Legends of the Dracorex

Before there was The Hourglass, there was Longbox Graveyard, and while that comics blog eventually achieved some small success, at its outset it too was confined to a modest circle of readers. Among the earliest of them was Matthew Howard, of Mars Will Send No More, who generously shared his blogging wisdom with me, and quickly became an inner-circle online friend of Longbox Graveyard.

Mars (as I must call Matthew) and I were bound to hit it off, sharing interests in jazz, comics, science fiction, and dinosaurs. A delight in knowing Mars were the unusual artifacts he'd send to my real-world secret headquarters, usually revolving around dinosaurs -- dinosaur postcards, dinosaur toys, even a dinosaur fact pamphlet sponsored by the Sinclair Oil company. In our mutual dino-passion we'd go on to co-author a Dinosaur Beat-Down elimination bracket, pairing off the great T-Rexes of comics and film in a blogging fight to the death. (The Jurassic Park T-Rex won, as I recall, though I pulled hard for the old-school Tyrannosaurus from the original King Kong).

Now Mars has expanded his Meteor Mags cycle with an original graphic novel -- Legends of the Dracorex -- along with artists Eliseu Gouveia, Blixxa Nika, Marcos Lima, and Marc Oliver, whisking us back to an alternate Cretaceous Period where cruel and super-intelligent dinosaurs build starships to escape the massive asteroid that wiped out most life on earth!

It is both an origin tale for the villains of his Meteor Mags stories and a one-shot graphic novel love letter to the dinosaurs and dino-media that blew our minds as kids. This is a comic in the classic form, with narrative captions covering vast spans of time — there are no decompressed “cinematic” comic stories here! But the storytelling is sharp and to the point. The dinosaurs receive a savior, build a civilization, love each other, turn on each other, and lose a world. The pace and presentation perfectly suit the framing device of lost religious/mythological stores from 66 million years ago.

Legends of the Dracorex is available through Amazon, in both print and digital forms. Check it out, and while you're at it, visit Matthew's eclectic blog, Mars Will Send No More, well into its second decade and still going strong -- an online treasure house of Jack Kirby comics, rock and roll, poetry, and countless other delights too unusual to categorize.