Jessica’s father constantly moved her across the country. See, he’s this high level scientist, always in demand, especially from the military. Which was great for her dad, but Jessica has never had the chance to develop a lasting bond with anyone else. She’s lonely. She’s sullen. She spends most of her time riding around on her skateboard. And then, one day, after accidentally ripping a hole in the space time continuum, Jessica gets the greatest pet in the entire world.
Written by Cullen Bunn
Illustrated by Drew MossThe touching story of a girl and her T-Rex… with a healthy dose of collateral damage and monster conflict on the side. When the scientists of Cosmos Labs punch a hole through time and space, they pull a ferocious dinosaur into the present. The dinosaur imprints on teenage Jessica, proving to be more mischievous than vicious. But he is not alone. Strangely mutated prehistoric monsters begin attacking our world. What’s a girl and her dinosaur-fighting dinosaur supposed to do?
When I was six, my dad took me to see Jurassic Park. This was a huge event for me: same as most everyone ever, I friggin’ loved dinosaurs, was completely obsessed with them, had the toys and models and posters all over my bedroom, and I stomped around the house roaring and knocking over everything that wasn’t bolted down or made of solid oak. It was also 1993, back when a PG-13 rating meant something, when it wasn’t a generic catch-all rating, and I remember it took hours of begging and pleading with my parents to let me see this movie. And oh my God it was amazing. The balance of terror and awe Spielberg evoked with his dinosaurs; the way the characters interacted with them, touched them, and looked at them was above and beyond the rear projection from the old stop-motion animated figures in the old movies; the whole thing felt real. It was all enough for my mind to explode.
Naturally, I wanted a dinosaur as a pet. Duh. And try as I might, my dog back then would not go along with the tyrant lizard attitude I needed from him. Unless you count chasing me around the yard nipping at me until I fell over particularly dinosaurish.
I bring this up because Cullen Bunn and Drew Moss’s new series for Oni, “Terrible Lizard,” understands that fantasy. It’s one of those stories where some weird circumstance brings an offbeat creature into a kid’s life. And where else besides comics can you get such pure fantasy fulfillment? And yeah, sure, the book starts off as a riff variation of stuff like Doug TenNapel’s “Tommysaurus Rex,” (which wasn’t the worst) or the How to Train Your Dragon stories, but it’s clear Bunn has different ambitions on his mind. His mission isn’t to just retell Sounder with a tyrannosaur; he’s taking stuff from his work at IDW on the post-apocalyptic monster romp, “Godzilla: Cataclysm,” and trying it out over here.
This issue is primarily set up for the rest of the series. Bunn relies on a lot of archetypes — the lonely girl, the overzealous military squadron leader whose first response to any hint of danger is to immediately open fire, the genius scientist who has his doubts about their project — but I think much of that’s because he wants to get to the meatier and more fun parts of the story. Not that this issue isn’t fun — because we get tears in the space time continuum, a minor T-Rex rampage, a scientific disaster, and some cute sight gags — but it all still feels like a preview of what’s coming up next. Even though Bunn’s rushing forward at 65 million miles per hour, he still takes the time to carefully set his pieces into place, position them right before he starts mowing them down. We get the right sense of empathy and understanding of Jessica and her father, we know the exact sort of malice to expect from Colonel Grayson. This series is only supposed to run for five issues, and when there’s the promise of other massive kaiju battles hovering above it, you want to empathize with the characters just enough so you worry about when they’re in danger.
Continued belowDrew Moss keeps it fairly pulled back as well. The layouts and design-work mostly features a standard widescreen presentation. There are about five or six panels per page, and save for one gag sequence, never really an animated feel. Moss is more about capturing that one image from a scene, and trying to pack in as much of the action he can on the page. His staging and choreography work well for him in this book, too, especially when he pulls back for a big reveal, whether with an enormous panel or a whole splash page.
What concerns him most for this book is scale and weight. When the T-Rex appears, you feel how cramped and crowded it is in those science labs. You get a sense of how it constantly towers over everyone. For scenes with people and the T-Rex, Moss just barely squeezes the dinosaur’s head into the frame. Most importantly, especially for a book like this, I think, you can clearly sense it’s weight — how difficult it is for this creature to move around, the sheer seismic energy it takes for it even lift its head. If the teaser promised anything, it’s that eventually this book is going to delve into cataclysmic monster battles, and the thing that sells these monster battles most, for me, is the feeling that these creatures are making an impact.
Moss’s style also falls right on that border between representational and objectifiable artwork. There are a lot of people making a lot of silly faces, sure, but his attention to monster movement and the reality of that movement also helps to sell the story. Colorist Ryan Hill doesn’t go overboard with the rendering either. Mostly the colors are flat with simple shadows, and each scene has a color coding to it to help us know exactly where we are in the story and help immediately understand the mood of the scene. For example: there’s some nasty yellow in the teaser, lots of grays in Jessica’s mopey scenes, a plethora of greens, red, oranges, and blues throughout the rest of the story.
As for the other monsters themselves, we only get a sneak peek at a couple others besides the T-Rex, and the promises in the tease look exciting.
“Terrible Lizard” isn’t offering much of anything new or original on the kid-and-their-pet story, and that’s okay. I think Cullen Bunn and Drew Moss are far more interested in brewing up an epic smackdown, and the key to this series’s success lies in how strong they can establish the bond between Jessica and the T-Rex. Judging from what they’ve managed to pull together in a few pages, I don’t think that element will be a problem. This book seems to want to go for the spectacle of having a pet. And i know, in my post-Jurassic Park, dino-wishing haze, this is exactly what I would have wanted out of life.
Final Verdict: 7.7 – Fun, colorful, and features a dinosaur and other giant monsters. Who cares if the premise isn’t entirely original when there’s so much else to go off on for this?
