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
End date	N/A
Genre(s)	Humour

Dinosaur Comics is a webcomic by Canadian Ryan North. Also known as 'Qwantz' because of the site's domain name of qwantz.com, it has been online since February 1 2003, although there were early prototypes[1].

Premise

Each weekday a new comic is posted; each comic uses the same artwork as every Dinosaur Comic before it, with only the dialogue changed. 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: [2] or [3], or extensions into entirely different media like this video: [4]

Dinosaur Comics tends to focus on topics that are not usually covered by other comics, including ethical relativism [5], the nature of happiness, the secret to being loved, the search for God, and so forth. While the humor used is often random and surreal, or literary and dependent upon juxtaposition [6], the discussions that Utahraptor and T-Rex have are often of a sophisticated level and manner. The episodes are effectively one-shot 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, the star, if only because he appears on all panels.
Utahraptor, T-Rex's foil, who appears in the second half of the comic.
Dromiceiomimus, female, appears in only one panel.

T-Rex sometimes tries to make out with Dromiceiomimus, possibly overcompensating 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.
T-Rex's neighbors: families of raccoons and cephalopods who talk to T-Rex in unsettling tones, with capitalized italics.
A tiny bug on T-Rex's nose, who speaks in a smaller font with no capital letters and no punctuation besides apostrophes.

Scenery characters

These supporting characters never say much. Often, they are simply part of the scenery of the strip.

the tiny house (presumably occupied)
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 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]) In this case, the full comments (and the email 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.

Awards

Dinosaur Comics was named one of the best webcomics of 2004 by The Webcomics Examiner. In 2005, it won "Outstanding Anthropomorphic Comic" in the Web Cartoonists' Choice Awards. 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 "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"

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 Okashina Okashi's "Strange English Project" and 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.

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