How To Be a Theory Dinosaur

 
Since the 1990s, internet surfers have enjoyed a proliferation of online serial comics. Though similar in design to many print comics, webcomics are distinguished by their accessibility, as they are effectively free and updated regularly (often daily). As of 2007, the number of webcomics in production globally was estimated to be in the tens of thousands (Manley). Webcomics have little in common as a genre besides their internet publication platform. Different webcomics use different media forms (including illustration, clip art, or animation), and different webcomics have very different styles of humor. Several, such as xkcd and Ph.D. Comics, take the life of the mind as their object of satire. Yet only one webcomic manages not only to thematize intellectual life, but also to contribute to it.
 
Designed by Canadian writer and computer programmer Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics (or Qwantz for its domain name, qwantz.com) is a webcomic that first appeared in its current form on February 1, 2003.¹ Since that time, it has been syndicated in several newspapers and published in two print collections, and it has spawned a sizable amount of retail merchandise, including t-shirts. Dinosaur Comics has developed something of a cult following, and its geeky mixture of highbrow philosophy and theoretical science with adolescent imaginings and corny humor has earned it wide-spread acclaim—and a central place in my undergraduate literary theory lectures.
 
This comic proves teachable for at least two reasons. First, as I will elaborate below, the comic emphasizes dialogue over drawing. Its three principal characters are constructed primarily out of words. This emphasis on language dovetails nicely with many of the theoretical lessons taught in an average introductory literary theory course: lessons about the ties that bind language to power, the difference between speech and writing, the relation of ideology to symbols, and, especially, the role of language in subject formation. Moreover, the comic explores not just the fact of linguistic construction, but the act of constructing itself. Thus, the second reason Dinosaur Comics is teachable: it turns the stumbling drama of learning to think abstractly about the world toward humorous ends. The comic offers its readers the opportunity to watch others thinking, enabling the pleasures of identification alongside the challenges of theorizing.
 
Dinosaur Comics realizes this heady combination of elements using only six frames and three main characters, chief among whom is a Tyrannosaurus rex named T-rex. We quickly learn that T-rex is a dinosaur with big ideas, farcical commitments to logic, and a deep desire to appear cool. His thoughts take the form of theoretical speculation. The first two panels of Dinosaur Comics feature T-rex by himself, making an assertion or two. He often imagines how cool it would be to find himself in a particular situation—testifying as a witness in a murder trial, for instance, or enjoying a clean house. Like the logical propositions that initiate Socratic questioning, his assertions start a dialogue whose endpoint is often amusingly far from the original statement. The reason T-rex might enjoy being called as a witness in a murder trial, for example, is that he could enter into the court’s official records an announcement of how awesome he is (see Fig. 1).
 

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Fig. 1.

Dinosaur Comics #213

© Ryan North. Used by permission.

 
Other Dinosaur Comics installments begin with recognizable theoretical postulates: an evolutionary principle like island dwarfism, or a description of the Turing Test (which determines whether machines are capable of intelligent behavior), or a redaction of a post-Kantian Romantic philosophy which posits that individual consciousness adjudicates moral value.
 
Regardless of whether the initial proposition comes from T-rex’s imagination or from someone else’s, the course of events is generally the same. Following T-rex’s initial proposition, he will distort the theory, either by applying it speciously (and perhaps failing to see any likely consequences) or by misrecognizing a minor aspect as the main point. Thus, evolutionary theory becomes meaningful because it is cute (Fig. 4 below), moral theory because it is indulgent, and emotional bonds because they are sexually arousing. Inevitably, T-rex will overdescribe his idea, rendering it absurd through extreme though uneven embellishment. These overdescriptions may meet with some resistance from another character, Dromiceiomimus, in the third panel, but the real challenge to T-rex’s ideas occurs in the fourth and fifth panels where he discusses the matter with Utahraptor, who dispels T-rex’s theories with logic, empirical demonstration, and friendly disapproval. Most often, Utahraptor shows that T-rex’s overdescriptions are entirely arbitrary. For example, when T-rex demands of his friends their opinions as to whether they prefer love or sex, Utahraptor refuses the rules of the game and insists that he likes both. In the final panel, a frustrated T-rex typically attempts a zinging retort to the sense that Utahraptor makes, very often confirming Utahraptor’s point instead.
 
Dialogue is so key to the design of Dinosaur Comics because the comic otherwise eschews many of the conventions of graphic storytelling. Dinosaur Comics is a constrained comic, meaning that it uses the same artwork in every installment (Baetens). This version of constrained comic writing was popularized in the 1980s by David Lynch’s print comic, The Angriest Dog in the World, and it continues to be used in other syndicated comics such as This Modern World. In the case of Dinosaur Comics, North has generated more than 2000 comics with the same artwork. The scene is fixed in the very first installment:
 

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Fig. 2.

Dinosaur Comics #1

© Ryan North. Used by permission.

 
The house and the little girl whom T-rex threatens to stomp in the fourth panel are part of the action of the comic, and the discussion around whether or not to stomp forms the crisis of the narrative. Yet neither the comic nor this installment is really about stomping. The house and girl hover in a state of potential annihilation, yet they are never annihilated. Instead, they return installment after installment in a kind of paleontological Groundhog Day. But if these same elements-to-be-stomped recur in every installment, they often do so with far less discussion and thematic weight than they receive in the first installment. Likewise, other elements that appear in this first installment carry less significance here than they will in other installments. Dromiceiomimus, for example, does not speak in the third panel, though she often will later on. The constrained form of the comic reduces the world—its environments, plots, and characters —to a neat and repetitive system.
 
Though characters in a constrained comic have no power to act in any way that disrupts the comic’s systematicity, they nevertheless have remarkable license to talk. Thus, instead of capitalizing on visual representations to tell its stories, Dinosaur Comics anchors its narrative progression in language. The encounters with Dromiceiomimus in the third panel and with Utahraptor in the fourth and fifth serve as foils for T-rex’s various misadventures. Often, one of these characters’ comments is relayed to the other character. In other installments, a character remains silent within a panel, adding a complex texture to the scene via the constrained form; in the first installment, Dromiceiomimus remains silent as T-rex prepares to stomp the wooden house from another time. She may or may not be in favor of T-rex’s stomping, but her presence in this panel creates ambiguity about her attitude. Her silent witnessing suggests both horror and complicity, leaving open the question of whether T-rex’s stomping is a psychic challenge to her, or a solicitation of her favor, or some sadistic combination of these options. At the same time, Utahraptor’s cry of “WAIT” exploits the fact that T-rex’s stomping is drawn in the middle of its action. T-rex cannot but wait, for we never see him begin or end the task to which his powerful foot is recurrently set. Through both language and silence, Dinosaur Comics makes careful use of its constrained design, posing its iconological fixity against its narrative dialogue. In this way, the graphic constraints of the comic are often reflexively incorporated into the plots of various installments. Dinosaur Comics is not a means of graphic storytelling so much as an ironically illustrated language game (see Fig. 3).
 

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Fig. 3.

Dinosaur Comics #121

© Ryan North. Used by permission.

 
Indeed, the most original use of graphics in this comic has less to do with visual images in the conventional sense than with the graphic representation of language. Linguists generally define “language” as a complex coordination of sound and meaning whose complexity is poorly approximated by alphabetic writing. As anyone who knows something about the history of literary studies can tell you, this emphasis on linguistic sound and meaning (and the grammatical rules that systematically link them together) once dominated literary studies for a long and boring time. In those days, what is now the study of literature was instead called “philology.” Though this word translates roughly as “the love of language,” it produced some astonishingly dry and rather unlovable propositions.² Though philology is no longer a dominant course of literary study, an old-fashioned emphasis on syntax and semantics, on sound and sense, persisted well into the twentieth century. This emphasis sent not a few literature students running to embrace visual storytelling, from illustrated books to graphic novels.
 
In such a context, it becomes clear that part of the genius of Dinosaur Comics is its determination to treat writing not as alternative to graphic representation, but as a species of it. In the first installment, we see a handful of these alphabetic graphics: the onomatopoeic “*gasp*” in panel two, the all-majuscule “WAIT” in panel four, the parenthetical “problem(s)” of panels five and six. Each of these examples uses the graphic representation of language to nuance the meaning of words in the context of their use, whether to create humor (*gasp*), emphasis (WAIT), or ambiguity (problem(s)). This interest in the graphic representation of language appears throughout the run of Dinosaur Comics. In other installments, God and the Devil will speak from out of frame, in capital letters (the Devil in red-colored text). On rare occasions, individual panels will be surrounded by a cloud bubble, suggesting that the entire scene is a dream or fantasy. In a few episodes, a dwarf elephant names Mr. Tusks appears out of frame, usually making a gentlemanly pun about his own diminutive status, for he is often in “a tiny bit of trouble” (see Fig. 4 below).
 

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Fig. 4.

Dinosaur Comics # 1078

© Ryan North. Used by permission.

 
But here again, graphic representation works in the service of the dialogical drama that is the real motor of Dinosaur Comics.
 
By propelling its characters through dialogue rather than through more traditional forms of graphic storytelling, Dinosaur Comics raises questions about the ties between language and personality. These questions are not, of course, unique to this forum. Many psychologists and psychoanalysts have proposed that the acquisition of language is a significant act in the development of our individual personalities. At the same time, scholars of language acquisition are keenly aware that the language we acquire is not individual at all. We learn to speak and think in a system that pre-exists us, though we manage to make this language ours through particular ways of using it. Indeed, the ways in which we organize the world in our minds and through our words can be quite individual. At a grammatical level, language is a shared system, but at a stylistic level, language accommodates our individual expressions.
 
Accordingly, what we see when Utahraptor and T-rex debate in panels four and five is that each has a very different style of linguistic self-presentation. T-rex makes grand assertions, using idealistic terms and displaying hyperbolic impulses. Utahraptor is more modest in his expressions, asking questions and making distinctions with an eye toward clarification. In one installment, for example, T-rex announces that “When you spend your time talking to a T-rex… Everyone’s a winner!” only to find that this goodwill pronouncement collapses around Utahraptor’s insistence that he define the term “winner” (see Fig. 5 below). T-rex’s scheme is punctured by his failure to know what the words he uses actually mean.
 

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Fig. 5.

Dinosaur Comics #164

© Ryan North. Used by permission.

 
Though T-rex is often a victim of his own illogic, it would be inaccurate to say that Dinosaur Comics is somehow trying to advocate for logical thinking. Instead, by following T-rex’s wild premises, we encounter a small bit of wisdom: logic is only ever as good as the logician.
 
Through myriad scenarios of misspeaking, misrecognition, and misconstrual, Dinosaur Comics demonstrates that thinking is a matter of style. It is this lesson, above all others, that nominates Dinosaur Comics as a teaching tool for students of literary theory. The comic brilliantly dramatizes the kinds of leaps in logic, idiosyncratic associations, and rowdy misapplications that people can (and, I would insist, should) experience as they come into contact with big ideas for the first time. Moreover, this dramatization is cruelty-free. T-rex aspires to be cooler than he can ever be, but the joke is very rarely on him. Instead, his backfiring ideas and limitations in reasoning seem entirely charming, as when, in one installment, T-rex objects to the idea of authorship because he thinks it is racist, though he evidently misunderstands both these key terms. Though such a proposition fails to work as an abstract idea, it proves entirely palatable when its failure can be read as a personality trait. Readers are invited to identify with T-rex’s aspirations to coolness, even though (and indeed, because) he fails to achieve them. When you spend your time reading about a T-rex, hubris and hyperbole turn out to be kissing cousins. In this respect, reading about a T-rex provides a mise-en-abîme for some of the challenges of thinking theoretically.
 
But if, as I have been suggesting, Dinosaur Comics provides a trenchant and gently comic take on the processes of abstract thinking, the question remains, why is this drama enacted with dinosaurs? After all, dinosaurs are figures of decrepitude or disappearance. To call someone or something “a dinosaur” is to suggest a kind irreversible obsolescence. Dinosaurs are extinct, yet I have presented the value of Dinosaur Comics in terms of its canny ability to figure an encounter with new thoughts. One explanation for why representatives of the old feature in a story of encountering the new may be that the contradiction complies with the comic’s ironic demonstrations. Such an explanation would follow from W.J.T. Mitchell’s observation that more dinosaurs exist now in representation than ever lived on planet Earth. From this observation, Mitchell concludes that a fascination with dinosaurs has more to tell us about ourselves than about these extinct creatures. Of course, not every child is fascinated by dinosaurs, just as not every student is interested in literary theory. But in either case, whether or not one enjoys or pursues the thing ultimately says less about the thing itself than about the person who has the interest (or lacks it). Dinosaurs are an occasion, not a goal.
 
To put the matter somewhat differently, Dinosaur Comics is far less focused on exploring any particular theory than on exploring the act of theorizing itself. As a result, its various installments cover a breathtaking range of theoretical propositions—from Marxism to Buddhism, computer science to queer theory—in order to show that any theory in the wrong (or, perhaps, the right) hands could become a conceptual mess. Theory, the comic shows us, is what we make of it. Thinking is an act of becoming, one of the more important ways in which we learn who we are. And through the lightness of comedy and the pleasures of identification, readers of Dinosaur Comics learn that we are all theory dinosaurs.