Terrorsaur Mini-Comic [1989]
I only have a few dozen mini-comics in my collection. A bunch from Matt Feazell's Not Available Comics, Brad Foster's Jabberwocky Graphix, a few other strays, and then, like the topic of this post, a baker's dozen from a 1989 published pack of minis called MIRAGE MINI-COMICS, featuring a bunch of the creators associated with the Ninja Turtles books of the time, some of them Turtle related, a few related to other Mirage published books (GIZMO by Michael Dooney, PUMA BLUES by Murphy&Zulli), some related to possible future projects. TERRORSAUR is in the last group, along with its companion in the set, COMMANDOSAURS, both by Steve Bissette and Peter Laird, and are my favourites in the set behind the PUMA BLUES one. The completed comics featuring these concepts never did come out (Bissette talks about the background a bit here).
The concept as it stood at the time seems to be two warring groups of intelligent dinosaur based creatures. The Commandosaurs are science fiction based, military types with high-tech weapons, and are at war against the more horror-based Terrorsaurs, much more savage and vicious versions of dinosaur descendants.
The 8-page mini-comic features the story "Daymare", which has a groups of Commandosaur soldiers out in a bombed out wasteland, with the rookie of the group worried about the Terrorsaurs, that he's never seen. The others, including the cigar chomping Sarge, regale him with with descriptions of the horrible Terrorsaurs they've seen, like two-headed Leechasaurs, flying Head Eaters, others which are all teeth or poison spikes. This serves to impress the green apple, but we see that those grizzled vets don't know as much as they claim, since the rocks they were resting on were camouflaged Terrorsaurs.
This was a great little sampler for the concept that the series would have explored. I really liked the combination of standards from old war movies and comics, sci-fi concepts and pure horror to create something new that the creators clearly reveled in exploring. It's a shame we never saw the full series, which was announced a few times in the early 1990s but never made it out the gate.
Laird seems to have the characters under some sort of development as of a few years ago. A.C. Farley has a few paintings on his site from a few years ago designed for a model set of the Commandosaurs designed by Michael Dooney (including some 3D quicktime objects of the models), but I can't find any evidence that the models actually were made.
No comments:
Post a Comment