I remember collecting Turok comics as a young child
in the seventies. It was a bit of a surprise to discover that the run extended
clear back into the fifties, during an age when both dinosaurs and American
Indians were popular topics, and the writers decided to combine the two.
One reason dinosaurs became a hot topic at this particular time was largely
thanks to Life magazine’s "World We Live In" series, which among much else,
featured Rudolph Zallinger’s mural, “Life Through the Age”, from the beginning of
life to the end of the Cenozoic. I remember pouring over the gorgeous mural,
and finding the different dinosaur and mammal species, in the huge book version
my parents owned when I was about four or five. I noticed, of course, that some
of the pictures in the small Turok digest (I later found out it reprinted the
first four issues from the fifties) were taken directly from the World We
Live In, that is, Zalinger’s mural. The monthly issues of TSOS sometimes
had swipes as well, often from the Color book of prehistoric animals, and I
enjoyed finding them, and pointing these out.
It's easy to see the swipes of Rudolph Zalinger's Life Through the Ages mural
When Turok began back in the fifties, the story had two
Plains Indians (later incarnations of Turok established them as Kiowa braves),
Turok and the young teenage Andar, investigate a vast cavern system. They have a
run-in with a huge cave bear (not a short-face, as would have been the case in
North America), and discover “Lost Valley”, a mammoth cavern whose roof as
fallen in containing prehistoric fauna. The eager Andar wants to explore the strange new realm,
of course, and first spies a small comsognathus then a dimetrodon and a
brontosaurus, followed by a tyrannosaurus. The entire valley is dominated by
Mesozoic and Permian fauna, with a smattering of mammalian species from later
eras, such as giant panthers, dire wolves, antelope, and cave-dwelling humans.
Turok and Andar are able to show the cave people more efficient ways to hunt
game, and trap the large “honkers”, as the dinosaurs and other prehistoric
reptiles are called. They discover poison berries with which they soak their
arrows. This proves fatal to even the largest honkers. The story arc of the
second issue, “Mystery Mountain” has lookouts of a cave tribe, stationed
on a cliff, mysteriously vanishing during the night. The two braves discover
the culprit to be a huge Pteranodon. They follow the winged beast into a cavern
swarming with the pterosaurs, and emerge into a second prehistoric valley, this
one dominated by mammals.
Now our heroes encounter a diatryma, a giant bird of the Eocene that gobbles down a raccoon and is in turn slain by a female Smilodon to feed her cubs. Note: diatryma, now called gastornis, is now known to have been herbivorous. They encounter a long-horned bison, a diodicerus glyptodont, mastodons, dinohyus, another huge panther that proves extremely hard to kill with the poison arrows, and of course more cave people who may well be Paleo-Indians
A swipe of Charles R. Knight's American mastodon
A Zalinger swipe of the entelodont Dinohyus
- . These early Turoks also included an educational series called “Young Earth”, about evolving life our planet. When Turok and Andar discover the valley containing ancient reptiles, “Young Earth” covered life in the Mesozoic. For the adventure in the valley of mammals, it educated readers about life during the ice age. “Young Earth” continued up until the seventies. Some of the info wasn’t accurate though, as in the case where they explained that the modern Asian elephant was descended from the mammoth, which lost its hair once the ice-age ended; actually the wooly mammoth was a northern species of elephant.
The "Young Earth" series was a feature of fifties and sixties issues
- Zalinger swipes were a feature of early issues
This early issue even featured a Kong-like giant gorilla, seen here crashing through some siligaria trees of the bygone Permian
Subsquent Turok adventures had our heroes venturing into
other regions of Lost Valley, in some of which Mesozoic and Cenozoic life forms
mixed and mingled. A short article on the inside cover of one issue depicted a
T-rex battling a mammoth, and explained that later forms of prehistory life had
entered the valley a different times than earlier species. However, at some
point prior to the seventies, it was decided, for unknown reasons, that only
prehistoric reptiles, and their contemporary fauna be featured in the Turok
stories, save for the cavemen. Thus, all of the braves’ adventures took place in Lost Valley regions where Mesozoic fauna predominated.
My dad once remarked that Turok was relatively free of
fantastic elements, and Turok depicted the world pretty much as it was seventy
million years ago, IF there had been two Indians there. But there were a few
more fantastic elements that would turn up occasionally. For instance, lost
valley was home to species of man-eating, (and occasionally dinosaur-eating!)
plants. There was also the occasional giant insect, arachnid, or crustation,
including a four-pinchered giant desert-swelling monstrosity called a “sand
crawler”.
The cover of issue featuring a monstrous hybrid theropod was reused for a Dark Horse omnibus volume
Once thing I disliked were the inaccuracies that would crop
up, especially when herbivorous dinosaurs were depicted as carnivores. The most
notorious of these was flesh-eating ankylosaur. In facr, ankylosaurs were
depicted as carnivores from the earliest issues, when an ankylosaurus devours a
rabbit from their cookfire. A later issue has ankylosaur as a guardian to the
deserted city, whose inhabitants were apparently highly civilized, perhaps
Phoenican or Greek, indicting that these people once attempted colonization of
the Americas! Another issue falsely referred to an ankylosaurus as a
gorgosaurus! Still another (one of the weirder ones) featured a huge dinosaur
hybrid, which Turok remarks looks like combination of different types of fierce
honker. It appears to be a large tyrannosaurus with ankylosaur armor. Another
frequent error was the carnivorous iguanodon, referred to as a ‘savage iguanodon”.
Since at the time, iguanodon was depicted in an upright posture, it was easy to
mistake it for a large theropod, rather than an ornithopod. Then there is the
matter of hysiphalodon, an iguanodont relative that was falsely believed to
have been a dinosaurian tree-dweller. Turok and Andar would often encounter
tree-dwelling honkers that seemed to be based upon hysiphalodon (at leasr tnce
referred to as such), but were always carnivorous.
Cover of the issue featuring "The Honker that was Human"
Another thing that bugged me as a young reader of Turok is that many of the stories talked down to kids, in my opinion, as Andar, still a young teenager, was very often getting himself and Turok into trouble because his foolishness and naivety. Turok was always right. You might say that Andar was sometimes clever, but seldom wise. There was the time he used his brains to get Turok out of danger, like the issue where he impersonates a honker-headed god (by wearing the head of a slain dinosaur) when Turok his held captive by a cave tribe. But these issues were exceptions. One issue that stands out in particular in regard to this had a story called "The Honker that was Human." This was sometime near the end of Turok's reign, when the book expanded into forty-eight pages, with three new Turok stories, plus a "Young Earth" educational feature (this was a reprint from the fifties-sixties , but I didn't know it at the time). The new format only lasted two issues, however.
The story went like this: Turok and Andar are searching for a way out of Lost Valley, when they are disturbed by the cries of a theropod dinosaur (a gorgosaurus, according to the script, but it is too large), Turok opts to shoot the honker with a poison arrow, but Andar stops him, observing (correctly) that they need no food, and honker isn't threatening them. They soon discover that the honker's cries save them from some danger (can't recall what). Andar believes the honker was trying to warn them. Later, when they make camp on top of a huge cliff, Andar shoves off some boulders for the same honker (whom he names 'White-Patch', because of the white patch on its throat) to play with below. When White-Patch is suddenly threatened by a pair of attacking monoclonius (why two herbivores would attack a predator is anyone's guess), Andar shoots the horned honkers with his poison arrows, while White Patch hold one of them by the horn. A bit later, White Patch lifts Andar up so the boy can gather fruit from a tree. This understandably alarms Turok, who attempts to kill the honker with an arrow, but Andar swats the arrow away.. Later, after they break camp and move off, White Patch undergoes a change of personality when he pushing a branch down on them, pinning both braves beneath. "Your honker did this!" yells Turok, and also observes that "your honker has summoned others for the kill" as a pack of other gorgogsaurs appears. Turok manages to finish them off with his arrow, but not before White Patch seizes Andar and very nearly swallows him, before Turok's arrow finishes off the dinosaur at the last minute. After this brush with death, Turok says,"it was strange how your White Patch seemed so human, but if we meet another honker like that--" "we will slay it," Andar finishes, lesson learned. The End.
What was the point of the story anyway? It seems to be that animals, at least wild ones, are unpredictable, and should never be trusted. Now that might have some merit, but there are holes in logic here. First, Andar, not Turok is the most sensible one at the start, when Turok intends to slay the honker simply because it's annoying him. Also, why would White-Patch summon other predators to its kill? Carnivores typically do not share kills, even among their own kind. And what is there to share when the only prey is two measly, bite-sized humans? The story's logic makes no sense here, and the only purpose seems to be that young people are foolish. It is quite a shame that Gold Key, unlike other companies, did not feature letter pages in comics wherein readers could write in and voice their opinions. It would have been interesting to receive, especially on stories like this one.
During the seventies, the dinosaur renaissance was just starting to come into vogue, with new theories regarding warm-blooded, feathered and cunning dinos staring to displacing to displace the old fifties notion of them as stupid and sluggish behemoths, doomed to extinction. To its credit, Turok incorporated some new discoveries and theories into some stories. For example, there was the story "Flying Beasts of Prey", in which Turok and Andar encounter a pair of flying honkers that are twice the size of the largest flying honker they had ever seen. Though the creatures are not named, these are obviously based on the newly discovered Quetzalcoatylus Northopi, then merely called the "Texas Pterosaur", though both beasts were incorrectly adorned with pteranodon-like headcrests. That the time of its discovery, Quetzalcoatylus was thought to have a fifty-foot wingspan, twice that of pteranodon, though that estimate has since shrunk to somewhere around 35.
Turok rides of phorohacas to save Andar from an evil shaman
Then there was the story "The Honker with Two Feet," about a cave tribe who worshiped an previously unknown type of honker with two legs and feathers. When the braves rescue a man from a plesiosaur, the latter assumes that the braves have slain one of his tribe's sacred honkers, because of the feathers of their headbands and arrows. They contemplate they have never seen such a honker (this is slightly incorrect, as dino-birds like archeopteryx and ichthyornis had shown up previously in the pages of Turok). Anyway, they are soon captured, and Turok is thrown to the sacred honkers. These turn out to be none other than Phorohacas, the South-American terror-bird of the Miocene, the only Cenozoic species to show up in the pages of Turok since the early sixties! Turok watches the giant birds peck an edaphosaurus (an herbivorous relative of dimetrodon) to death. he slays a few with his arrows, then escapes on one that is still alive but woozy from the poison. The tribe takes him for a god, and he and Andar are able to escape. This issue is notable for showing a clear link between dinosaurs and birds.
By the early 1980s Turok was finally running out of steam. Gold Key itself folded sometime around then. But they had well over 100 issues to their credit, unlike all too many other dinosaur-themed comic series. There was a fairly respectable revival in the ninties, with more sci-fi themed plots, video games, and a number of failed revivals. Sadly, none of these ever lived up to the original. There was also one animated DVD movie, that changed the story, but intentionally harked back to the original Turok series.
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Above: Some of the educational features to be found in early issues of Turok
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