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 the 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. 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, beginning 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 and 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 comics checklist showed the upcoming issues that would be on sale over the next month, so they contained details of the next edition. 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.
Then 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 did not 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 though 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.
Upon first spotting this post you may be wondering why I’m talking about a videogame on a classic comics blog. Well, regular readers may remember back when I was reading Dark Horse International’s Jurassic Park comic that the advertisement for this game and the subsequent competition to win a copy of the Nintendo GameBoy version brought back many happy memories of playing it at the time. Those memories have now ended up costing me money.
Earlier this year I bought a bookazine about the history of Nintendo and the chapters covering this little joyful plastic box had me grinning from ear-to-ear so much that I invested in a refurbished GameBoy and a few games. I’m delighted to say those rose-tinted glasses weren’t playing tricks on me and I’ve been having a blast with it. When I eventually teared myself away from Tetris (easier said than done) I replaced its cartridge with Jurassic Park’s and travelled even further down memory lane.
So, I’d decided to follow up on my wistful reminiscing about the game (in the reviews for Jurassic Park #6 and #7) with actually getting my hands on it again all these years later. I thought you might like to take a closer look with me. Those adverts for the multi-format game were brilliant, playing off of the Street Fighter II craze at the time with a killer tagline. Despite no GameBoy screenshots (they’d always show the so-called ‘prettiest’ versions in the ads) I remember desperately wanting to get my hands on it for my handheld.
I think I got the game before the next issue, which actually contained images of the version I was playing as part of that month’s phone-in competition. I wouldn’t have been allowed to enter these anyway, they cost a fortune, so I was happy to have the game already. I remember it not having anything to do with the plot of the film, with Dr. Alan Grant instead walking about with a huge gun(!) but that never put me off because it was just so much fun.
I recall playing it late at night, long after I was meant to be asleep for school the next day, viewing it through one of those huge, cumbersome GameBoy magnifier accessories with a built-in light and having to take little breaks because it was so damn heavy! These restrictions obviously no longer apply and I’ve been playing this game (and others) quite a lot, getting plenty of jealous looks from people around my age on public transport, accompanied by looks of confusion from younger generations.
I decided to spend a little extra on the GameBoy and get a refurbished model and the same applies to the games, simply because I’d like to have them all in their original boxes and in great condition so my collection looks as good as possible on the shelf. The Jurassic Park game arrived in near mint condition and I couldn’t have been happier. It even included the manual and some advertising leaflets for other games. I’d forgotten all about these.
The manual also contains some basic details on the dinosaurs and from reading these it’s possible to glean how they could act in the game, although this hasn’t been particularly helpful with the T-rex. With my collection started I needed a way to figure out what other games (ones I didn’t own at the time) would be worth my money, especially if I was prepared to pay a little more for them. It’s not like I could easily shrug it off if a game was crap.
With writing a classic comics blog, one which has already included Commodore Format, it’s only natural I’d turn to some contemporary viewpoints. Instead of relying on people’s memories for recommendations or retro reviews which often unfavourably compare them to modern games, I wanted to read the opinions of those who were playing the GameBoy at the time, those who had been invested in it as a ‘modern’ gaming device.
As it turns out options were limited. The only magazine I found on eBay dedicated solely to this machine was GB Action from Europress Interactive. This same company had published a truly awful Commodore 64 magazine in the early 90s called Commodore Power, but beggars can’t be choosers as the saying goes and so I’ve started buying issues which contain previews and reviews of games I’m interested in. As it turns out, it’s not a half bad way of doing my research.
You can see the game in action in these three short videos
The reviews aren’t exactly in-depth and each 68-page magazine can be read in very little time but it does what I need it to do. I bought my first few games for my new GameBoy before buying any of these issues so their review of Jurassic Park ended up being a kind of test in a way. As it turns out their review pretty much sums up exactly how I feel about the game as I play it now, decades after its release.
Finally we get to the game itself and you can see it in action in these three short videos of the initial levels, after which I become completely and utterly stuck and I’m not going to show you that out of embarrassment.
The first thing that struck me is that John Williams’ music is nowhere to be heard throughout the game, despite this being a fully licenced title, but after a while I just started playing it with the soundtrack on my HomePod so it made little difference. The Velociraptors and Dilophosauruses keep the player on their toes and a keen memory is needed to remember the layouts of the security buildings in which pass keys are needed to unlock the main gate and escape into the rest of the park.
In most levels of the game there are dinosaur eggs lying about the place and these must all be either destroyed or collected. Of course, collecting them means more points and rewards but in the levels in which pass keys are needed they’re essential, the keys only made available to you after all the eggs have been taken care of. This means venturing into all the nooks and crannies of the maps, including the undergrowth where anything could leap out at you.
Playing that first level made me feel like a child again but I have no recollection at all of this Triceratops stampede which popped up next. I definitely got a lot further in the game as a teenager but my ageing memory initially thought the levels were all pretty similar. This stampede is really tough, mainly thanks to the fact you have to guide Tim to safety which isn’t easy when he constantly stays a few feet behind you, often putting herself in harms way when you try to turn left or right and he’s jumping out in front of a dinosaur just to remain at the right distance from you!
Reading OiNK led me to Jurassic Park, which in turn led me back to this game and now I’ve a new hobby
I’ll admit it took a few goes to get through this and of course because it’s a retro game there are only so many lives to play with until it’s game over and we have to start all over again from scratch. Thankfully there are a handful of continues on top of the lives handed out, which gave me 12 chances altogether before turning off the GameBoy and plugging Tetris or Super Mario Land back in.
Moving on and the sparks of memory surged a little as I remembered the next level in which Grant is on a rowing boat making his way to the next area of the park. Each press of the button pulls Grant’s arms in once and moves him a tiny bit up the screen in whatever direction you have his boat facing. This technique takes a long time to master. Timing is key. Being on the water it’s not easy to turn in a different direction, you have to wait until he’s stopped rowing, plus you can’t speed ahead because you don’t know what’s about to come down the screen. Also, if you stop Grant will start coasting back downwards again towards any danger you’ve already passed!
The game is definitely a challenge and I remember it being so back in 1993. I just had a lot more patience back then, even after playing it for ages and having to start over, which I did without a thought at that age. I don’t care that it’s not close to the premise of the film or its characters, after all look at the system it’s on, it was never going to be too complex, but it’s still Jurassic Park to me and a hugely enjoyable slice of it too.
Reading OiNK in real time led me to doing the same with Jurassic Park, which in turn led me back to this game and now I’ve a new hobby. Playing NintendoGameBoy games on an original machine is always going to be the best way to play these and with Lemmings and Pinball Dreams gratefully received for Christmas, it looks like I’m back in this world for a long time to come. So thanks Jurassic Park! Now, one more go to sneak past that Tyrannosaurus rex in level four. Young me would be so ashamed of me right now…
Well here we are at the final issue already of Titan Magazine’s The Lost World Jurassic Park comic. In the States, just as with the original movie, Topps Comics released its adaptation as a four-part mini-series. When the original adaptation proved popular further stories were told as the first official sequel to the film, however in 1997 no further adventures for the sequel movie were forthcoming. In the UK, instead of simply having a one-off special consisting of all four chapters as had happened with other adaptations at the time Titan decided to also do a mini-series, with exclusive extras for UK readers of course.
Unfortunately #2 remains the only issue to feature one of the gorgeous animatronic animals from the movie on the front but I do like this final cover by Walter Simonson and Richard Ory, complete with an exceptionally cute little baby Tyrannosaurus rex. It also gets across the exciting moment from the movie a lot better than the strip. Inside we go and we kick things off with our heroes arriving at the workers’ village in a suitably eerie scene.
Once again the narration sets the scene, most likely taken directly from the script and unlike in previous issues it doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard, writer Don McGregor’s captions perfectly balanced with the more subdued art on these first pages from penciller Jeff Butler, inker Armando Gil, colourist (and editor) Renée Witterstaetter, alongside the lettering by Ken Lopez. Even the lack of detail in the buildings adds a feeling of things being shrouded in mystery and shadows, capturing the feeling of this moment in the movie really well.
Nick Van Owen arrives alongside the rest of the characters, Ian Malcom, Sarah Harding and Ian’s daughter Kelly and I’m fine with this change, it helps get the same story beats across in a shorter time frame, one of the better decisions made in this adaptation. Then on the very next page my hopes for a better comic book climax than the original movie received are dashed when another brilliant part of the movie is hacked down to an unrecognisable state.
So much happens here in the movie and it’s all just excised including, yet again, anything to do with Vanessa Lee Chester’s character, Kelly. In the original film’s comic adaptation Samuel L Jackson’s Ray Arnoldsuddenly disappeared without explanation. Now we also have this movie’s sole black character unceremoniously edited out of all of their scenes.
There’s an overall feeling of this chapter being rushed
Yes, Ian’s moments being chased around here are nowhere to be seen but at least he’s still front and centre elsewhere, whereas Kelly is basically ignored throughout all the chapters, and to have her most important moment not even referred to is criminal. I’m also personally unhappy they removed the moment that in the cinema made me jump out of my seat, which in turn made my friend jump, which in turn made me jump again! (The bit with the ‘raptor under the wooden wall.) But hey, that’s just me.
Almost as annoying as all of this is the fact Roland Tempo is somehow still alive and well without a single scratch just like in the film, even though we blatantly saw him get killed off two weeks ago, something I was happy the movie didn’t do. Did Don forget this had happened in his version? There’s an overall feeling of this chapter being rushed and the art suffers just as much as the script. There’s an overall lack of detail and finesse throughout. Here are some key examples.
That scene of the Velociraptors in the long grass would make no sense if you hadn’t seen the film, characters no longer look like their onscreen counterparts and the gloriously detailed dinosaurs from the first couple of chapters give way to cartoonish monsters. The final chapter of Jurassic Park’s adaptation suffered the same fate and it would seem no one has learned any lessons from it in the three years since.
I know I’m coming across as very negative and usually I only include comics on the blog that I enjoy and I like to keep this as a positive reading experience. The original Jurassic Park comic was awesome, I loved it and it holds a special place in my heart. It’s the whole reason there’s a section for JP on the blog in the first place. This mini-series is very much an extra aside to that, I don’t think I would’ve included this on its own. It’s a crying shame because I love the movie so much.
Towards the end of the story 11 pages are given over to the San Diego scenes, albeit a bare bones version of them. The panel above of the S.S. Venture crashing into the docks is about as detailed a panel as you’ll find in this final chunk of story. You wouldn’t even know any of this was taking place in a city because the backgrounds just don’t exist beyond one panel. Other than there being a sporty car involved this could all be happening back on Isla Sorna.
Below you’ll see the one and only panel that shows some hurriedly drawn buildings and the word “cinema” visible behind the T-rex’s tail. Next to it is a panel I’ll use to sum up these eleven pages. Look at the panel with the car. There are no backgrounds, not even a road! Storywise, we get the ‘rex leaving the ship, discovering Ian and Sarah have his baby, then we’re back at the dock. That’s it.
Thinking back to when I first saw this film in the theatre, the moment we saw the InGen helicopter and the camera panned down to show it was flying over a city was a real shock to the system. It was so unexpected from a Jurassic Park film (I hadn’t watched any trailers before seeing it) and as surprise endings go it’s right up there for me. There was so much to enjoy about it which is why its treatment here is so underwhelming.
“This is a parent teaching its young to feed on its own”
Narrative caption, Don McGregor
Surprisingly Peter Ludlow’s final scene gets three pages to play out fully. One of the most satisfying endings for a villain character, it pretty much happens as it does in the movie, even if the backgrounds are still conspicuously absent. To anyone unfamiliar, this is back on the boat now, Ian and Sarah having lured the adult back into the cargo hold by placing the baby there and then jumping overboard themselves, before climbing back on from the other side of the ship, ready to close the bay doors when the T-rex enters.
From Ian and Kelly to the adult and baby Tyrannosaurs, the theme of The Lost World Jurassic Park movie was one of family and parental instincts. Sarah is even an expert on archeological parental behaviours just to hammer the point home. Personally, more than any other film in the series this one showed the dinosaurs as complex characters in their own right, a far cry from how they’d been described before this franchise. But anyway, Ludlow is about to get eaten.
I’m glad this moment wasn’t cut because it shows the adult teaching the baby and it’s a particularly chilling moment in the film, even if it elicits a dark grin from the audience! Given how much has been left out these past two months it might seem like an odd moment for anyone reading who hadn’t seen the film and (all of its moments between the Tyrannosaur family members), but for those reading this as a way of filling the gap before the home video release it would bring back memories of that scene really well.
After all of my complaints about the lacklustre art in this final issue we finally get a moment that matches the potential those first couple of chapters had in their renderings of the dinosaurs. As the InGen helicopter circles overhead trying to get a good shot to kill the ‘rex, Sarah shoots the tranquilliser dart first and we get this page with a particularly fantastic, expression-filled and dramatic panel when the dart strikes.
I look back at those first two chapters and the gloriously detailed scenes in the jungle with the Stegosaurus family and I can’t help but wonder what this series could’ve at least looked like, even if the script was still a shadow of the film. What if we’d had that early level of detail coupled with the dynamism of the page above? What an impact it could’ve made. The art team was definitely up to the task but it seems deadlines and a rushed story hindered them in the end.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the task of taming a beast of a movie script down to four comics was monumental and I found Don’s explanations in a previous issue fascinating but in the end I think he boiled it down too much to the maths. I’ll get back to that in a little bit further down this review but let’s finish things off with the final page of the strip. Happily, Richard Attenborough’s beautiful John Hammond speech remains mostly intact, as does that famous Jurassic Park line first uttered by Jeff Goldblum’s Ian.
As you can see detail in anything other than the few dinosaurs in the immediate foreground is minimal and when you contrast this with #1 the difference is stark. My final thoughts on the comic strip itself in just a moment. First up though are the extras editor John Freeman and his team assembled and which have definitely been the highlights for me in all the issues.
First up is a competition to win a mug with the logo of the film on it. Not the most exciting of prizes, you’d expect this to be a runner up prize, but then again the original comic gave away a large variety of swag, everything from a simple set of glow-in-the-dark stickers to actual Sega Mega CD systems. So if this had been an ongoing comic I’m sure the same would’ve applied to future competitions, and at the end of the day I’d still like that mug!
The competition itself is somewhat easy though, right? Upon first glance I thought it’d be a case of naming the dinosaurs, with the ones in silhouette form being the trickier ones, but actually it’s just a matter of matching them to the pictures in the next row. I remember competitions and quiz pages like that in my old Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends comics as a child and it seems very out of place for the target audience of a Jurassic Park title.
There are a wonderful couple of pages detailing a selection of the merchandise released to tie in with the hottest film of the summer of 1997. There are some action figures of the dinosaurs shown, including a T-rex apparently engaging in a spot of S&M and mention of a figure of Ian with a jet pack! Really? Sadly no pictures of that one. Of more interest to this retro gamer are screenshots of some of the videogame releases of that year.
My friends laughed as I jumped and slid about the seat in reaction to the dinosaurs
The first image shown is from the arcade game, where players would sit inside a mock-up jeep with tranquilliser guns and on the screen was a fast-moving on-rails shooter with graphics that were mind-blowing for the time. I’ve played this one. A local ten-pin bowling alley had it for a few years in the late 90s and early 00s, and I have distinct memories of my friends laughing as I jumped and slid about the seat in reaction to what was happening while another friend sat quietly shooting at the dinosaurs.
There are also screenshots from the platform game available on the Sega Mega Drive and the 3D game (that was a new thing at the time) for the Sega Saturn and the new Sony Playstation. Sadly there’s no mention of the Nintendo GameBoy Lost World game. I had a GameBoy in the 90s and adored the game of the first film which was also a competition prize in the original comic. (There just might be more about that on the blog later this year.)
The Script to Strip article from #2 gets a second part here, although it’s a lot smaller and features less information. It would also have been a lot more interesting if the correct page of the movie script had been used in the comparison on the left! Such a shame. It does give a decent insight into the ‘Roar’ page from #3 though. It even mentions in Don’s original pages how the characters were meant to react to the sound, but in the finished page they did not.
This is the perfect point to reflect on the entire strip. I’ve said all along there have been moments of potential; the early art was fantastic and #2 was a vast improvement over #1 in terms of adapting the film to the medium. However, towards the end the art definitely suffered. I’m making an assumption here, I know, but it could’ve been due to tight deadlines towards the end to ensure it was released in America at the same time as the film. I also think Don’s articles have unintentionally summed up what went wrong, for me anyway.
Some lovely art and some fun extras have made this comic mini-series worth reading and the completist will definitely find those elements enjoyable
In part one of Script to Strip Don talked about the amount of pages David Koepp’s movie script had compared to how many the comic would have in total to tell the same story, and he explained how many pages of it he’d have to squeeze into each comic page. Now, after reading the whole story it feels like it was more about solving the problem by logic rather than creativity. The first chapter in particular of the original Jurassic Park adaptation showed how to include as much of the movie as possible while being very aware it’s a different medium, using imaginative ways to swap scenes or retell them in a new way. It felt like the film but it was different. A bit like adapting a novel into a movie you could say.
Towards the end though it felt like a checklist was being ticked off as it rushed from one scene to the next, paying lip service to moments the reader would remember from the film. With the sequel, in breaking everything down mathematically as Don did it’s felt like that throughout all four chapters, with some glimmers of the (that word again) potential here and there, which just made it all the more frustrating, knowing this team was capable of so much more.
So here we are at the final page of the final issue of The Lost World Jurassic Park which mentions a third novel by Michael Crichton. While there’s the occasional mention of such a thing on fan sites there’s nothing official anywhere to state he actually started it. Instead, Jurassic Park III and specifically Jurassic World would pull a lot from the two released novels. The rest of this page takes me back to all of the discussions at the time about DNA cloning and I can remember teenage me being very excited by documentaries and such on the subject.
So that’s us. Some lovely art in the earlier issues and some fun extras have made this comic mini-series worth reading and the completist will definitely find those elements enjoyable, just don’t expect anything ground breaking from yet another movie-to-comic adaptation. I do want to go and watch the movie again though! Remember, all 16 issues of the original comic, including the first official Jurassic Park sequel, have been reviewed and I’ll be returning to that series next year with the graphic novel collections of the rest of that story, which we never saw printed in the UK at the time and so I’ve never read them!
Definitely something to look forward to there. In the meantime, remember… “don’t go into the long grass”.
OiNK BLOG 