Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara
Translated by John Neal
196 pages
Published 2021 (English translation published 2024)
Read April 11
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
After volumes 1, 2, and 3 of Dinosaur Sanctuary, I expected more or less the same substance here: a shallow but entertaining tale of dinosaur-keepers running a zoo full of prehistoric animals, a well-researched and excellently drawn manga with few surprises but plenty of dinosaurs. And that’s largely what we get from this volume.
However, we open with a flashback chapter that centers on a secondary character but doesn’t add much substance to him. For me, at least, that threw off this volume’s rhythm, and it never quite recovered. I enjoyed the tale of Suma and Kaidou helping to capture an escaped Velociraptor, but the rest of the chapters felt a little flat. Even the art felt a little bit more rushed this time around, with fewer splash pages and less attention to detail.
Perhaps I’m the problem this time around. My partner R and I are in the middle of a complicated process of home-buying, packing, and planning for a move halfway up the Eastern Seaboard, so I’m in my distracted era. Or perhaps the infamous pressures of manga production are catching up with Itaru Kinoshita.
Still, it’s a lovely book about an operational dinosaur park, which puts it well above all but the first of the Jurassic Park movies (and most of the dinosaur fiction I’ve read).
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