Jurassic Park IV (Topps)

Jurassic Park IV is the final issue in Topps comic adaptation of

and depicts the rest of the events in the film after Dr. Alan Grant and Lex Murphy try not to be noticed by the park's Tyrannosaurus rex.

Plot[]

Dr. Alan Grant tries to keep Lex still so the T. rex that had escaped in the last issue will not see them, the T. rex begins to push the car (with Tim Murphy inside) off the edge and subsequently pushes Grant and Lex down with the car, but Grant and Lex survive the fall. The Tyrannosaurus, having defeated or killed the humans in the area, is disappointed and vanishes into the stormy night.

At the Control Room, John Hammond is furious at Dennis Nedry for what he did to Jurassic Park's systems. Ray Arnold finds that at one point Nedry turned off the safety systems so it would not log his keystrokes and that the only way to find what Nedry did to the system Arnold must analyze each line of the estimated two million lines of code. Hammond then tells Robert Muldoon to search for his grandchildren and Dr. Ellie Sattler joins Muldoon in the search.

Meanwhile, in the depths of the park, Nedry gets his jeep stuck in the mud. While he is out of the jeep trying to get it unstuck, a goo hits the side of the jeep, which alarms Nedry. This goo then strikes Dennis in his face causing pain in his eyes. He discovers that this goo is venom from a Dilophosaurus and runs back inside the jeep, but the Dilophosaurus follows him into the jeep where it proceeds to kill him. As he is consumed by the Dilophosaur Nedry drops his cryo-can and it becomes submerged in the mud.

Elsewhere, Dr. Grant rescues Tim from the tour vehicle. Afterward, Alan tells the kids that they are going to walk back to the Visitor Center via the empty Tyrannosaur Paddock as the T. rex may still be near the road.

Muldoon and Sattler arrive at the road of the Tyrannosaur paddock to find only the footsteps of Dr. Grant and the children. They also find Dr. Ian Malcolm buried under the rubble of the Tyrannosaur Paddock Bathroom and escort him to their jeep, though after getting him in the jeep the Tyrannosaurus ambushes them, though they manage to outrun her.

After the attack above, Dr. Grant and the children climb to the top of a tree where they sleep for the night. They are woken up by a Brachiosaurus eating from that tree while along with its herd feeding on the other surrounding trees. When the three come down the tree to continue their trek, Grant finds dinosaur eggs, meaning that the dinosaurs are breeding on the island. Dr. Grant deducts that since frog DNA was used in the creation of the dinosaurs that this is how the dinosaurs are able to breed as West African Frogs are known to change sex.

Back inside the Control Room Hammond tells Arnold to restart the system to erase what Nedry has done. Arnold initially refuses but does so after Hammond persists. Rebooting the system works and all that must be done to get Jurassic Park is to turn the circuit breakers back on in the Maintenance Shed. Ellie takes the task of turning the circuit breakers back on while Muldoon accompanies her once more to protect her from any danger they may face. The rest of the people inside the Control Room retreat to the Emergency Bunker until the power is restored with Hammond following the two's progress and giving them instructions on how to reset the circuit breakers using blueprints of the park.

As Muldoon and Sattler run past the Raptor Pen, Muldoon finds that some of the fencing of the pen torn open, the raptors having escaped while the system was shut down. After seeing a raptor in the nearby jungle, he tells Sattler to run to the shed alone as they are being hunted by the raptors and that he will take on this raptor. However, once Ellie is gone and he prepares to fire his rocket launcher at the seemingly lone Velociraptor, another raptor leaps from Muldoon's right side and the two proceed to maul Muldoon. Dr. Sattler reaches the shed where she reports to Hammond that she has finally inside it. Hammond then begins to give her the first of his instructions.

Elsewhere in the park, Dr. Grant and the Murphys see a stampede of Gallimimus ahead of them. Grant notes that their behavior is like a flock of birds evading a predator. Grant and the kids then proceed to climb a deactivated electric fence. As the group climbs the fence, Dr. Grant glances back at the Gallimimus flock to which he discovers why they are stampeding: the Tyrannosaurus rex is chasing them. As he watches the T. rex manages to kill a Gallimimus at the end of the flock. Grant and Lex manage to climb over the fence to the other side, but as Tim climbs down Ellie turns the electric fences back on inside the shed. Tim is briefly electrocuted by the fence and falls to the ground, but Alan catches him just in time. At the Maintenance Shed, Ellie is attacked by a raptor after turning the circuit breakers back on, though she manages to escape it, closing the door of the shed behind her to prevent its escape.

Alan, Tim, and Lex finally enter the Visitor Center only to find there no people in sight. Wanting to find help, Grant leaves the Murphy children in the dining room while he searches, but in his absence, a Velociraptor enters the room, and Lex and Tim run to the center's kitchen to evade it. Grant is reunited with Ellie during his search for people. Back at the kitchen the raptor opens the kitchen's door and enters the room with another of its species. As the two siblings sneak across the room to escape the raptors that are hunting them, Lex devises a plan to trick the raptors into attacking their own reflection via one of the kitchen cabinet's doors. This idea works and with one of the raptors stunned Tim Murphy darts toward the freezer room, the other raptor following him in pursuit. Unfortunately for Tim, he slips on some ice on the floor inside the freezer room, but the raptor pursuing him slips on that same ice as well. With the Velociraptor on the floor, Tim quickly gets out of the freezer room and closes its door with his sister before the two flee the kitchen entirely, the Velociraptor that was stunned watching them as they escape.

The kids run through a corridor meet up with Drs. Grant and Sattler and warn them of the raptors inside the center. Grant then immediately takes the group to the abandoned Control Room where he finds that the phones are still offline. However, to their luck, Lex knows the system that runs Jurassic Park and reboots it, thus allowing the phones to come back online. With the phones back online, Dr. Grant calls John Hammond back in the bunker to inform him that his grandchildren are safe as well as to send in a rescue helicopter. But a Velociraptor approaches the window of the Control Room during Dr. Grant's call causing the group to flee to enter the air ducts located above in the ceiling until the call abruptly ends. The Velociraptor then leaps through the window just as Dr. Grant and Lex Murphy enter the ducts. It then proceeds to crawl up the air vent and tries to attack them until Grant kicks it to the floor.

They crawl through the air ducts to the top of the rotunda where the same Velociraptor has crawled up to the top still in pursuit of them. The survivors retaliate by jumping onto the sauropod skeleton nearby only for the raptor to leap onto the skeleton as well. The combined weight of the humans and the Velociraptor ultimately results in the sauropod skeleton collapsing to the ground below and into pieces, taking the T. rex skeleton along with it. The survivors are unscathed by the fall, but the Velociraptor that Ellie had locked in the Maintenance Shed runs toward them ready to attack. However, the park's Tyrannosaurus rex enters the Visitor Center and kills the raptor just before it could harm the group. The survivors take the opportunity to flee the center as the second raptor attacks the neck of the T. rex which leads to the Tyrannosaur flinging the smaller dinosaur to the group and proceeding to crush the raptor with her foot, letting out a loud roar with the first raptor she had killed still in her mouth.

Just outside the center's doors, the group finds Hammond waiting in a jeep. Grant tells Hammond that he will not be supporting Jurassic Park, to which Hammond agrees and drives the group to the location of the rescue helicopter. The helicopter flies off into the sunset, ahead of a flock of birds that follow.

The story is continued in the comic series Jurassic Park: Raptor.

Differences from the Film[]

Hammond is shown to be furious at Nedry for what he did to Jurassic Park, going as far as saying that he would kill Nedry. Hammond does not express this strong animosity toward Nedry in the film even after he causes the incident. Hammond's dialogue about killing Nedry is taken from the script of the film.^[1]
Nedry's death is different from that of the film.
- His jeep does not go off the road and subsequently gets caught in a mud embankment like in the film, instead, his jeep simply gets stuck in a deep mud puddle.
- The Dilophosaurus is more aggressive in that it attacks Nedry and begins spitting at him before he even sees the dinosaur, unlike in the film where it displays curiosity towards him before attacking.
Arnold does not go to reset the circuit breakers, he instead apparently goes to the bunker along with other surviving personnel. Instead, Ellie volunteers with Muldoon going with her and Hammond giving Ellie commands over the radio. This is unlike the film where Arnold initially goes to reset the breakers and when he fails to return Ellie then decides to do it herself with help from Muldoon and Hammond. Because of these movie events above never occurring in the comic, Ellie never finds Ray's severed arm inside the maintenance shed. Ray Arnold's overall fate is left unknown in the comic.
Muldoon carries a rocket launcher when he goes with Dr. Sattler to the Maintenance Shed instead of a Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun. This is taken from the script in which Muldoon grabs and loads a rocket launcher before he goes to the shed^[2] as well as the novel where Muldoon used a rocket launcher against the raptors to defend John Arnold as he went inside the Maintenance Shed.^[3]
Muldoon's "death" (he is confirmed to have survived in the Topps comics) is different than that of the film.
- His attack occurs before Ellie resets the circuit breakers while in the film it occurred after she reset the circuit breakers and immediately after she fled the maintenance shed.
- The whole attack is entirely different. Muldoon spots a raptor in the nearby jungle and tells Ellie to run to the shed herself as he deals with the raptor. As the raptor comes closer he prepares to fire his rocket launcher, but a second raptor leaps out of the jungle to his right, which surprises Muldoon, and the raptors proceed to maul him.
  - This is contrary to the film where the raptor that Muldoon first sees is never shown to the audience and he then proceeds to go deeper into the nearby jungle while Ellie resets the breakers. The raptor he sees while in the jungle is obscured and still not fully visible. Finally, only one raptor attacks Muldoon while the other watches.
- Even Muldoon's signature quote is changed from "Clever girl..." to "Two of you! Clever girls!"
The scene where Sattler and Hammond have a discussion in the Visitor Center restaurant is omitted.
Both the Gallimimus flocking scene and the scene where Grant and the kids climb the deactivated electric fence are merged into one scene.

Behind the scenes[]

Though it is shown that Muldoon seemingly dies as he did in the film, Jurassic Park: Raptors Attack II reveals that Muldoon survived the attack in this issue.