Friday, January 16, 2009

Dinosaur Comics

If you're not reading Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics at qwantz.com ...well, what the hell is wrong with you?

(Sorry these images are so small. Right-click and open in a new tab or window to view them full-sized.)

this comic is based on two days ago, last saturday, when i kicked joey comeau of asofterworld dot com's ass at chess so badly that he DIED. :0 ;0 :0

It's a brilliant concept: working with the same six panel images, create an ongoing comic strip involving a group of talking dinosaurs who are more-or-less friends. With special off-screen appearances by God, the Devil, and other guest stars! How long can you keep such a thing up? Ryan North has been doing it since February 1, 2003!

even the example t-rex gives is fundamentally flawed.  who would like to be known as a 'sexual basketball player'?  'sexual basketball' sounds like some game a creepy guy would make up and then try to get you to play with him.  what's the deal, creepy guy?

This isn't a comic strip for kids, which might be the target audience you would expect for a strip involving talking dinosaurs. It's clever, witty, and sophisticated, and packed full of references to pop culture. Check out this example from the "Mirror Universe" story arc:

look how evil he looks in the second panel! seriously it's freaking me out

Ryan North includes hover text unique to each strip, a related joke that appears if you use the site to compose an e-mail response to a specific strip, and even embed code for each day's strip (which is how I got these strips to come over!) (which produced images too wide to display on the blog, so you'll have to click through the images to see the full-sized originals, though I was able to reproduce the hover text through a meticulous process of trial and error!)

Go on over to qwantz.com and check out the entire collection of archived strips! You'll be glad you did!

1 comment:

...tom... said...

...
hey there...

No need to apologize for having to 'click thru'. Your readers are all smart, savvy, geeky computer users who know how to click thru and follow a link..!!

And I do not think your 'hover' (ALT tags..?? This geek forgets what they are called)) thing is working...