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No. 15: Jurasick Park

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Jurasick Park

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=15

Strip by: Ian Boreham

{Dr John Hammond stands in front of a presentation, obscuring a large stone-chiselled logo including the word "Jurassic".}
Hammond: It's all part of the miracle of cloning!

{A three-frame montage of the process of drilling into a chunk of amber containing a fossilised mosquito, inserting a needle into its stomach, and processing it in a lab.}

{Hammond, Dr Ellie Sattler and Dr Alan Grant are outside, looking over a beautiful landscape, suspiciously devoid of dinosaurs, but with clouds of insects in the air.}
Hammond: It turns out that most of the DNA in a mosquito's stomach comes from a mosquito...
Hammond: ...or malaria.

{Sattler, Grant and Hammond are crouched, still looking out into the distance, surrounded by a cloud of bugs.}
Hammond: Welcome to Jurassic Parasite Park.
Hammond: Now you two are going to need some shots.

The author writes:

I'm not sure if he means "malaria shots" or alcohol.

It takes a special sort of scientist to love mozzies. (If you're asking "What'sss mozzies, preciousss...?", it's Australian for "mow-skee-tohs".) They could have been like any other sort of fly, hanging around poo and headbutting windows, but noooo...they had to evolve a proboscis, and start stealing decent creatures' blood, spreading disease, causing annoying itchy bites, and possibly worst of all, making that irritating, near-ultrasonic whine as they fly past your face while you try to sleep!

But, back to the scientists, I do admire the determination of someone who says, "OK, we were aiming at dinosaurs, but we got mosquitoes. And malaria. Others would give up at this point, but damned if we aren't going to see it through." Or perhaps, "They all laughed at me, but look who's running a high fever, vomiting and in pain now!"

The strip was drawn in Krita and text added in Inkscape. If you line up certain frames from the film, you might notice some suspicious alignments. Also, I need a better font. Why is it that every single installation of Windows seems to come with a different catalogue of fonts??? I should probably head over to Blambot.