Welcome, dear readers, to another week of comics and commetary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing our awards for the Best of the Week - beginning with two Award postings, followed closely by the past week’s Best.

Comics, you had me at the words “dinosaur hunter”.

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Dynamite made quite the splash at this past year’s New York Comic Con with the announcement of a line of new Gold Key comics. For the past several years, the characters have been lying dormant (beyond a brief resurgence at Dark Horse where issues came out terminally late, none lasting more than a an arc or two), waiting for a breath of fresh air to bring them back to life. Enter Nate Cosby, line editor and packager, and his band of merry creators, all bursting with talent, all excited to get to work on some amazing concepts. Pairing creators with concepts and letting them run wild, Cosby has set up a neat little shop of what are sure to be some compelling books. To kick things off, Greg Pak and Mirko Colak laid their fingerprints all over Turok: Dinosaur Hunter - and the results are stunning.

Pak and Colak do a phenomenal job taking the concept, and making it viable for today. During the brief moments I would take to flip through old issues of Turok, it was quite clear that they were a product of its time - clunky dialogue married with some… problematic characterization, let’s say. In this version, the action is slick, and the characters are vibrant. There’s not a whole lot of dinosaur hunting in this issue, but there is a lot of character development taking place, giving the skeleton of the concept some meat with which to cling. This rockets towards a conclusion that adds yet another interesting wrinkle to the proceedings that I’m eager to see these creators explore quite fully. After all, the genre is at its best when the window dressing helps a reader push through a window of discomfort through to learning some solid truths about modern life, or the implications of our past.

If it sounds like I’m talking circles around something, that’s because I am - I believe that the comic’s ending should be read fresh, rather than delivered here. I’m just an asshole on the internet with a blog. This is not where the entertainment is. You’re going to want to go to your local comic shop or hit up ComiXology and read it for yourself. Think of it less as a shocking ending, and one that gets the gears turning, implying a rich vein of storytelling to explore, rather than a cheap jolt. This book gets this week’s Denver the Last Dinosaur Award. It probably won’t be it’s last.