwork of the TOPPS cards the series is based on and had there been a better story surrounding them, this would be currently one of the better comics to buy.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Dinosaurs Attack! #4 will be a great issue. Gerani has gotten all of the, admittedly, much needed exposition out of the way so that he can focus his attention on the destruction aspect that people want to read. In an ideal world, he would have gotten the balance of violence and story right, but sadly Dinosaurs Attack! is a one-trick pony and that trick is not on show here. Simply put, Dinosaurs Attack! #3 is pretty boring, tedious and a waste of your time.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published September 26, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
