By this time, collectors had distorted the market by late-1993 into a hellscape of first issues selling millions of copies in the hopes that investing in dozens of those issues would eventually give a return as high as something like Action Comics #1. It is possible that Walt Simonson was planning for a long run as an adaptation, but was shortened by the time of the first issue’s release as they were more concerned with capturing an audience rather than making a successful adaptation.Īfter five issues, and tons of sales with the Jurassic Park hype train trundling along at full steam, Topps Comics decided to continue past the movie with a sequel series. This meant over an hour of the movie was compressed into about 30 pages of comic, and the first two issues wound up being incredibly boring from an “is anything happening yet” standpoint. The pacing was probably the worst aspect of the book, with the dinosaurs only escaping at the end of issue 3. The all-star talent was shoved in as well, with Walter Simonson himself on the script. However, the money wasn’t just shoved into the marketing and the license. Wrapped in a plastic bag with a few trading cards, the comic also had an extra-gimmicky flip book format where the comic had to be flipped halfway through to read the other story.
Since just about any zero issue sold thanks almost entirely to short-sighted investors, a zero issue was created to hype up the four-issue miniseries releasing with the movie. The concepts of “zero issues” were big in the industry at the time, with DC eventually literally making an entire event to create zeroth issues for their entire line under the name Zero Hour next year. Topps Comics made one hell of a marketing blitz with Jurassic Park. Despite being mostly-disposable cash-in books, a few of them are highly sought after by collectors, like the X-Files comics. Mars Attacks, the X-Files, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the movie), James Bond’s Goldeneye outing, and (of course) 1993’s Jurassic Park. When it came to licensed properties, Topps was able to snag some of the biggest ones of the mid-90s. Topps Comics’ library consisted of exactly three unique titles out of their publishing history, one of which was a sexified female Zorro… and another was based off a pair of Playboy models.īut hey, the third one was Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.
Most of their marketing strategy seems to have been capitalizing on some of Jack Kirby’s old discarded comic designs, making spin-offs out of licensed comics, and picking up just about every comics license on the planet.
Topps Comics grew out of the actual trading card company Topps in 1992 like a third arm sprouting out of someone’s forehead. Case in point, Topps Comics’ Jurassic Park comics.
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