Dinosaur Hunter Diaries #092: Man Hunt! Part 2
Turok: Dinosaur Hunter #30
Man versus man! Man versus beast! Man versus self? It’s the full platter of the literary conflicts!
Turok had just begun exploring the back-alleys of Dallas in search of an unknown killer, assumed to be a bionisaur… but now it turns out to be a primal man he once knew, wearing the pelt and adopting the ferocity of the savage beast.
Kru lashes out at him, savage and feral, and no amount of words seem to get through to him. He fends him off as best he can, scrambling for answers: have the bionisaur’s brain implants effected his mind? Is he just off his rocker? Something in his eyes betrays such notions.
Fearing he hasn’t been giving it his all, Turok busts out his bow and snikts out the hidden blade (last seen all the way back in #1, is that right?), slicing Kru across the chest.
The beast-man staggers off, but by no ones ends his rampage: he simply turns his attention to easier prey. Two big bruisers fall to his claws before Turok can catch up, and not even his arrows dent Kru’s hide as he crawls up a fire escape. What’s worse, all the ruckus has drawn the police into the fray!
Swiping a gun from the cops, Turok and Kru’s tussle sends them crashing through a skylight and into a nightclub, where the sensory overload looks to be enough to send the beast on another rampage… if it weren’t for the one clientele recognising the bouncer beneath the dinosaur getup.
Woken from his frenzy, Kru looks in a mirror and finally snaps out of it, seeing what he has become. He breaks down; he wasn’t a noble warrior who just happened to be absent when his kin were slain back in the Lost Land. He cowered, and did nothing to save them. He’s not just a coward, he’s a monster, misdirecting his shame into violence. And he and Turok both know what monsters deserve.
(now’s a bad time to say Transformers had a scene just like this isn’t it)
But Turok does not go through with it. Kru is but a victim of Mothergod’s war. The fallout of her reign left more than just physical scars, but mental ones, as Turok himself can attest to; those who survived are still fighting the effects of it in their mind.
Regan shows up to clean up the mess, bailing Turok out yet again. He asks her if she’s any the wiser on why Kru acted out in such a way. She theorises he offloaded his repressed guilt over his cowardice into a monstrous persona; that way he could maintain his warrior’s pride, yet upon reuniting with Turok, knew he could count on him for a solution… be it redemption or death. Whatever the case, that’s for a shrink to sort out.
As you’d expect, a big dumb throw-down to offset the story dump from last time. Mike Deodato and Mozart Cuoto remain on art duties and knock it out of the park, making a dude in dinosaur cosplay come across as one of the most intense battles Turok has faced yet. Every wound a grave one, every struggle an intense mountain to climb. This is comics, baby!
It’s refreshing to see the psychological scars of Mothergod’s war laid bare. Sure, it still falls into the old comic book trope of “I experienced a bad thing, so now I must become MURDER MAN“… but something as simple as Turok plucking the truth out of Kru is nice to see. We’re so starved for heroes with healthy coping mechanisms that the bare minimum of psychiatry is enough to make me spend a paragraph on it.
The actual reasoning behind Kru’s killing spree is still kind of nebulous — the significance behind the signs of the Primitives, the actual murder mystery, it’s all brushed under the rug with “he’s wearing a dinosaur skin, your argument is invalid.” Nobody said murder had to make sense or anything! On the bright side, Simon Furman will later return to wrap up a story thread he’d left hanging in the last issue.
