This is Ricardo Delgado’s Age of Reptiles Omnibus Volume 1, published by Dark Horse early last year.

The Dark Horse Omnibus series handsomely collects comics in glossy, high-quality paperbacks, at about eighty percent of the original printing size. Looks great on a shelf, fits nicely in the hand. Overall a very classy product, clocking in at around 400 pages in this case.

The Age of Reptiles collection is interesting for a few reasons. One: it’s about dinosaurs. Two: there are no word balloons, nor is the book narrated in any way. Three: it’s resoundingly well-drawn and drafted, communicating a great deal of drama and action in its pages without the use of the written word.  Four: it collects three stories published over a sixteen year period, which allows one to observe the evolution Delgado’s drawing style, as well as changes in the coloring of western comics.

1. Tribal Warfare (1993)

In Tribal Warfare, Ricardo Delgado painstakingly renders his landscapes and dinosaurs with as much detail as possible, hatching and cross-hatching elaborate textures that emphasize the reptilian nature of these terrible lizards. It looks like a lot of work, but succeeds at breathing vicious life into the story he’s telling, which concerns an escalating vendetta between a pack of deinonychus and a tyrannosaurus rex.

The coloring is tacky and gauche, and I mean that positively. It looks terrific! Dinosaurs parade around in absurdly flat, bright and contrasting colors. I don’t know how much of the appeal is derived from the added visual interest this brings, and how much comes from the nostalgic resemblance to toys and other books depicting dinosaurs in the early nineties.

2. The Hunt (1997)

The Hunt is similar to its predecessor in all ways. Delgado’s drawing style works to depict lush landscapes and bumpy, scaly beasts. An allosaurus feuds with a pack of ceratosaurs and all sorts of wanton violence and destruction occurs.

The most interesting difference is the enhanced use of coloring. Now not only are the dinosaurs bright, but they also gleam, as the growing possibilities of digital coloring allow for highlights and dappled pigment which almost always serve to enhance the art because these effects conform closely to Delgado’s lines. In addition, there’s a part of the story which incorporates big splash panels of clouds, and it would have been nearly impossible to present in an interesting way without the enhancements made to comics coloring by this period of time.

Credit must go to colorist James Sinclair. There was a lot of awkwardly colored mess in this period of comics history, but Sinclair keeps his gradients at manageable levels, and pays close attention to the anatomy of the figures Delgado has laid out. The result isn’t flawless, but mostly works. In the above image, for example, you can see how the highlights on the red dinosaur call a little too much attention to themselves, and would have been better off reduced.

3. The Journey (2009)

We jump twelve years into the future, and see a radical change in Delgado’s style. His linework is softer and more whimsical. He’s totally abandoned the crosshatching technique, though he’ll occasionally invoke that focused attention to surface details which characterizes his earlier work for some of the close-up panels. His lines now have a rounded, topography-like look to them.

At the same time, the scale of his compositions has grown. Whereas in earlier work we might see thirty or so dinosaurs in a single page, now there are often over a hundred! It works well for the story, which deals with a massive migration of many dinosaur species and the resulting culture clashes.

The same way a brazen color palette is characteristic of nineties American comics, The Journey reflects the muted, earthy tones that often prevail these days. There’s no denying the story suffers for it. The dinosaurs blend into the parched milieu, and Delgado’s inspired landscapes are less vivid than they deserve to be. Overall the comic is still an impressive work of art, but comes across as a bit of a misstep in light of Delgado’s earlier pieces.

Don’t let my comments about the differences in the three stories fool you, this is a terrific collection of visual storytelling that I’m delighted to own. I’d highly recommend Age of Reptiles to anyone with even a passing interest in comics and dinosaurs.

I first became a fan of Olivier Ledroit when I was a broke college student reading pirated comics. Low quality scans of his Pat Mills collab Requiem (an insane comic I totally endorse) lit my imagination on fire, and the artwork posted on theevilsnest.com had me looking at importation costs of the French editions. The way the comic was entirely painted, with a heavy sense of atmosphere and thematic color saturation, drew me in a manner comics rarely do.

My total lack of funds forced me to abandon the idea of importing the books, but I resolved to not actually read through the scans, because I knew their low quality would take some of the magic out of it. Shortly afterwards I forgot about it altogether.

A few years later I’m an independent working adult (blech) and I randomly discover Heavy Metal has printed two Requiem collections. I read ‘em and love ‘em. So I pick up every other Olivier Ledroit comic available in English: Sha, another Pat Mills collaboration published by Heavy Metal, and Xoco: The Obsidian Butterfly, the first of a four chapter series only available in a Heavy Metal Magazine back issue.

My desire to import his exclusively French work only increased. One in particular hung over me perilously: the self-titled Olivier Ledroit, an enormous 300-page hardcover artbook. Not much information about it exists aside from a French-language amazon.fr review. I held off on purchasing it for a long time, reasoning I’d be better off getting comics and looking at those instead of an art book filled with behind the scenes info I couldn’t read. But I eventually relented, took a chance, and was rewarded.

Ledroit's early work on the dark fantasy comic Black Moon Chronicles (Chroniques de la Lune Noire).

Concept work Ledroit did for the Heroes of Might and Magic game series. Never played it, but I'm pretty sure the art is better.

My crappy scans don't do this book justice... imagine this image but 26 inches long and in amazing clarity.

Olivier Ledroit is entirely dual-language, with the French and English written side by side. And it neatly covers every major project Ledroit has undertaken in mostly chronological order, beginning with his pioneering work on the dark fantasy comic Black Moon Chronicles (1989), and ending most recently with the ongoing Requiem series. Every chapter is underwritten with commentary by the people he worked with, as well as Ledroit’s own thoughts. And gorgeous full-page illustrations.

Short of having all of his work published in English, it’s perfection.

If you’re a fan of Requiem on a visceral level, I’d highly recommend this book. It provides a thorough look at Olivier Ledroit’s variedness and evolution as an artist, including all of his comics work (tons of which hasn’t been published in English), his covers for Phillip K. Dick novels, a chapter on bugs and fairies (an area he’s not well-known for, perhaps explaining the uncharacteristic cover of the book itself), and a bunch of other stuff, including various paintings.

I’m telling you about this book out of an odd sense of duty… I don’t know how many people who don’t speak French are even aware of its existence, or the fact it’s written in English. Ledroit’s personal website doesn’t mention it at all (and looks like it’s from 1995.) I haven’t seen it anywhere other than Amazon and sites that aggregate book information by ISBN number.

My approach towards reading comics began changing two years ago. I can’t pinpoint exactly why it happened, and I could use inflated highfalutin language to describe it, but I’ll be honest with you: now more than ever I like to be immersed in fantastic art. I used to be in the habit of catching up–voraciously reading something, finishing it, and going on to the next thing. But as it turns out, reading comics is a lot like lovemaking. The most rewarding experiences are often the most leisurely.

I read volume one of Katsuya Terada’s fully painted manga The Monkey King shortly after it was published in 2005. I was a different person back then and the book didn’t leave a strong impression. When I heard a second volume was finally due this month (a seven-year hiatus!) I took note. The preview artwork made me wonder if perhaps I was in a place to better appreciate something like this, and it turns out I am!

The Monkey King takes its name and characters from the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West, a frequent source of inspiration in Asian pop culture. For example, Dragonball was originally based on it. You probably knew that already.

Journey to the West is about a Buddhist priest’s quest to retrieve ancient scrolls from India, running into all sorts of demons and monsters along the way. He eventually allies with a powerful monkey and a hedonistic pig, as well as a man-eating demon and a god who takes the form of a horse.

Katsuya Terada is a Japanese artist whose most substantive credit to Western audiences is the character designs he provided for the 2000 anime Blood: The Last Vampire. His take on Journey consists of short bursts of story focused on the monkey character, in what I can only imagine are heavily remixed accounts of the original text, ramping up the violence, gore, and sexuality. I mean, the original novel may have had masturbation jokes in it, but I’m guessing not. Terada even transforms the main priest character into a sexy nun, for indecent reasons I won’t spoil.

Each story is unrelated to the other, and don’t seem to be assembled in any particular order. They’re totally Heavy Metal, in the Moebius/Arzach sense of the phrase. Because Journey to the West is a famous story Japanese people absorb naturally, there are details Terada leaves out which may baffle Western readers, details which probably should have been given more mention in the book’s supplementary notes.

I’ll mention them succinctly as possible: the monkey king is ridiculously overpowered. He can shapeshift, clone himself, and has immense physical strength and speed. He wields a heavy staff that can become longer or shorter at will, and rides a cloud. Before he is recruited along the priest’s journey, the monkey is punished by the gods for his pride and left trapped under a mountain. He is controlled by the priest character using a metal band held around his head which is able to magically contract, causing pain.

Knowing these things will make your reading experience of Monkey King flow better, as the events fit along a loose timeline, but aren’t always presented in order.

Volume two continues the pattern set out in the first volume admirably. The same unpredictable sense of imagination is applied, and the narrative is just as impulsive, to seemingly fit whatever Terada feels like drawing, such as the story of how the monkey king comes to own his magical staff. The book is filled to the brim with blood, violence and nudity, affectionately crafted in living color for your pleasure.

The plan seems to be that this manga will run for three volumes. But be warned: in Japan, there was actually a twelve year gap between volume one (1998) and volume two (2010). Remember what I said about the value of leisure in comics? I’d selfishly prefer if the artists themselves didn’t take it to heart.

Katsuya Terada’s The Monkey King Volume 2 hits stores April 18. Review copy provided by Dark Horse Comics.