Jimmy Palmiotti has more comic book credits
under his belt than can be sensibly listed in a sidebar biography.
He's done lots. Trust us. We don't lie. Much.
Notable amongst the above mentioned credits
are: Co-creator of 21Down, The Resistance,
Gatecrasher, Ash, and Painkiller Jane. Editor
and founder of Marvel Knights, working on Daredevil,
Black Panther, Punisher, Killraven, and
The Inhumans. Writer/co-writer on Beautiful Killer
and Superboy.
Jimmy is also one of the comic industry's
most popular ink artists, having put his pen to Superman, Batman, Catwoman, Midnight Mass, Codename ; Knockout, Sci -Spy, Punisher, Nick Fury, Brotherhood, and many, many more.
Justin Gray has been extremely lucky in
that he has managed to slide his way into a number of exciting
and interesting situations for which he was distressingly under
qualified. He traveled to the mountains of the Dominican Republic
and mined amber with the local people, spending his nights partying
on the balconies of Santa Domingo. Along with eccentric inventor
Roy Larimer, Justin has delivered previously undiscovered species
of insects to the curator of entomology at American Museum of
Natural Histrory.
Currently Justin is co-creator and co-writer
of 21Down and The Resistance, with Jimmy Palmiotti,
as well as being co-writer of Chastity Re-imagined from
Chaos! Comics.
His upcoming projects include a piece of
sequential fiction for the official Matrix
Movie Website with artist JG Jones.
Lance Creek is located in east central Wyoming and was established in the early 1940’s when oil field exploration, development and eventually, production, came into full swing. These oil companies installed the water supply system that provided much needed water for the oil industry and the growing community of ranchers. While oil may have been the catalyst for developing commerce in Lance Creek, its fame and notoriety grew from the abundance of dinosaur fossils scattered throughout the Badlands. Lance Creek and the surrounding areas became a gold mine for paleontologists looking to . Each year students, scientists, tourists and amateur fossil hunters brave the harsh climate and brutal weather conditions to visit the Lance Creek Formation. In 1999 I joined Roy Larimer, one of the world’s premier fossil amber dealers and his team on an excavation.
Larimer, his eyes keenly focused, face darkened with stubble and wild spikes of gray hair shooting up give him the appearance of mad scientist. Roy is direct, honest and confident in everything he does. His reputation among both scientists and fossil dealers is one of respect and loyalty. Mr. Larimer frequently donates rare and valuable materials to the American Museum of Natural History, something I was also privileged to take part in. Although his primary passion is fossilized amber, he doesn't deny the thrill of unearthing Dinosaur remains. At 42, Larimer still maintained a firm grip on his childlike sense of wonder.
The 1999 dig focused on a recently discovered Triceratops located on privately owned ranch land. In remote locations it is often difficult to obtain permission to dig on private land. In his usual fashion, Larimer had no trouble convincing a third generation ranch owner to allow us access to the Trike. There was of course an exchange of services required which afforded me the chance to rope, wrestle, brand and castrate cattle. However, that's a story for another time.
Here I transform the column into an IMAX presentation with full discovery channel voice over. Feel free to read aloud with an Aussie accent. For those of you that are Aussie natives, try reading aloud as Ghandi.
Cheyenne River Road is a long stretch of dusty gravel that cuts through the heart of Wyoming’s Badlands. Staring out of the bug encrusted windshield it is easy to understand how this piece of American real estate earned its menacing name. The sun-baked landscape is cut with winding scars; vast gorges carved from glaciers that moved down from the polar-regions thousands of years ago. Yellow sandstone formations sprout from the earth, their curves burnished by centuries of wind and rain. In the Badlands, everything is extreme. Everything is dangerous and still as wild as it was when the pioneers first ventured west.
The summer temperatures reach as high as 120 degrees and when winter rolls into town, the frozen wind drops the temp well below zero. The people who call this region home possess an interesting blend of rugged determination, unimaginable openness and generosity. There is a beauty to this land, an unforgiving sense of solace and grace that calls to mind the frontier days of the untamed west. In Wyoming, the cowboy still casts his steely gaze across the open plains, but looking around it is hard to imagine this area was once a fertile jungle, once the domain of the Earth’s mightiest creatures, the dinosaurs.
Seventy million years ago, herds of Triceratops roamed freely across this land. The climate and environment at the time was similar to the warm and wet bijou of the southern gulf. Grass had yet to evolve and the new flowering shrubs that the Triceratops ate were early cousins of sequoia, sassafras and relatives of the fig. The modern Badlands are covered in dry sagebrush, cactus, short grasses and spiny Yucca plants. Now, instead of Hadrosaurs or Velociraptors, free-range cattle populate the dry hillsides. Somewhere, beneath layers of time and mud, lay the remains of those once great creatures. Crikey, we have to cut to a commercial...
The reluctant superhero.
His brother the homicide detective.
The sexy FBI agent with a secret agenda.
The search for a serial killer end's here.
In an instant three lives will be changed forever.
21Down #6 in all the cool comic shops February 5th 2003!
With complex relationships and a fascinating central idea, 21 DOWN is already ahead of the vast majority of the pack.
21 DOWN is how a modern take on the superhero should be done. It is realistic in setting and character without going for shock value or perversion (which are only substitutes for realism). The creators do the smart thing. Instead of taking an old style hero and putting him in black leather, they give us a realistic guy who would be wearing a leather jacket anyway. In other words, they aren't doing something old and worn out and decorating it in goatees and trench coats.
Fossil hunting in Wyoming requires patience, diligence and a childish passion for playing in the dirt. You must always be alert, surveying the ground for the signs of possible dinosaur gravesites. You also want to keep a special look out for rattlesnakes and scorpions, which commonly nest beneath the shaded outcropping of rocks and can fuck you up something fierce. Speaking of rattlesnakes, I'd like to point out the importance of remaining calm around them. Particularly if you're holding your dick in one hand and a beer in the other when said reptile decides to show itself. It's best to back away slowly while mumbling, "take the leg not the dick, anything but the dick."
When searching for a site, your first priority is to find bone fragments. Pieces of exposed bone that have chipped off or been worn away by wind and rain. In some areas of the Badlands, bone fragments littler the ground by the hundreds. These fragments can lead you to a larger bone. Fossil hunters in Wyoming keep their fingers crossed that the winter snow and spring rains have carefully removed layers of sand and mud from the land. This natural erosion uncovers the fossils and makes it much easier to find them. One of the secrets of fossil hunting is to look within the remains of ancient riverbeds, places where the earth has been cut away to expose layers of buried earth. The harder the soil surrounds a bone, the better the preservation of the fossils.
Once you find a trail of bone fragments, follow them up a hillside to uncover the origin. When the source is located, you must be especially careful. Although the calcium from the bones has been replaced by rock and minerals they are still extremely fragile. Prolonged exposure to the elements causes the bones to deteriorate. It is best to start digging slowly, prodding the ground with a thin knife. When the knifepoint hits a bone, it will make a distinct hollow sound. This is how the team first uncovered their Triceratops.
Triceratops ceratopsids, measuring up to thirty feet in length, was one of the last dinosaurs to walk the earth. It lived to the end of the Cretaceous period some 65-70 million years ago. Othniel Marsh examined the very first Triceratops in 1887. At the time, Marsh believed the horned beast originated from an extinct form of bison. He named the specimen Bison alticornis and until then, no other horned dinosaurs had been found. Two years later, a nearly complete skull was unearthed from Wyoming, and Marsh quickly rectified his mistake. The new skull was named Triceratops Horridus, a horned beast with a powerful beak. It was quickly determined that Triceratops was a plant-eating animal. The basic structure of its teeth and jaw were perfectly designed for eating plants. A triceratops has blunt teeth with grooves designed for cutting open thick reeds and stalks. Paleontologist John Bell Hatcher later collected more than 30 skulls in one area of Wyoming alone. So many Triceratops specimens have been found in Wyoming that paleontologists are still unsure as to their number. It is possible their numbers were in the thousands. However, despite their abundance, at this time no complete Triceratops skeleton has ever been found.
To be continued...with photos of me laying the Smackdown on a bull!
