Review: Jim Lawson's 1993 Dino Island

I've probably been looking for Jim Lawson's 1993, two-issue mini-series Dino Island in back issue bins for at least 25 years now...unsuccessfully. 

Lawson is, as you probably know, an alum of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Mirage Studios, having drawn many issues of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series (including the "City At War" arc) and its sister series Tales of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, written and drawn the entirety of the full-color volume 2, drawn the Laird-written volume 4 and various and sundry other TMNT works, including the newspaper comic strip, a volume of the Pallaium role-playing game and the adaptations of the characters' first two films. 

I haven't exactly kept track, but I'm pretty sure Lawson remains the most prolific artist to ever draw the characters, his page count dwarfing that of any other contender. 

I've come to appreciate Lawson's idiosyncratic work more and more as time went on, and, at some point I remembered a Mirage house ad for his Dino Island in the back of some Turtle comic or another, as it was one of the relatively few Turtle-less comics Mirage published from creators like Lawson and Michael Dooney (And, for a time, Mirage was home to Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo and a spin-off, Space Usagi). All I remembered was the image of a woman atop a triceratops, and an establishing shot featuring sauropods in a pen. After reading Lawson's later Paleo: Tales From Late Cretaceous, a collection of excellent dinosaur comics seemingly inspired by, or at least made in the spirit of, Stephen Bissette's Tyrant, I really wanted to see Lawson doing a people-and-dinosaurs book.

A couple weeks ago, I got an email from Midtown Comics, telling me that books from my "wish list" were now available: Dino Island #1 and #2. To be honest, I had forgotten that I had ever even looked them up on their site or that I had added to my wish list. Hell, I forgot that I even had an account there, let alone a wish list. 

So that was a nice surprise.

Not long after, these comics, these two comics, released the same year that the original Jurassic Park film had come out, were sitting on my desk. 

Now I wouldn't be being entirely honest if I said that the 53-page story completely rewarded a 25-year wait; that's a lot of expectation to live up to, after all. But I must say that I wasn't at all disappointed, either. It was Lawson at the height of his powers, drawing a comic full of the sorts of things that Lawson seemed to like to draw: Dinosaurs, aliens, vehicles, a pretty lady. 

It also intersects with a particular interest of mine—dinosaurs, sure, but, specifically, human beings encountering dinosaurs—in what today reads to me like a very particular stylist doing a riff on "The War That Time Forgot" feature from DC's old Star Spangled War Stories series. (Which was, of course, itself a riff on classic science fiction and fantasy from the likes of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs; in fact, shortly after seeing her first dinosaurs, the heroine of Dino Island says to herself, "Thiz place is like some kinda Edgar Rice Buroughs novel.")

I would be quite curious to learn more about the behind-the-scenes of this book. As I've said plenty of times before, I would love to know more about Mirage in general, as it seems like an important story in comics history that for some reason no one has written yet. 

This came out the same year that the first volume of TMNT ended (concluding with the epic-length "City At War" story drawn by Lawson) and the second one began...and the same year that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot Crossover (also, in part, by Lawson) launched. Three years later, TMNT would relaunch for its third volume...not at Mirage, but at Image Comics.

Lawson was, obviously, quite busy, and I'm curious why this book, the covers of which are signed "Lawson 92", ended up as a two-issue miniseries, rather than a more standard-length four-issue mini. It feels a little...well, maybe not rushed, but definitely compact, and it would easily, clearly have benefited from being given more room to breathe. There's definitely a point in the second issue where it seems Lawson could have used a double-page spread to express a sense of awe and wonder (something done quite effectively in the first issue), but he instead used a more standard sized panel on a single page, and the series could have used a bigger page count to explore the characters, who don't get much development in the fleet-moving narrative.

Also, surprisingly, the book could have used more dinosaurs...I mean, with a title like "Dino Island", one might expect a little more dinosaur content than we end up with. (As for why Lawson went with Dino Island rather than Dinosaur Island, well, the latter was apparently already taken, by a Fantagraphics-published book from 1991 that I have never even  heard of...but now want to read. Maybe I should add that to my wish list...)

While Lawson wrote and drew Dino Island, he does have a pair of collaborators here. The color is provided by Mary Woodring, who also colored that Flaming Carrot crossover, and it's lettered by Mirage's regular leterrer Steve Lavigne. Given Lawson and Lavigne's presence, it thus looks and feels like a Mirage book, despite the bright, poppy colors...I'm not sure if it's particular to Woodring or not, or perhaps the technology of the era, but, like the Flaming Carrot crossover, this book felt more colorful than most color comics to me. Of course, that might also be because I am so used to seeing Lawson's art in black and white. (I should note here that the panels below are ones I scanned from the comic using the scanner at the public library where I work, and they never seem to look quite right to me, so please be aware that the colors in the actual book are a bit better than they look here). 

The first issue opens with a full-page splash of a woman in flight gear in the cockpit of a plane, which we will later learn is a P-51D Allison, if that means anything to you guys. She's blonde, with red lips and spots of pink blush on her cheeks, and she is staring down at her instruments with a look somewhere between sadness and concern. At the top of the page, the date "October 19, 1942" is written.

We quickly learn that she's attempting a trans-Atlantic speed record but that hr instruments are behaving strangely, when she radios "Bermuda Naval." Soon, her compasses start acting up, and then she sees something that makes her say "No...", and she's bathed in a bright light. She awakens sometime later, still in her cockpit, and sees land below where there shouldn't be any.

In short order, she collides with something but doesn't see what. Given the title, we see enough of the object to realize what it is right away, even if she doesn't.

She manages to land, repair her plane, and then starts to explore, finding some strange footprints: "Wow...These are the biggest damn bird tracks I've ever seen!"

Soon, she climbs up a ridge and looks over to this fantastic double-page splash reveal...

It's a whole herd of triceratops! Peter Laird's favorite dinosaur! (And, obviously, this looks better if you're holding the book in your hands, than a scan of it does.)

She's barely taken a moment to consider how insane that image is ("I must be completely bats!") before she rescues a triceratops from a pair of raptors. It then returns the favor when they turn on her. When she spies a plane fly above, she mounts the triceratops and heads in that direction. Some miles (but just a few pages) later, there's a splash of her atop the dinosaur regarding some kind of little village built between a battleship and the coast, with a pen of dinosaurs. This is apparently the image used in that house ad I saw all those years ago.

There she meets a friendly man who she introduces herself to as Amelia (I assumed it was that Amelia, but, checking the date of her disappearance online later, I see this comic is set five years after that Amelia's. Lawson probably should have given her any other name then, really). The man then introduces her to a Captain Errouck, whose battleship is part of the settlement they've formed and named Plymouth.

In short order, the captain explains that Amelia is now part of their society, which he is completely in charge of, and he offers her their best theories about the place: They think the Bermuda Triangle is some kind of dimensional gate, and it has transported them all to an entirely different world, based on a geological clue (the rocks have no strata, it seems). A professor offers to show her "The Convincer", but that has to wait until part two...

Once again mounting her triceratops, which she has named Spike, Amelia and the professor head out...and he shows her a gigantic rectangular monolith, its gradient colors including violet, blue and green, and its size and perfect shape proving that it's no natural occurrence (This is the instance where a splash page might have been a good strategy to emphasize the bizarre nature as well as the importance of the object).

As they explore, and Ameila learns that no one has been to the top because it's too big to climb, the two red, horned therapods on the cover of the second issue attack, killing Spike. Amelia and the professor might be next, but a Jeep from the settlement arrives to rescue them, as the captain needs the professor immediately.

If the story moved fast up until now, here it starts speeding. 

The captain has a strange, humanoid alien bound to a chair in a room; it was apparently found disemboweling one of the town's sentries using tools from some sort of medical kit. The alien has a strange, vaguely mushroom-shaped head, with its eyes high atop that head, orange skin and strange-looking hands and feet (You can see its fellow alien, which looks exactly like it, in an image below.) Despite being questioned, it won't talk. 

We then jump immediately to Amelia's plan to explore the monolith, as the professor flies her over it and she parachutes to the top. Finding a disguised entrance, she journeys within, where she meets an alien identical to the first. There's a four-page conversation, in which this very chatty alien explains everything to Amelia in plain English, including the nature of the world they are in; I won't get into it here, but I will note it will sound familiar to anyone who has read a particular popular science-fiction comedy novel from England. 

After what I am assuming is a weird coloring mistake (note the purple rectangle in the first panel on the page below, overlapping and partially obscuring the dialogue balloon), this alien tells Amelia that her fellow humans must release the one they are holding, or else "the project will be abandoned."

Which, here, means the end of the world.

The professor picks Amelia up at the foot of the structure, which we now understand the nature and purpose of, on another dinosaur, but it's too late for her to plead for the release of the captive alien: "The alien's dead," they're told as soon as they arrive back at Plymouth. "Errouch was slapping him around- I think he broke his neck."

In the very next panel, a strange ovoid shape appears in the sky. In the next panel after that, it fires a green ray at Plymouth, creating a fiery explosion.  The aliens are attacking! Amelia manages to steal her confiscated plane back and get it up into the air, leading to a rather beautiful four-page plane vs. flying saucer dogfight, one that ends when she strafes the ship, and we get a close-up of a dead, shot-up alien in its strange cockpit (This one wears a green jumpsuit rather than a yellow one, and is thus presumably a different one than the one she met inside the monolith...that, or, perhaps, he changed into a different jumpsuit to pilot his craft, having gone on the attack as soon as he learned his partner had been killed). 

The time then jumps ahead two weeks, to a dour epilogue. With the aliens gone, the world is dying. The atmosphere is degrading, the plants are dying off and the dinosaurs are following them. 

Is this the end? Yes, probably. 

"Maybe," Amelia tells a man. "Or maybe this is just a transitionary period while the planet adjusts..." 

In the meantime, she advises they start building underground shelters, because "Soon it will be too hot to stay up here."

And those are the last words of the series, which ends with our heroine, all of the characters and apparently all the dinos facing almost certain death.

It's not all that unusual for stories in which modern humans discover a lost world of dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures, only for that world to "end" as they escape at the end of the adventure—think Conan Doyle's Lost World, 1933's Son of Kong, 1951's Lost Continent—but this is different, darker, as the outsider, human characters seem like they are doomed to go down with the lost world and its inhabitants. 

Dino Island is a pretty fun, old school adventure story, full of well-made and quite striking imagery. It's also an example of an auteur seemingly following his bliss, making a comic full of things he likes, the appeal of its components proving infectious to the reader. I certainly wouldn't have objected if there were two or four or 20 more issues of it. 

I'd say to look for it in any back-issue bins you may come across, but, in my experience, it probably won't be there. So, I guess you could add it to your wish list...? Or perhaps hope that IDW, who has republished so much of Mirage's output, decides to collect it at some point, maybe with Lawson's Paleo under a title like The Dinosaur Comics of Jim Lawson or something...? 

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I didn't notice this until I set the comics side by side to take a picture of them, but the covers actually connect to form a single image:

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The house ads in Dino Island are for a new color series of Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III film, an "all-new color 17 x 22 poster by Todd McFarlane" featuring his image of Michaelangelo from TMNT #50 and for an upcoming Michael Dooney superhero series called Xeno-Tech ("Some heroes are born... Some have to be made"). 

I've never seen Dooney's book in the wild, but the Grand Comics Database says it lasted four issues, and was apparently published as "Xenotech," sans the ad's hyphen. I'm not surprised it didn't catch on given all the competition for superhero comics in those glut years, but I'd still be interested in seeing what Dooney might have done with the genre (He did a couple of Turtles comics which played the characters off of more traditional superhero comics types).

There was also this page which, had I the money as a high-schooler in 1993, I would have ordered pretty much everything from it that I didn't already have:

Looking it over now, it looks like I have all of the comics listed here in one form or another, save for Mark Bode's Times Pipeline TMNT special (which has never been collected or reprinted?), Gizmo, Gizmo & Fugitoid, Bade Biker, Grunts and Space Usagi.