A Chaotic Retrospective — Revisiting Topps Comics’ ‘Jurassic Park’ Adaptation

Welcome to the table,

Did you know Walt Simonson, Gil Kane, George Perez, and Arthur Adams worked together on a comic that was based on a film by Steven Spielberg that was based on a novel written by Michael Crichton, the same man who wrote Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in AD 922? The comic, those aforementioned sequential luminaries worked on, was not Mr. Crichton’s epic tale of 13 warriors, though that would have been amazing. No, the comic adaptation that that talented team lent their not insurmountable skills to was the iconic Jurassic Park, published by Topps. And to celebrate the latest movie in the popular series, we wanted to take a look at those classic comics.

Did you know they did not spell Michael Crichton’s name correctly in #1 of that comic? They got it right in issue #2, but I was still really amused when I realized this fact over 30 years after it had been published.

As far as comic adaptations of films go, Topps’s Jurassic Park is not bad. It does have some pretty inconsistent art, but it’s inconsistent enough to feel intentional at best, or an odd stylistic choice at worst, so I am not going to hyperfocus on that because we are dealing with a comic that is over 30 years old and more than likely had a large amount of oversight from studio folks and licensing people to try and produce a comic that looked as much like the movie as humanly possible.

From a writing perspective, the comic adaptation pretty much faithfully follows the plot of the film, with a couple of key scenes most likely omitted for page count and blood and gore considerations. More on the blood and gore thought a bit later.

The first issue jumps off with a Klark Kent if he sold used cars looking guy in the Robert Muldoon role and while there is no iconic “Shoot her, shoot her” we do get one of the Jurassic Park workers getting eaten by a raptor who is trying to break out of its containment cell.

I’m not sure why the choice was to change Muldoon’s character to someone else in this scene, as Muldoon shows up in issue #2 looking fairly the same as he looks on screen. It was a choice for sure, but it baffles me as to why it was done.

The story, taking no downtime on anything, spends a page on an excavation operation to get the amber in a place that looks like it has no cool raft, no swamp, and no massive teams of workers. If I had not seen the film, I would have honestly been a little lost on the plot point or why it needed page space, because we then get right to Dr Grant at his dig site telling the annoying kid about the raptor who is going to cut his stomach open.

Strangely, the conversation about Dr. Grant not wanting to have babies takes up quite a few panels, and in the grand scheme of things, it seems like it is way less important than other bits of the story that were cut later.

I did quite like the “they can’t walk and they know very little about the cretaceous! or dinosaurs!” line because I think Jurassic Park is directly responsible for multiple generations of kids knowing so much about dinosaurs that it baffles most adults how they (myself included in those kids) were able to keep it all organized within the confines of their mind.

We get the arrival of John Hammond by helicopter, and Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler are irritated until they realize who he is. The lack of the champagne, even though it is mentioned, is kind of odd, but again, I think this is cut for either censoring it for younger readers in a comic form or page count.

Nedry and Dodgson have their conversation about Nedry stealing the embryos, and while it is not a Barbasol-branded can, it’s pretty much the same story beats as it rolls along. Kane’s linework is really fast and loose, with Tom Smith‘s colors and Perez’s inks doing the majority of the lifting through the book.

Ian Malcolm is introduced on the helicopter ride as the party heads to Jurassic Park. His design looks almost identical to Robert Muldoon’s, with the exception that Ian is in black and Muldoon is in blue. There are then four pages of external helicopter flight and landing with an info dump of exposition about the park before we get to the actual park itself. It’s a weird way to pace the story for sure, but far from the most awful storytelling I have seen in a comic.

We get to the park, everyone gets into the jeeps, and they are off to see the first full image of a living dinosaur in the book, the brachiosaurs.

The second issue kicks off with the brachiosaurs, but it looks way different than it did in issue #1, and there are a lot more of them in the comic than there were in the film. In one panel, it looks like a hydra more than a dinosaur, as a ton of heads are coming out of the same part of the image, giving it a very mythological look.

We move on to the visitor center, where we get introduced to the “ride” part of the experience. Mr. DNA is not missing, something I was very excited about, as “Dino DNA” is something we say often in our home for no particular reason other than we think it’s funny.

What is really unhinged, though, is when they start to talk about “supercomputers and gene sequencers.”

The device they show looks like something out of a 4th World comic. I mean it, it looks like something Orion would show up riding, or Scott Free would be tasked with escaping. It’s very cosmically coded and completely out of place in a dinosaur comic set in the early 1990s. Also, I am not sure that guy has pants on while he is using it, so there are a ton of questions here about what is going on, but it is still cool in a chaotic sort of way.

The comic keeps playing out with Ian giving his warnings and Hammond talking about the strides they are making. A baby raptor is hatched, and Dr. Grant freaks out about them breeding raptors.

What follows in the next couple of pages is that Robert Muldoon shows up, a cow gets eaten off panel, Hammon’s grandkids get introduced, the adults have dinner, and discuss the ethical and moral implications of bringing things back from the dead, and then we get introduced to Ray Arnold and his iconic “Hold onto your butts” line as a storm rolls in and he is instructed to “start the program” but it never really indicates what program he is starting.

As far as adaptations go, it’s solid, but it does rely heavily on you knowing what happened in the movie. The issue draws to a close with a triceratops looking as if it is going to rampage on the party of Dr. Grant, Dr. Stadler, Dr. Maclom, a jerk lawyer who went with them, and Hammond’s grandkids.

Again, the dinosaur at the end of issue #2 does not look like the dinosaur at the start of issue #3. That is fine with me, it’s kind of an abridged, rushed, chaotic telling of one of the greatest movies of all time, and it does not bother me that things are super inconsistent, as it feels like that is some kind of style choice through the whole four-issue run.

The triceratops is sick, and Dr. Statler sticks with it after she and Tim, the younger of Hammond’s two grandkids, play with its poop and gizzard stones. They really go out of their way to focus on the gizzard stone stuff, and it seems like an odd choice but, hey… this is an adaptation of a major motion picture my friends, and each issue came with trading cards, we are not looking for exact re-tellings in the grand scheme of things we just want you to enjoy the “close enough” art and the dinosaurs while you flip through the pages time and time again and get excited about dinosaurs.

The party, without Dr. Statler, gets back into the jeeps and continues on their journey as the rain begins to fall. The back half of issue #3 is kind of fascinating, as it goes from Ian and Dr. Grant talking about Ian’s taste in women and Dr. Grant’s undefined relationship with Dr. Statler.

Nedry shuts off a good deal of the park to cover his escape with the stolen embryos in the storm, leaving Hamond and Ray to speculate why he made the choices he made. The two, of course, are unaware that Nedry is stealing embryos to fund his bank account. They do find it peculiar that everything but the raptor fences are shut down, but when they try and reset the system, they are faced with Nerdy’s lockout screen mocking them.

They really rush through key plot points to get to what ends up being almost half the back side of the issue, being the T-Rex coming out of its cage and doing just fine.

The T-Rex attacks the jeeps, and then Ian and the lawyer, after quite a few pages of it just wrecking the jeep with the kids in it. If I were going to spotlight a moment in the movie that was a standout for me, it would be the T-Rex attack, so the fact they lean into it to fill so much space honestly feels solid as far as making the most of a movie adaptation.

I have seen fights between two super-powered entities destroying whole cities, with the sonic booms from the impacts of their punches going on for fewer pages than the T-Rex attacking a helpless jeep goes on in this comic. It’s not the most beautiful thing to look at in the sense that art is subjective, and I don’t find it “beautiful,” but I’m honestly hard pressed to not call it art in the sense that it made me feel something, and it feels like it is saying something more than “this is a comic adaptation of a major motion picture.”

What it could be saying is, “I like drawing dinosaurs, and this is a ton of fun to just draw a T-Rex destroying a jeep.”

And in the same way, the movie Jurassic Park makes me nostalgic for the simple joy of smashing plastic dinosaur toys together. There is something deeply charming about this unhinged exploration of a dinosaur fighting a jeep/Ford Explorer on the page.

Now, what is amusing to me, in addition to the play time on the comic page point, is that in the movie Jurassic Park, the T-Rex attacking the jeep takes place around the halfway point. Depending on what version you are watching, it’s almost exactly halfway. So, for this to come at the end of the 3rd issue, leading into the 4th issue, the second half of the adaptation is very, very rushed, and a lot of what happens in the film is taken out from this point forward.

The T-Rex art at the end of issue #3 does look pretty much like the T-Rex art at the start of issue #4, so that is something.

Nedry gets attacked by the dilophosaurus while trying to escape a dilophosaurus that looks rad, even if it is not exactly what the on-screen version looks like.

The kids and Dr. Grant sleep in a tree and meet some brachiosaurs, but there is no sneezing or feeding here. Dr. Statler and Muldoon find Ian under some wreckage. He was not eaten by the T-Rex, one can assume, because he did not move after being knocked into the thatched-roof bathroom and crushed under its collapsing walls.

Dr. Grant and the kids find some eggs, and Dr. Grant quotes Ian from earlier in the story, saying, “Ian was right, life finds a way.” We are then dropped into the command room where the rest of our cast is trying to reset the computers, and Ray once more says…

Muldoon and Dr. Statler take a rocket launcher and go to switch back on the power, but Muldoon finds that a rocket launcher can not stop raptors and gets eaten. Dr. Statler gets into the power station and flips a switch, unknowingly sending a bunch of electricity through Tim as he is still clinging to a fence that the kids and Dr. Grant have just crawled over.

If this all feels really quick and rushed, that is because entire scenes of the movie are being crammed into a single panel, and things like Ray being dead and his arm being the only thing left after a raptor attack do not even occur.

If I was going to compare issue #4 of this run to another life experience I would tell you that it feels like that thing that happens when you fall asleep during a movie but you are not sure if you have fallen asleep or not so the movie just feels disjointed and like you have missed whole parts of it. You vaguely know what is happening and you recognize the characters and the sets, but you are not sure how it all connects, and while you are looking for context clues, you fall asleep and wake up again in one of those weird jerking motions where it feels like you are falling but you aren’t.

This issue reads like that.

It’s rad, I enjoy it, but it’s wildly rushed and chaotic.

We jump to the raptors hunting the kids in the kitchen, a scene I would say is the second most iconic dinosaur scene in the whole Jurassic Park experience, only second to the T-Rex jeep attack, of course.

The wacky “I’m a hacker” scene is covered in two panels before the kids, Dr. Grant, and Dr. Stadler get attacked by raptors once more and make their way through the drop ceiling to a T-Rex skeleton where once they start crawling on it, the humans, the raptors, and most of the skeleton go tumbling to the floor.

The T-Rex shows up and eats the Raptors with more green blood than I was prepared for, and then the humans escape on a different helicopter than they arrived on, with a very final feeling closing panel and narration that has not been present up to this point.

I’m not sure who the omniscient narrator is in the last two boxes. It could be the friends we made along the way. It could be Mr. DNA. It could be the jeep eating T-Rex. Honestly, it really does not matter who it is because the whole point of these books was to put comics about dinosaurs into the hands of excited kids and kids at heart who loved the Jurassic Park movie and wanted more of that sweet, sweet dinosaur content in their lives.

Typically, I would be incredibly harsh on this kind of comic. The team who worked on this book is all very talented, the movie is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I love dinosaur stories. I could dig into the sloppy, inconsistent art, the strange pacing, and the weird-looking dinosaurs, but when you roll back a little bit and look at the whole thing, you realize that this is exactly what it set out to be.

It’s an inexpensive, brightly colored comic book that got kids to read, got some trading cards into people’s hands, and contains not only the story of the Jurassic Park film, even if it was a truncated version, but also some additional information about dinosaurs and some photos of the movie in the back so you could feel like a well informed fan at the lunchroom table when you pulled this thing out of your backpack.

This is the kind of comic that was made for ten year-olds who are going to read it so much the cover falls off and they get jelly stains on the pages from sitting their sandwich on it during lunch. This is the kind of comic that is going to have weird grooves on the pages from having notebook paper placed over the panels and the dinosaurs traced time and time again, while the kids who are reading it are trying to learn to draw. This is the kind of comic you are going to pick up from a dollar box when you see it because you remember what it was like to be a little kid who loved comics more than just about anything else in the world, except for maybe D&D, and the feeling you got when you read something that did not have to be a big world connecting event. When you were happy reading something that was just some brightly colored nonsense presented in an easy, digestible format scratches that nostalgic itch in your brain you have been trying to scratch for years.

Is the Topps Comics Jurassic Park film adaptation comic good? Yeah… all things considered, including the intent behind making this thing and choosing to see it as a thing made for kids who love dinosaurs and not some kind of greedy cash grab… yeah… this book rules and I would argue that case with anyone who says otherwise.

Until next time, the T-Rex is the best and she deserves all the flowers.