“Age of Reptiles”: Wordless Storytelling Excellence

The following originally saw print in 2011.  I’ve cleaned it up a tad and reformatted it for PipelineComics.com. I’ll have an update at the end.

The book is on sale this weekend at Comixology for Earth Day, so I’m reprinting it now. The sale ends on Monday, April 23, 2018.  Run, don’t walk!

 

The Best Overlooked Book of the Last Two Decades?

It’s a bold claim, I know, but Ricardo Delgado’s “Age of Reptiles” is an amazing artistic accomplishment that I doubt very many people have ever seen a page of. Dark Horse recently published an Omnibus edition that, I believe, collects all of the work from the series. It is an impressive accomplishment, and a joy to read through.

The book is composed of three mini-series, basically, telling stories of when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and ate each other. All the stories are silent, giving you a final Omnibus of 350+ pages of silent storytelling, which has to be some kind of record for a comic book. Delgado, an animator by trade who’s worked at Disney/PIXAR amongst other places (he worked on Disney’s “Dinosaur,” naturally), uses a very cinematic style of storytelling, with lots of wide angle shots, large images, and fast-paced sequences. But it’s a style that evolves over the course of the book.

 

The Stories Begin

In the first story, “Tribal Warfare,” a T. Rex battles a family of smaller/faster dinosaurs. It’s classic Hatfield and McCoys, with a circle of death and violence that escalates over the course of the 110 pages it runs. He kills one of theirs, they kill one of his. He goes after their children, they go after his eggs. Back and forth.

By the end of the story, you almost feel badly for these animals, but have to realize that it’s the dog-eat-dog life they lived. Survival counts for everything, and a meal is a meal. Delgado’s dinosaurs just take it more personally.

Still, it’s an emotional journey that’s also thrilling. There are moments in this story that stop you cold, memorable images of killer creatures staring each other down, or running from a kill most brutal. Delgado can stage a scene and a specific moment to hit hardest at the reader.

The art and story goes back to the early 90s, and some of the coloring seems crudely Photoshopped (or at least color separated), but the bold colors help you track the dinosaurs around. Delgado’s art is wide open, often relying more on the storytelling than the sheer line work to catch your breath. These are dinosaurs that leap, bounce, lumber, fight, and claw their way through the landscape. But they do so in spectacularly untamed nature, filled with distant waterfalls, lush and dense greenery, and wide open skies.

 

Bambi With Dinosaurs?

The second story, “The Hunt,” is an almost Disney-esque tale. When a dinosaur’s mother is killed, her child comes back to avenge her death, hunting her killers for the next 130 pages. It’s not exactly “Bambi,” but it has all the elements of dead parents, ultimate revenge on the murderers, and an adventure romp.

The story opens up a lot on this tale. Whereas the first one stayed focused on just the dinosaurs involved in an epic struggle, this one takes its time to mosey around a bit and introduces lots of other colorful creatures and their impacts on each other.

The art also tightens up a bit, and I could swear I see Moebius influences in parts of the landscape. The computer coloring looks a hundred times better, too. James Sinclair is credited on colors for the first two stories, but it’s clear that his style evolved with the technical elements between the first and second pieces of work. It’s much more slick, and the subtle shadow work that replaces the more garish gradients from the first story really help sell the piece. It’s smoother and more natural.

Delgado has some awe-inspiring pages and double-page splashes in this story, often of such simple things as dinosaurs flying over the clouds and coming into conflict. The negative space he uses is breathtaking. You can follow the story and get a better sense of scale and perspective from the angles he chooses.

 

The Grand Finale

The third story, recently completed, is another dramatic leap forward in Delgado’s art style. Picture Geoff Darrow or Scott Kolins drawing a dinosaur book. Imagine WETA Digital animating crowd scenes of dinosaurs. Picture Mike Mignola’s inset panels and storytelling choices, with Dave Stewart’s coloring style. (The colorist did change for this volume, but it’s Jim Campbell here, not Stewart.) Combine them all up, color it beautifully, and you have the last 100 jaw dropping pages of the book.

“The Journey” tells the story of multiple herds of dinosaurs on a journey together, presumably heading south for the winter or something. Imagine ten different types of dinosaurs sleeping amongst their own at night, just yards away from each other, before waking up at dawn and getting to their feet to travel some more. Then imagine the feeding opportunity this presents to smaller, faster dinosaurs. It can be brutal.

The art constricts a lot in this part of the book. Delgado uses a tighter grid of panels, with lots of smaller panels filled with dozens of dinosaurs. No texture is left un-inked. He does open it up at times, and those full page splashes are filled, again, with dozens of dinosaurs roaming in packs. It’s a ridiculously wonderful thing to stare at.

But, for the most part, there are a lot more panels here to capture the creatures’ reactions, to cover the stories of untimely demises, and to give the reader a sense of chaos and action. Delgado even goes so far as to do margin art, as if he was trying to compete with Sergio Aragones by unleashing a tidal wave of dinosaurs on the page.

 

Of Blood and Pacing and Silent Storytelling

This is a book that isn’t always easy to read. There’s a lot of bloodshed in it and dinosaurs taking each other down and feasting on their flesh. If you want cute dinosaurs doing fun things in a highly-detailed environment, I’d point you to “Gon,” instead.  (Heck, read “Gon” anyway. It’s a great book.)

Just because the pages aren’t filled with word balloons, that doesn’t mean it’s a breeze to read through. Sure, you could, but silent storytelling demands more of your attention to follow the story. The art carries it all, so you need to pay attention to that.

There will also be times when Delgado’s art stops you dead in your tracks. You’ll want to let your eyes wander over the art spreads in the book, to take in the composure (trees doubling as framing elements), the quiet power (of birds in flight soaring over the clouds), or the sheer density of what’s one the page (like every panel of every page of “The Journey.”)

 

The Omnibus Edition

The Omnibus edition of the book contains all the forwards ever written for the series and its collections, including a new one from Genndy Tartakovzky. The other impressive names introducing these tales include Ray Harryhausen, Burne Hogarth (Delgado was a student), John Landis, and Thomas Schumacher (V.P. of Walt Disney Feature Animation.)

There’s also 15 pages of sketchbook material in the back and essays Delgado wrote to accompany “The Journey.”

Normally, I’d avoid smaller reprints like this one. The print page size is smaller than standard comic size, and art as detailed as Delgado’s gets over the course of this book could really use the breathing room that an “Absolute”-type presentation could offer. Yet I’m OK with this Omnibus. I think shrinking the art down does tighten it up a bit, particularly in the earlier stages of the book. That could only serve to help.

The book never suffers from sitting in my hand so easily, and the colors present very well here. There are some darker pages in the last third that start to approach muddy, but so long as you read the book in a brightly lit room, you won’t have any problems with it. The glossy pages do their thing well.

Perhaps overly optimistically, the Omnibus has a giant “1” on its spine. I hope it doesn’t take another two decades for a second book to show up in the series. This stuff is too good, particularly at the $24.99 price point.

Delgado, by the way, won an Eisner in 1997 for “Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition.” He did another mini-series through Dark Horse, “Hieroglyph,” which is not collected yet.

 

2018 Update

I originally read this book in Dark Horse’s Omnibus format, which is a print publication that fits in your hand.  It is appreciably smaller than a standard comic, as I mentioned before.  For the most part — except for the last story — Delgado’s art is wide open, without too many panels per page.  Like manga does with its smaller page size, Delgado is careful to keep the panel number per page very small.  He uses lots of double page spreads in the book, and limits most of his panel pages to about four panels per page.

Because of that, the art is easily read at the smaller size. I re-read parts of it digitally as big as I could take it.  As it turns out, I think this book looks better when you shrink the art down.  It does tighten things up in a nice way. Delgado isn’t filling the page with feathering and crosshatching and all the small details that make for noodle lines you want to see as large as possible.

If you want to read this book on an iPad or, even better, an iPad Mini, I think you might have the optimal experience.

Delgado’s follow-up book, “Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians” is also available now digitally.  It has about 100 pages of story, plus plenty of sketchbook and pin-up/cover work, with a few more text introductions.  Dark Horse published that in January of 2016.

I haven’t read it yet, but I did flip through a few pages and the art and coloring has only gotten better. The style picks up nicely where the Omnibus book ended.

 

Buy It Now

“Age of Reptiles Omnibus”:

 

“Age of Reptiles: Ancient Egyptians”:

 

 

Izneo.com Preview

If you’re in Europe, Izneo is the digital distributor of Dark Horse comics.  You cannot buy them there from North America, though.

The second book, “Ancient Egyptians” is not available currently through Izneo, though the original Omnibus is available for our European friends.