Research consultant: Shin-ichi Fujiwara
Translated by John Neal
194 pages
Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)
Read from September 27 to September 28
Rating: 3 out of 5 (maybe 3.5?)
I read Dinosaur Sanctuary: Volume 4 in the midst of packing up to move to New York. That was less than six months ago, yet it feels like years have passed. There was the move itself, and adjusting to our new home and our new region, then I caught COVID for (probably) the first time, then we had a lovely summer, and then… everything that’s happened just this month, which has felt like a year on its own.
Thankfully, I get to spend some time in my own home this week, a brief respite from the month or so of Long Island exile still hanging over me. As a nice bonus, my preorder of this book was waiting for me when I got home. A comfort read for a comfort break.
Dinosaur Sanctuary has always presented a mix of dinosaurs with light human drama, but I think this installment skewed too far in the direction of office drama, and skimped on the dinos. The series' main weakness — the fact that its characters are broad stereotypes (the excitable new hire, her sisterly friend, the serious hard-working supervisor, the misanthropic stickler), and none of them get any development — is especially apparent here, without as much gorgeous dinosaur art or as many interesting zookeeping dilemmas to give the manga heft. The main dino storyline, a saga of two ceratopsians that the zookeepers want to mate, seems like it drags on forever.
That said — and I say this every time I review one of these — it’s a manga about a dinosaur zoo. It’s everything we ever wanted from Jurassic World, etc. I don’t think I could ever fully get bored of this series. And this tankÅbon has Sanctuary’s most interesting flashback chapter to date, giving us a glimpse of a dinosaur safari park in Australia, and the poaching problems that beset it. So that was pretty cool.
No comments:
Post a Comment