Books: Xenozoic Tales

"Xenozoic Tales," a comic series by Mark Schultz, is proudly secure in its pulp action-adventure roots. There's a dashing and muscular hero, a lithe and buxom heroine, and stories featuring dinosaurs that eat people in grusome ways. The issues collected in this anthology, which I picked up for a song at the local comics shop, are loosely connected and can be read in any order, but they always end with an EC Comics-like punchline.

The setting is a fictional far future, 500 years removed from our time. Through nuclear war, Man has brought on ecological disaster to himself. Civilization has fallen, coastal cities are under 30 feet of water, and some unknown mechanism has caused once extinct species, like dinosaurs, to reappear. Instead of being depressing, however, "Xenozoic Tales" embraces this wild and woolly new world.

There's a lot less dinosaur killing than you'd expect, mainly because our heroes, Jack "Cadillac" Tenrec and Hannah Dundee, are environmentalists who actually safeguard wildlife. In lieu of lurid pictures of dinos getting shot, you have some interesting intrahuman conflict and stories about lost relics of the 20th century. Jack is no less a badass, though, since he drives guano-powered cars and guides people through the rugged interior of North America.

You might know this series by another, more evocative name - "Cadillacs and Dinosaurs." There was even a TV series spawned by this comic: