Dinosaur Comics

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Dinosaur Comics
Author(s)	Ryan North
Website	http://www.qwantz.com/
Current status / schedule	Updated almost every weekday
Launch date	February 1, 2003
Genre(s)	Humour

Dinosaur Comics is a webcomic by Canadian writer Ryan North. It is also known as "Qwantz" because of the site's domain name qwantz.com. It has been online since February 1, 2003, though there were early prototypes.^[1] Dinosaur Comics has also been printed in two collections and in a number of newspapers.^[2]

Comics are posted on most weekdays. Each comic uses the same artwork, with only the dialogue changing from day to day. (There are occasional deviations from this, such as several episodic comics^[3]). It has been compared to David Lynch's "The Angriest Dog in the World" comic, and also made references to it.^[4][5] The strips take on topics including ethical relativism^[6], the nature of happiness, the secret to being loved^[7], and so forth.

Contents 1 Cast 1.1 Main cast 1.2 Supporting cast 1.2.1 Seen characters 1.2.2 Unseen characters 1.2.3 Scenery characters 2 Easter eggs 3 Awards 4 Japan English class 5 April Fool's Joke 6 See also 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Cast

[edit] Main cast

The character names are each dinosaur's genus (with the notable exception being "T-Rex", an abbreviation of the tyrannosaurus' full binomial name). Although other dinosaurs have been mentioned in the strip, they are rarely shown.

• T-Rex is the main character. He is 27^[8] and is a large green Tyrannosaurus Rex. He considers himself knowledgeable on many subjects, but is frequently shown up as ignorant (although he does sometimes offer genuinely interesting insights) by the other main characters, primarily Utahraptor. He is good-hearted, but occasionally shows signs of being egotistical or selfish. In spite of this, his friends tolerate him. T-rex appears to be stomping a log cabin and a woman in frames three and four, respectively. In comic 163, he explains, via flashback, that this action is the result of being denied the opportunity to do so as a child.

• Utahraptor, T-Rex's comedic foil, appears in the fourth and fifth panels of the comic. He is generally more intelligent and skeptical than T-Rex, and often refutes whatever point T-Rex made in the first half, though T-Rex rarely takes notice. While it is not often brought up in the comic, Utahraptor is gay, ^{[9] [10] [11]} as North confirmed in the title of the RSS feed for the December 13, 2007 comic:^[12]

“

i received several dozen emails about utahraptor either being a girl or being gay in yesterday's comic! he is gay, guys. only he doesn't talk about it all the time, on account of having interests outside of being gay?

”

• Dromiceiomimus appears in the third panel. Although she is generally friendly to T-Rex — answering either neutrally or with mild, friendly criticism, in contrast with the more adversarial and skeptical Utahraptor — her replies may also be parsed as mocking, perhaps highlighting T-Rex's general lack of understanding of and success with the opposite sex. She has been a romantic love interest to T-Rex^[13] and is also a nautical engineer.^[14]

[edit] Supporting cast

In a mirror universe, there is a set of characters that portray the evil side of the protagonist main characters. The only visual difference is that they are all seen with drawn in goatees, and are facing the opposite direction.[2]

[edit] Seen characters

• Batman is brought to life by T-Rex's imagination in comic 1068, and appears as a tiny Batman head floating around T-Rex in the sixth panel. He appears to T-Rex again in comic 1069, much to the scorn of Utahraptor, and thanks T-Rex for making him real, "if only for a little while". His latest appearance is in comic 1206, as an "imaginary Australian Batman," a spoof deviated from John Batman and Daniel Batman.
• Godot is a stegosaurus who appears in the last panel in comic 283 after T-Rex spends some time waiting for him.

[edit] Unseen characters

• God (first appearance: 128) and the Devil (first appearance: 465) 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 little or no punctuation and can be heard only by T-Rex. Topics of conversation between T-Rex and God vary, but the Devil and T-Rex mostly discuss video games and Dungeons & Dragons.
• T-Rex's neighbors: families of raccoons and cephalopods who talk to T-Rex in unsettling tones, with capitalized italics. Their speech makes appearances in comics 492, 493, 494, 500, 524, 681, 788, 888, and 988.
• Professor Science, a mortarboard-wearing diplodocus, who has only been alluded to in comics 636, 918, 1030, and 1031, but is depicted on a merchandise t-shirt.
• "Fictional Jimbo Wales" appears in comic 816. He supports T-Rex's apparent vandalism from the Wikipedia page on evil to "Irish Evil." He also appears in comic 879, supporting T-Rex's idea to vandalize only the Wikipedia article about chickens, leaving all other articles unvandalized.
• Morris, a "tiny bug" on T-Rex's nose, is first alluded to in comic 673, is more formally introduced in comic 674, reappears in comic 935and again in comic 942. The latter appearance is the first time Morris is not actually on T-Rex's nose.
• 19th-century poet Edgar Allan Poe appears in comics 805 and 806 as a needy, annoying friend of T-Rex's, following T-Rex around and only wanting to talk about their relationship with each other.
• Playwright and poet William Shakespeare appears in "Literary Technique Comics" 958, 959, 960, 983, and 1018.
• "Mr. Tusks" is a dwarf elephant who appears in comics 1078, 1079, 1080, 1099, 1181, and then again in 1222. He is affected by island dwarfism as a result of his race being isolated on an island with limited food supply. He speaks only in the sixth frame and makes puns on the word "short" and its variants every time he speaks. He is also the Vice-Mayor of Tiny Towne.
• Actor Patrick Stewart, whose self-published newsletter appears in comic 916, appears himself in comic 1092 when T-Rex directs a statement toward "everyone I've ever met and ever will meet!" When asked what he is doing, Stewart responds that he's bored, while (still unseen) checking his watch and sighing dramatically.
• Offscreen-director Ben Chuckles makes his debut in comic 1211, when he rejects T-Rex for an acting gig.

[edit] Scenery characters

These supporting characters never say much. Often, they are simply part of the scenery of the strip, and later strips very rarely even acknowledge them, despite their regular appearance. They all appear in the strip while T-Rex is about to stomp on them. These characters are:

• The tiny house (occupied in at least one strip)
• The tiny car (possibly occupied, and "slightly out of scale")
• The tiny woman.

[edit] 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 (this can also be accessed through the image file's properties menu for browsers with a length limit). The second, which began appearing with the fifth comic, is found in the subject line of the "Comments" e-mail address. The third is found in the RSS feed of the comic and the archive page, being, essentially, the comic's title. Some comics have additional easter eggs, an example being the URL to God's ringtone (the Téléfrançais theme) hidden in the watermark of comic #399([3])

Also, the image at the bottom of the webpage displaying the tiny woman and house changes according to the current season.

[edit] Awards

Dinosaur Comics was named one of the best webcomics of 2004^[15] and 2005^[16] by The Webcomics Examiner. In 2005, it won "Outstanding Anthropomorphic Comic" in the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards[4]. Soon after, in August 2005, Dinosaur Comics was accepted into the Dayfree Press.

[edit] Japan English class

Dinosaur Comics has been used by an English teacher in Japan for creative writing exercises. The project is similar to 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, and two phrases from the students' comics ("Am I bad man?" and "People is sometimes kind") were used in DC merchandise.

[edit] April Fool's Joke

On April Fool's Day 2008, Dinosaur Comics was part of a three-webcomic prank involving Questionable Content and xkcd wherein each comic's URL displayed another comic's web page. www.questionablecontent.net displayed the Dinosaur Comics website, www.qwantz.com displayed xkcd, and www.xkcd.com displayed the Questionable Content website.

[edit] See also

• Whispered Apologies
• Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists (includes material from Dinosaur Comics)

Ryan North owns several other domain names, all redirecting to www.qwantz.com, and chosen for comic effect; some of these are domain hacks. These include:

• http://www.chewbac.ca
• http://www.dinosaurcomics.com
• http://www.exotica.ca
• http://www.poo.ca

[edit] References

[edit] 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
• A Greasemonkey user script that displays the three usual easter eggs