Review by Win Wiacek

As eruditely and so very lovingly explained by Stephen R. Bissette in his scholarly overview and introduction, terrifying thunder lizards have been visitors and antagonists in literature and the arts for decades. However, it was comics that finally gave them a voice of their own.

What’s a Dinosaur comic? One set in the creatures’ own times and scenarios, with no human intrusion or overblown authorial invention. These are scientifically credible tales about animals living and dying on their own terms and in their own context: no cavemen, aliens, time machines or human heroes. All Then, All Lizard, All the Time…

There have been precious few – and Bissette lists them all, including his own wonderful Tyrant – but for devotees, paramount amongst them is the far-too occasional Paleo: Tales of the Late Cretaceous by Jim Lawson. Since 2001 the exceptionally gifted, prolific and apparently tireless Lawson has relaxed from his day jobs to craft a string of monochrome comics of fictionalised natural history and daily dramas of the big beasts.

For The Complete Collection, Dover republished Lawson’s 2003 compilation, with the added attraction of two more unpublished issues: three all-new stories produced in collaboration with Bissette, Peter Laird and other equally dedicated devotees.

Lawson’s stories are delivered with earnest veracity and unsentimental authenticity, as of a show on Animal Planet, or perhaps the better Disney wildlife films of the 1960s and 1970s. The spectacular, eye-popping opening narrative takes the form of informed observation as a young Triceratops interacts with or avoids Quetzalcoatalus, egg-stealing proto-rodents and voracious Daspletosaurs, getting into a fix which nearly ends her young life.

Other scenarios see an alpha male Dromeosaur deal with a pushy young male in the female-heavy pack; a strange case of maternal transference as a baby Stegoceras loses one mother and believes a roosting Quetzalcoatalus might be a likely substitute, and a colossal sea lizard Plotosaurus coming in-shore to scavenge from Aublysodons before making the kill of a lifetime.

Paleo superbly opens a window onto distant eons of saurian dominance and provides a profound panorama that focuses on a number of everyday experiences which simply have to be exactly how it was, way back then. In all these tales, astoundingly rendered and realised scenery and environment are as much characters in the drama as any meat and muscle protagonists.

Lawson’s love for his subject, sublime feel for spectacle and an unmatchable gift for pace, coupled to a deft hand which imbues the vast range and cast with instantly recognisable individual looks and characters, always means the reader knows exactly who is doing what. No lover of lizards and comics fan should miss Paleo.