When I originally started on my journey to post all the dinosaur covers I could between 1950-2020, I disregarded earlier comics on the grounds that there just weren’t enough of them to matter. There were no great series like Turok or The War That Time Forgot. But slowly over time I kept coming across dinosaurs on comics before 1950. Here they are. And I was wrong, of course. Perhaps the very first franchise in dinos was Alley Oop by V. T. Hamlin. Beginning December 5, 1932, Hamlin drew the comic strip for four decades.
I’ve never really talked about my criteria, and this looks like a logical place for that. When choosing dinosaur covers I have always stuck to those that were fair representations of what we thought dinos looked like at the time. If it breathes fire or has two heads, I’ve passed on the grounds that’s a dragon or just plain silly. Seems like a strange delineation for a bunch of comics but there is something in a dinosaur drawn by someone who knows dinosaurs, as opposed to sad, cliche or illogical make-believe. I have shied away from space dinosaurs because they usually have some new gimmick added to them that makes them dumb. My bias, but I stick to it.
