When I read Dark Horse International’s UK Jurassic Park comic I wondered what marketing it may have received in their other titles. Throughout the reviews you’ll see adverts for the likes of Total Carnage, Manga Mania and what could probably be described as their flagship comic, Aliens. It’s on the back page of an issue of that film spin-off that I spotted a full-page advertisement for the new movie tie-in comic.
As I announced last Christmas, Aliens will be coming to the blog this year in a real-time read through of Dark Horse’s time with the licence (UPDATE: Now live). Whenever I buy classic comics from eBay I don’t read them until I’m scheduled to do so for the blog, but I do flick through them, solely checking the page numbers to ensure there’s nothing missing. As I picked up #13 (on sale 24th June 1993) to begin flicking from the back cover to the front, counting down the page numbers as I went, this jumped out at me.
As you can see, I wasn’t the only person something was jumping out on. Using the cover from #1 (by Gil Kane and George Perez), this is promoting the initial run of the adaptation of the film, before the American comic began publishing the first official continuation of the story. At this point in the US bets were hedged before telling readers it was an ongoing comic, so naturally over here they’d do the same. Released every three weeks to start with, it all began on 8th July before the movie had even been released here.
The advert mentions how the art of the strip was based on stills from the movie, which is a strange boast to make. It makes it sound like it could be nothing more than traced-like images, but of course in the end it was a genuinely good comics adaptation which successfully tinkered with the script and the running order of the scenes so it’d work better on the page. Well, for the most part anyway, until they got to the final chapter. You can read the reviews to see what happened there.
The Jurassic Park comic would prove popular enough to survive many cancellations at Dark Horse
Strangely, it’s advertised as a 32-page comic when it actually had 36, but then again Dark Horse didn’t seem to count their covers in the total. Then in a later issue of Aliens (#17) I discovered the exact same advert again minus the green text along the bottom. However, the promotion of a competition with “50 (count them) 50 fantastic prizes” only applied to #1 and not the competitions in the issues on sale at that later time. What does correlate properly are the Dark Horse Checklists.
In each of the early editions of Jurassic Park the checklist showed the upcoming comics that would be on sale over the next month, so they contained details of the next issue. This means we never got to see the checklist released for the premiere issue to see what it had to say, but #13 of Aliens does, just a couple of pages before that advert.
By the time Jurassic Park moved to a monthly ongoing format with brand new stories set after the movie the checklists were dropped from it. There just wasn’t room anymore, however they still appeared in the larger Aliens. Below is the one which promoted the beginning of the first official sequel to the movie, although it unfortunately doesn’t mention the completely awesome Age of Reptiles back up strip.
The question marks might look like they’re keeping the free gift a mystery for some reason, but it’s actually just placeholder text that they’ve forgotten to delete before going to press because #6 didn’t come with a free gift. A few sloppy errors aside it’s interesting to see how one of my favourite childhood comics was marketed to potential readers.
After the movie proved to be such a phenomenal success I thought they’d have advertised the comic more, that they’d have at least produced a new advert to promote the new stories instead of recycling the one they’d already used before the film’s release. Oh well, hindsight is a wonderful gift. The Jurassic Park comic would prove popular enough to survive many cancellations at Dark Horse, only succumbing to the folding of the company itself towards the end of 1994. You can read reviews of them all on the blog right now.
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