4 out of 5

No, this isn’t rating the webcomic, silly nutballs, and it isn’t even rating one of the fancy collections that’s been put out, because I’d make the title accurate to that.

Rather:

Imagine the year is 2003 or ’04, and my girlfriend at the time works at a comic book store, handling consignments, amongst other things.  She’s laughing uproariously at some little indie book she just picked up on consignment.  I dunno if I purchased one or she secretly comped me one (or not secretly gave me one), but it was a little square, seemingly hand-stapled and page-cut and computer printed black-and-white affair called Dinosaur Comics, copyright 2003, featuring the same six panels over a few score of pages with typed dialogue coming from T-Rex, Dromiceiomimus and Utahraptor, and a special guest appearances from God.  I had no idea what this was, and it verged on being too smart here and there (or so I wanted to tell myself, because I was jealous of how humbly funny it was), but overall – my god, it was hilarious.

Yes, it was a small collection of early Dinosaur Comics – check out qwantz.com if you’re blind to this awesome webcomic.  I have no idea if Ryan North left Canada to come by the now-closed Village Comics to have his book carried on consignment.  Perhaps I’ll never know.  But I feel honored to have this little chunk of history, whether it was actually professionally printed in this clumsy little format or indeed hand-made, or manufactured by some Ryan North pretender who made a few bucks off someone else’s genius…  Early Dinosaur Comics tend not to dig as much into random knowledge drops for humor, but this was a good spread of the different styles of jokes North shuffles through.  Just docking a star because there’s no inclusion of the hover texts in some way, and, well, it’s black and white… color being such a huge component to the thing…?

I should write an e-mail to Ryan and ask him if it’s legit.  I WILL DO JUST THAT.