Ryan North’s ‘How to Take Over the World’
Popular science as a series of supervillainous thought-experiments.
There’s a certain kind of Internet Person who makes the world a better place every day, just by showing up. People like Ryan North, whose many accomplishments include his daily, long-running, brilliant Dinosaur Comics:
The secret to Dinosaur Comics is the simplicity of the bit, coupled with the lengths that North takes it to: it’s the same six stock-art panels of a T-Rex, a Utahraptor and a, Dromiceiomimus, discoursing on some funny, bizarre or philosophical topic. Three times per week, every week since 2003, Ryan North has written new dialog for these three dinosaurs, as T-Rex crushes a log cabin (panel 3) and a tiny person (panel 4), while pondering the imponderable.
Thinking up three different gags per week for the same six panels for nearly 20 years has meant that North has had to go to some very weird and amazing places, really push through all the obvious riffs, and take us beyond the obvious bounds of the imagination.
Now, Dinosaur Comics is all the more amazing in that it is basically a side-hustle and passion project. North has several other careers he pursues, like producing improbable, delightful, wildly popular crowdfunded…
