I remember when Saturday Night Live’s Jane Curtin announced a supposedly upcoming program: “What if the pioneers had to fight dinosaurs, but the Man from UNCLE went back through time to help them?”
I’ve always delighted in unlikely juxtapositions like that. And in the later 1950s and early 1960s, you could often find a fair approximation of Curtin’s topic in DC Comics’ Tomahawk.
Tomahawk 58 (Oct. 1958) featured a Tyrannosaurus rex discovered in an icy mountain cave, and accidentally revived. Tomahawk recognizes it as a “dinosaur” — despite the fact that that term won’t be introduced until 1841.
The frontiersman faces the double-barreled task of stopping a rampaging T. rex and making peace with a hostile Mohawk tribe. By finally luring the beast over a cliff, Tomahawk proves to the Mohawk chief that they can work together.
While not as ubiquitous as gorillas, dinosaurs were already a familiar presence on DC Comics covers.
Tomahawk was sometimes called “Batman in buckskins,” and the Caped Crusader also had considerable experience with dinosaurs. Batman and Robin confronted the mechanical dinosaur Locto in The Creature from the Green Lagoon (Detective Comics 252, Feb. 1958). And a mere three months later, they faced more mechanical dinosaurs in Death in Dinosaur Hall (Detective Comics 255, May 1958).
The Blackhawk team tackled a giant reptile in Valley of the Monsters (Blackhawk 119, Dec. 1957). Wonder Woman lassoed a T. rex in The Runaway Time Express (Wonder Woman 97, April 1958). The Viking Prince faced a “spiny sea dragon” in The Lady of the Lake (The Brave and the Bold 17, April-May 1958).
As far back as 1953, even Rex the Wonder Dog faced down a T. rex in Rex, Dinosaur Destroyer! (The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog 11, Sept.-Oct. 1953).
So it was probably inevitable that DC would eventually give dinosaurs their own title. That happened in Island of Armored Giants (Star-Spangled War Stories 90, April-May 1960). U.S, troops continued to battle dinosaurs in the War That Time Forgot feature through issue 137 (Feb. March 1968), when Enemy Ace replaced them.
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