Juan Gedeon and Daniel Warren Johnson’s The Jurassic League is a quirky book, selling itself with a high concept from the get-go: the Justice League … but as dinosaurs! Clearly that’s sufficient, already earning itself the rumored animated feature. Plot is in some respects secondary and also at times actually secondary, though deceptively Jurassic offers a paradigm of the Justice League that’s different and interesting. The League doesn’t translate to dinosaurs — or at least, not these dinosaurs — seamlessly, and the affordances change the relationship between the League and the people they protect.

[Review contains spoilers]

There’s assuredly a fun batch of “League as dinosaurs” here — Batsaur, who still wears a cowl, and Jokerzard, a legitimately terrifying purple-and-green velociraptor(?). Blackmantasaurus feels a bit easy, as do some of the other Legion of Doom-specific villains, but Atrocitaurus is a pleasant surprise. If the Darkyloseid reveal gets telegraphed way back, the bloody scenes of him munching up enemy and ally alike add an unexpected note of gore toward the book’s end.

At risk of taking “League as dinosaurs” too seriously, there were more than a few aspects of the story where I felt the authors were treading on premise alone. Among the first villains that the heroes encounter are Giganta and Brontozarro, though Supersaur finding he has an imperfect double out there is something never remarked on.

To the extent the Big Three — Supersaur, Batsaur, and Wonderdon — are well-defined, Flashraptor, Green Torch, and Aquanyx are less-so, the former two portrayed as lackadaisical “bros” and the latter as a dolphin-obsessed parody; I never clocked, for instance, how Flashraptor got fast. Darkyloseid is a nondescript world-eater, something more akin to Galactus than Darkseid necessarily.

But that’s made up for, one, by big dinosaur action, and two, by the characterization around the Big Three. Supersaur is perhaps the most unchanged, an alien (dinosaur) sent to Earth and raised by the “small beasts,” the humans who populate this place. Seemingly there are humans, “regular” dinosaurs, and then the League- and villain-type dinosaurs, though why some of those are sentient and some are not is also never explored.

Batsaur’s parents, in the Tim Burton vein, were killed by Jokerzard, though this “Batman” doesn’t appear to have been raised by an Alfred(saur), or at least not by a human one. This is a key place where Jurassic League differs from the League itself, in that while “our” Superman is a Kryptonian, Wonder Woman is an Amazon, etc., they are effectively human, of the species on Earth that they protect. But the whole of the Jurassic League is biologically separate from the humans that Darkyloseid targets, and specifically here the “Batman” is not the mortal representative of humanity that he might be on the League; instead Batsaur eschews saving the humans in favor of his own vengeance against Jokerzard.

“Our” Superman is effectively human, raised (at least if you go by Byrne) as human and only discovering his extraterrestrial origins later. Still, it’s an unusual position for Supersaur to be the one advocating for protecting humanity even if, as Batsaur says, “They do not share your blood.” Batsaur’s arc is to see his mission as beyond serving just himself (eventually taking a human “Robin”), whereas usually Batman comes with “no one else should have to suffer my tragedy” baked in. Meanwhile, in the face of a more warlike Batsaur and Wonderdon, the peaceful Supersaur wonders if he ought be more violent, until his human father guides him otherwise.

Johnson writes here only, with Gedeon as the co-writer and main artist, though one intuits Johnson’s influence — or, at least, there’s a similar graininess to the art that reminds of Johnson’s Wonder Woman: Dead Earth. Maybe what we take from that is the presence of colorist Mike Spicer on both books. Gedeon’s Jurassic League characters are kinetic and detailed, but his panels feel roomy; when Rafa Garres comes in, there’s a lot of extra background shading and inking that made those chapters look too dark and cluttered.

I took a quick left turn when I was about to start reading Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Across the Universe because I can see that it has the Jurassic League in it (they’ve also cameoed in a couple multiverse crowd scenes). Neither Juan Gedeon nor Daniel Warren Johnson are involved in that story; rather it’s Mark Russell, no slouch, though I’ll be interested to see to what extent Russell hews to the League personalities here or not — whether the characters of Jurassic League have “solidified,” as it were. Art is by Jon Mikel, who also did a few pages here, so there’s that consistency. I have not been quick to watch the DC animated films, Aztec Batman and such, but Jurassic League? That’s something I’d watch.

(I imagine Brontozarro sounding something like Gregg Berger’s Grimlock.)

[Includes original and variant covers, sketchbook]