Antarctic dinosaur

Story 19/21: Non Stop comics – seated adventuring

Visitor from afar

Story 19/21: Non Stop comics – seated adventuring

September, 1986

“Whoooooaaaaaooooouuuuuaaaaaaahhh…” Violent siren blasts me back to my room. Seems to be already 11 o’clock. I really like our new home, but as the civil defence center is just uphill, these Monday tests really rubs the cold war to your face. Luckily it is not every week.

Alarm fading away I look back to the comic book. Gray dinosaur has just crashed through a building –roller-skating on couple of cars. Appropriately to match with the now weakening alert, tanks are rolling in on the next frames of the story. My thoughts cut, I lift a pile of 1970’s comics to remind me, how did the “The traveller from the Mesozoic, 1957” start.

The curious thing with these “NON STOP” -magazines is, that they repeat the model of operation of some Belgian comic releases like the “Spirou” and the “Tintin”, where on weekly basis new comics were printed as a magazine. There were short strips like the ones on newspapers, as well as parts of longer stories to be continued on next issues.

I had been collecting these for some years and had finally gotten most of them, so I could read complete stories. This was split into four issues published Summer 1977, when I was four-and-half-years old. I really loved exploring the antiquarian bookshops with one friend of mine. We even had set up a private “library” each, lending the books between us.

Now the friend had moved to a neighbouring town, but books and comics I had collected with him remained. And collecting went actually on by myself. But I am getting sidetracked. I was to check; how did the dinosaur end up to demolish parts of Champignac.

Going back couple of issues I return to Antarctica, where the Count of Champignac astonishes pair of arctic explorers by strutting around the freezing continent wearing just a sleeveless shirt. He has destroyed a radio to salvage an incredible discovery – a deep-frozen dinosaur egg.

That’s one thing I like about the comics – and books, movies and storytelling in any form, to be honest; it can take you to places you never were with just a turn of a page. And in these old serial comics you actually can jump from tale to tale – going from midst of a medieval adventure to conclusion of a futuristic storyline and further to the beginning of a story headlining with funny little shirtless blue creatures.

The bad thing about them is, that it is too easy to get submerged to the stream of fiction so deep, that you lose your sense of time. It happened again. Have to run. It is only couple of hundred meters downhill to the school, but I need to go around the building and through the gate and to race the stairs up to 4^th floor. Good for me, that the English teacher was bit later than me – so I got away without a warning.

Some background data:

Old comics:

Second hand bookstores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Used_bookstore

Non Stop: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_Stop

Spirou magazine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirou_(magazine)

Extinctions:

“The Big 5” mass extinctions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#The_%22Big_Five%22_mass_extinctions

Questions – see links above, books, Internet or digital media for answers:

1. Used books. Recycling is one way to keep the natural resources in rotation, instead of just dumping once used items. Old books, comics and maps are also sold second hand. Multiple layers of stories, studies, art and action are packed to the shelves and decades and even centuries change in just few steps. Suspension, surprise, laughter and tears are backed between sheets of paper and sold in petty cash.

Antiquarian bookshops are nowadays both at storefronts and online. Where is your closest second-hand bookseller? Find it and visit. Explore at least three different topics, like the comics, youth, adventure, crime, sports, fashion, art, photography, chess, cooking, etc.

2. Extinctions and evolution. At least five larger waves of extinction have happened on planet Earth. They have been triggered by different events from huge volcanic eruptions to meteorites and for example changes in the atmospheric gases. Study the five major extinctions.

Evolution. Despite some criticism to this 1982 “Big 5”, it is a good reference to study extinctions. Glance through the five extinctions and note some phases, where life forms are wiped out. Then, on the next extinction see for new genera, or species, that were not listed on previous era. View some links in Wikipedia by taking the mouse on top of links of species names and compare the images of lifeforms having died in earlier extinctions to the more recent ones. 

Can you see, how much more complex some species of the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event (4^th out of the Big 5) orCretaceous–Paleogene extinction event (the last of the five extinctions) in comparison to for example the second extinction: Late Devonian extinctions. So, death of simpler lifeforms has given way to birth of more sophisticated species – over the timespan of tens of millions of years. 

Image: Declines in the numbers of terrestrial and aquatic genera at times of extinction events. Attributing the author: By SVG version by Albert Mestre – Phanerozoic_Biodiversity.png, CC BY-SA 3.0

3. Extinctions and diversity. Look at the above graph. The grey and green areas represent the amount of classified life forms on the planet at that given time period. Yellow downward triangles locate the “big 5” extinctions and smaller blue ones mark other extinction events. 

You can see, how the grey and green lines drop in extinctions. What else can you see? At the right there is the y-axis, that describes the number of classified organisms in thousands of genera (taxonomic rank of lifeforms). Compare the peaks and valleys of the grey colour in the first four extinctions to the fiftht extinction and the curve after it. What can you see?

4. Discuss. Your view: What thoughts did rise in your mind having read the story, browsing through the background material and answering to the three questions above? Can you see links between the three topics handled in questions above? Discuss with your pair.

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