Dinosaur Comics

A critical dinosaur: example comic strip

Dinosaur Comics is a web comic by Canadian Ryan North. Also known as 'Qwantz' because of the site's domain name of qwantz.com, it has been online since February 1 2003. Each weekday a new comic is posted; each comic uses the same artwork as every dinosaur comic before it, with only the dialogue changed. This has almost been done unintentionally by other cartoonists who like to copy and paste or cannot draw, and intentionally by many of his fans – the website has an extensive fan art section — who often take it far beyond his own experiments. Examples: [1] or [2], or extensions into entirely different media like this video: [3]

There are also easter eggs: every comic contains two hidden comments. One is accessed by holding the cursor over the strip and waiting for the alt-text window to pop up. The other is found in the subject line of the 'comments' e-mail address. Some of the title text comments are longer than Mozilla allows for. (There is a Mozilla bug report for this behaviour that is four years old, causing some readers to become impatient.) In this case, the full comments (and the email subject lines) can be found by viewing the page's html source.

The Cast

The cast includes:

T-Rex, the star, if only because he gets the most panels.
Utahraptor, T-rex's foil, who appears in the second half of the comic.
Dromiceiomimus, who appears in only one panel.

Each character is named after his (or, in the case of Dromiceiomimus, her) species. Apparently there are not too many dinosaurs in their world: things do not seem to get that confusing. Although other T-Rexes have been mentioned in the strip, they have never been shown.

T-Rex sometimes tries to make out with Dromiceiomimus, possibly overcompensating for a one-off gay fling with Utahraptor which is referred to in an early episode (although T-Rex is unsure of whether or not it actually occurred).

There are also the supporting characters who never say much. In fact, they are almost part of the scenery of the strip. They are:

the tiny house (presumably occupied)
the tiny car (possibly occupied)
the tiny woman

--all of which are stomped on by T-Rex.

God and the Devil also make frequent appearances in the strip, speaking from off the top and bottom of the screen respectively, in bold and capitalized letters. They also speak with no punctuation whatsoever and can only be heard by T-rex. Other off-panel characters include T-Rex's neighbors, families of raccoons and cephalopods who talk to him in italics.

Dinosaur Comics tends to focus on topics that are not usually covered by other comics, including ethical relativism [4], the nature of happiness, the secret to being loved, the search for God, and so forth. While the humor used is often random and surreal, the discussions that Utahraptor and T-rex have are often of a sophisticated level and manner.

External links

Categories: Web comics