Written by contributor James Aquilone
Chris “Doc” Wyatt is an Emmy-nominated animated TV writer/producer who’s penned stories for Star Wars Resistance, Marvel’s Rocket & Groot, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He was also a producer on the cult classic movie Napoleon Dynamite. Now he’s written a YA graphic novel about extraterrestrial dinosaurs called Alien Bones. It’s a blast and a must-read for any dinosaur-loving kid. I had the fortune to ask Chris a few questions about his book, available now from 1First Comics, and, of course, those terrible lizards.
Give me the elevator pitch for Alien Bones.
Alien Bones is set in the distant future where a kid named Liam thinks he’s living his best life. His scientist dad is a “xeno-palentologist,” so they travel around the cosmos in a large cargo spaceship, searching distant planets for the fossils of extinct alien dinosaurs. But one day he goes back from attending holo-class in his ship to find that his dad is completely missing—like not even on the planet anymore. Furthermore, Dad’s disappearance might be connected to the ruins of a long dead alien city beneath the sand. So Liam, his best friend Dianna, his robot nanny Standard-5, and his chicken-sized pet cloned dino Squigglesworth have to cross the universe to search for his dad, and on the way they uncover a conspiracy that could threaten the entire human race.
Where did your idea for Alien Bones come from?
I was reading about the search for other Earth-like planets, which made me think about how life would develop on those alien worlds. And it occurred to me that planets that were really similar to Earth might have life develop in similar ways. What if other planets had gone through an “Age of the Dinosaurs” where big, reptilian life developed? Then, once I hit on the idea of Alien Dinosaurs, that was it. I started thinking about what they would be like, who would be hunting for their fossils, etc…
You also write animated TV shows. Do you have a different process for writing comics? Is it an easy transition?
It’s definitely a different way to think about presenting stories. My TV writing/producing partner, Kevin Burke, and I have had the awesome experience of authoring comic book takes on some of the shows we’ve written. We did some digital comics for Marvel based on “Avengers Assemble,” a show we were writing at the time. We also wrote two issues of IDW’s Star War Adventures comic, which were stories from the world of Star Wars Resistance, an animated series that we’d done scripts for. And we developed a TV series for Netflix and Hasbro Studios called Stretch Armstrong & the Flex Fighters and then got to write comic book tie-ins for that show. What strikes me about that process is that the characters are the same, writing the dialogue is the same—but presenting the visual aspect of storytelling, when you don’t have motion to carry you into and around the scene, can be challenging. But on the other hand, there are aspects of the printed comics medium—using frame shapes, and sizes, for example—that you can’t really do in the same way in TV animation.
Why publish the book as a complete graphic novel and not six comic books first?
This is an all-ages graphic novel, aimed at younger readers. In seeing how my son and his friends read comics, they tend to not really pick up the floppy monthlies, but rather grab trades, like the Graphix line from Scholastic, which feel like complete stories. So I suggested to my publisher, 1First Comics, that Alien Bones fit that format best.
Did you do much research into dinosaurs?
No, because there are no actual Earth dinosaurs anywhere in the book. But I did a lot of research on extrasolar planets and what environments might be like on planets that are similar, but not identical, to ours.
What’s your favorite dinosaurs – real and fictional?
My favorite real-life dinosaur is triceratops. My favorite fictional dino is Grumpy, the T-rex from Land of the Lost. The opening title sequence of that show ended with Grumpy turning to camera and roaring at the audience. That scared me so much, I’d shut the TV off at the roar, and wait a little bit before turning on the TV again to watch the rest of the episode.
Why do you think kids love dinosaurs so much?
Probably due to their extreme, self-evident awesomeness.
Will there be a second book? What about an animated series?
No announcements yet, but let’s say there have been conversations.
What else are you working on?
My TV writing/producer partner, Kevin Burke, and I developed, wrote for, and executive produced an animated series based on a comic book by Robert “Walking Dead” Kirkman and the artist Jason Howard. The show is called Super Dinosaur (another dino-themed sci-fi kids story), and the first 12 episodes are going to be streaming on Amazon Prime starting October 6th! I’ve got lots of Dino stuff coming out in October, which just happens to be International Dinosaur Month. There are going to be dino-themed celebrations at the Smithsonian and other museums across the country.
