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 after 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 original adaptation writer 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 Arnold suddenly 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 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; 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.

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“This is a parent teaching its young to feed on its own”

Narrative caption, Don McGregor

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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. 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, expressive, 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, some of which have definitely been the highlights in previous 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 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. 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.

A quick personal note: That T-rex in the bottom-right is actually a version of the cover from my very first Jurassic Park comic as a teen.

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 creatively. 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 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 with the graphic novel collections of the rest of that story, which we never saw printed in the UK at the time, so I’ve never read them!

Definitely something to look forward to there. In the meantime, remember… “don’t go into the long grass”.

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