Dinosaur Comics

Dinosaur Comics
Dinosaur Comics
	A critical dinosaur: example comic strip A critical dinosaur: an example comic strip
Author(s)	Ryan North
Website	http://www.qwantz.com/
Current status/schedule	Updated every weekday
Launch date	February 1 2003
Genre(s)	Humour

Dinosaur Comics is a webcomic by Canadian Ryan North. Also known as "Qwantz" because of the site's domain name, qwantz.com. It has been online since February 1 2003, although there were early prototypes[1]. In addition to web publication, strips of Dinosaur Comics have been reprinted in two collections and in a number of newspapers. ^[1]

Premise

Each weekday a new comic is posted; each comic uses exactly the same artwork as every Dinosaur Comic before it, with only the dialogue changed (There are occasional deviations from this, such as several of the episodes in a brief series which partially takes place in a mirror universe [2]). In this respect, it is much like David Lynch's "The Angriest Dog in the World" comic. 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: [3] or [4], or extensions into entirely different media like this video: [5]

Dinosaur Comics tends to focus on topics that are not usually covered by other comics, including ethical relativism [6], the nature of happiness, the secret to being loved, stomping, and so forth. The episodes are effectively one-shots most of the time, but sometimes there is a follow up - such as when T-Rex starts an off-screen utopian society which later abandons him. The "Show, Don't Tell" rule of writing is often violated for humorous effect, such as in the last panel of a comic about spring break [7].

Cast

Main cast

The character names are each dinosaur's genus. Since there is only one of each type of dinosaur, this causes little confusion. Although other dinosaurs have been mentioned in the strip, they have never been shown.

T-Rex is the main character, if only because he appears in every panel. He is proud and considers himself knowledgeable on many subjects, but is frequently shown up as ignorant (although he does sometimes offer genuinely interesting insights). He is good-hearted, but occasionally shows signs of selfishness. In spite of this, his friends tolerate him.
Utahraptor, T-Rex's foil, appears in the fourth and fifth panels of the comic. He often refutes whatever point T-Rex made in the first half, but T-Rex rarely takes any notice. He is almost always portrayed as T-Rex's intellectual superior.
Dromiceiomimus appears in the third panel. Although she is generally friendly to T-Rex — answering either neutrally or with mild, friendly criticism, in contrast with the more adversarial and skeptical Utahraptor — her replies may also be parsed as mocking, perhaps highlighting T-Rex's general lack of understanding of and success with women (or, at least, female dinosaurs). T-Rex once claimed that they engaged in "dinosaur sex".

T-Rex sometimes tries to make out with Dromiceiomimus, who occasionally seems interested but more often appears nonplussed. His efforts possibly represent overcompensation for a one-off homosexual affair with Utahraptor which is referred to in an early episode, although T-Rex is unsure of whether or not it actually occurred.

Supporting Cast

Unseen characters

God and the Devil also make frequent appearances in the strip, speaking from off the tops and bottoms of the panels respectively, in bold and capitalized letters and with the Devil's font in red. They also speak with no punctuation whatsoever, excepting the occasional apostrophe, and can only be heard by T-Rex. Topics of conversation beween T-Rex and God vary, but the Devil rarely speaks about anything other than video games and Dungeons & Dragons. T-Rex finds this uninteresting and somewhat tedious.
Inhabitants of the small house, heard in comic #4.
T-Rex's neighbors: families of raccoons and cephalopods who talk to T-Rex in unsettling tones, with capitalized italics.
Morris, a tiny bug on T-Rex's nose, who speaks in a smaller font with no capital letters and with run-on sentences. The last sentence of each of Morris' speeches ends without a period. Morris's first appearance is comic #673.
Professor Science, a mortarboard-wearing diplodocus, who has only been alluded to in the comics, but is depicted on a merchandise t-shirt.
Some hermit crabs, which T-Rex "gobbled up" in comic #379, despite his being warned that they would take over his body as their new home. The crustaceans deny this by stating, "NO WE DIDN'T", although their voices emanate from inside T-Rex' body.
A talking bottle of vanilla extract figures into comic #628. It speaks similarly to Morris, although with a slightly larger font.
Edgar Allan Poe, who has traveled to the future to hang out with T-Rex, appears in comics 805 and 806.
Jimbo Wales who supports T-Rex's apparent vandalism from the Wikipedia page on evil to Irish Evil appears in comic 816.
Captain Suggestible, who, as his name suggests, will go along with whatever he is told appears in comic 828 and is mentioned in comic 829.

Scenery characters

These supporting characters never say much. Often, they are simply part of the scenery of the strip, and most later strips very rarely even acknowledge them, despite their regular appearance. These are:

the tiny house (occupied in at least one strip)
the tiny car (possibly occupied)
the tiny woman

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

Easter eggs

Every comic contains three hidden comments (easter eggs). One is accessed by holding the cursor over the strip and waiting for the title text tooltip to pop up. The second, which began appearing with the fifth comic, 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 behavior that is five years old.[8] - an addon which addresses this problem is available from: [9]) In this case, the full comments (and the e-mail subject lines) can be found by viewing the properties page of the link and the comic. The third is found in the RSS feed of the comic and the archive page, being, essentially, the comic's title. Some comics have additional easter eggs, an example being the URL to God's ringtone (the Telefrançais theme) hidden in the watermark of comic #399([10])

Also, the image at the bottom of the webpage displaying the tiny woman and house changes according to the current season.

Awards

Dinosaur Comics was named one of the best webcomics of 2004 and 2005 by The Webcomics Examiner. In 2005, it won "Outstanding Anthropomorphic Comic" in the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards [11]. Soon after, in August 2005, Dinosaur Comics was accepted into the Dayfree Press.

Surrounding culture

Fan prose style

A unique subculture has evolved around Dinosaur Comics. Ryan and T-Rex's prose style is often used by fans when talking about the comics or about other issues. Examples can be seen in the news box on the site itself, as well as in the comments on the LiveJournal syndication. The style involves using few punctuation marks, capitalizing words and using the words "woo" and "awesome" in large quantities. There are other points in T-Rex's style which are often imitated, with the expected comic effect of an in-joke, by fans. These include over-use of exclamation points, using the word "also" followed by a colon to begin sentences to emphasize the lack of a smooth segue, ending declarative sentences with a question mark, and speaking in all caps with little to no punctuation as God does in the comic (this is generally imagined to be a loud and monotone voice which often denotes sarcasm or other irony).

Fan prose style examples:

"It is quite common for Dinosaur Comics fans to over-use exclamation points!"
"Also: this also-construction."
"Ending declarative sentences with a question mark for comic effect is a common technique?"
"Hello, people! What are the haps?"
"I think the only way you could have made it worse were if you had all of that generate a javascript window.write encoded in hex. man, that would have been awesome."
"wooooooooooo new member woo"
"DINOSAUR COMICS FANS LIKE TO OVER USE CAPITAL LETTERS IN A KIND OF SELF-AWARE IRONY"
"N-nervously stuttering the first word of a sentence to imply uncertainty?"

Japan English Class

Considering the above phenomenon, it is perhaps ironic that Dinosaur Comics has also been used by an English teacher in Japan for creative writing exercises. The project is similar to Penny Arcade's "Remix Project." The teacher, Patrick, who was a friend of Ryan, the strip's author, used blank templates of the comic and had his students fill in dialogue. The results of this activity have been posted to the Dinosaur Comics fanart page.

References

^ "Q: Is Dinosaur Comics printed anywhere else off the Internet? A: It was in a few papers, but they tended to go bankrupt, so that was the end of that." from the interview "North By T-Rex: Dinosaur Comics' Ryan North talks about bringing up his dino-baby in the world of webcomics"

External links

qwantz.com- official homepage
Dinosaur Comics Japanese English Student Version - The results of Japanese English students writing dialogue for Dinosaur Comics.
Webcomics Examiner interviews Ryan North

[In-print-1] "Q: Is Dinosaur Comics printed anywhere else off the Internet? A: It was in a few papers, but they tended to go bankrupt, so that was the end of that." from the interview "North By T-Rex: Dinosaur Comics' Ryan North talks about bringing up his dino-baby in the world of webcomics"

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