Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: godzilla

10 Things About Godzilla Issue 1

Alasdair Stuart writes for Bleeding Cool.

The Godzilla ongoing launches today from IDW. Written by Duane Swierczynski and with art by Simon Gane and Ronda Pattison it's my first real exposure to the enormous angry lizard other than the occasional Channel 4 and BBC2 special, and, of course, the Roland Emmerich movie. It's a lot of fun, smart, nasty and tightly paced. Here are ten things about it;

1. Punch Lines
We have an opening scene straight out of a thriller; main character puts life of violence to one side, then has it all swept away in a second and returns to his old ways. This is 100 Bullets or I'll Sleep When I'm I'm Dead territory which makes the use of a giant spider as punctuation all the funnier. And make no mistake, there is a a real sense of humor to this book, a wry, sideways look at it's action which never once descends into parody. Which, for a book about a colossal radioactive lizard, is actually pretty impressive.

2. Forty Stories of Sheer Terror

I'm a sucker for a good pulpy title and this one is particularly pulpy. We even see it at the top of a forced perspective panel up the skyscraper most of the action takes place in, lightning striking behind it. It's a great panel, that, like the rest of the book, balances spectacle, humor and foreboding.

3. This issue's special guest star, Jason Statham

Boxer, our hero, is a cockney, shaven-headed former Special Forces Operator with a dubious past, an unusually erudite way of speaking and a fondness for cookery. I'm weirdly fond of Mr Statham's work, and it's a real pleasure to see the 'Slight, Cunning, Cheerfully Brutal' action hero trope he's championed start to turn up outside action movies. Here in particular it grounds the action, bringing the ridiculous danger into sharp relief.

4.Welcome…to Godzilla Park!
That's a nice callback to the other iconic gigantic lizard franchise of the last century, with Boxer noticing something amiss when the water he's attempting to make poached eggs in (Boy really needs some poach pods, they're awesome) starts to ripple.

5.The Cloverfield Effect
There's an interesting trick of scale that Cloverfield pulled off very well, and which Swierczynski and Gane riff on very nicely here, where the monster, and the events surrounding it, are so huge that the impact is felt long before they actually interact with the characters. Godzilla is a force of nature, a weather system with teeth and that impersonal, uncaring element of him only makes his rampage across DC all the more terrifying.

6.The Past Is A Monochrome Country
Swierczynski neatly drops individual, sepia-toned, panels into the narrative showing Boxer's past and how it affects him in the present. Gale then runs with it, mirroring body posture in the past and present to show Boxer's training, his sensibilities and the mistakes that haunt him. This is graphic storytelling with real subtlety to it, neatly drawing the reader in at the same time.

7. Taking the Stairs
There's some smart use of space here, as Boxer leaps across the hole in the building, kicks the door out towards us and slides down the stairs, and panel, directly beneath that. It's all too easy for an action sequence to look like a set of exciting postcards but this flows really well.

8.Forty Stories Up, Forty Stories Down
Another really smartly handled page here, as we see from the top of the building down, instead of from the bottom up. Just as precipitous, but this time it emphasizes how much trouble the characters are in as opposed to the scale of the action.

9. Friendly Fire
An action set piece flows seamlessly into some spot on humor ('Why can't you curse like normal people?!' is a beautiful, short hand way of showing up Boxer's nationality) which then hits full on tragedy. In amongst all this, Swierczynski even shows us an interesting piece of world building, along the way, the survivalists who want to bring Godzilla down are an interesting reflection of the hunter culture and how powerless they are in the face of Godzilla. East meets West, East comes out on top and Boxer and his charge are caught in the middle.

10.The Beginning is the End
And we finish where we start, with tragedy. Only this time it's the foundation for something greater as Boxer calls an old friend…Urv, from the opening sequence. So we open with a gigantic spider and close with two men, spectacularly gifted at both violence and survival, united by prior association and a common target; Godzilla. It's like Ocean's Eleven but with more punching and property destruction.

Godzilla Issue 1 is out now from IDW, priced $3.99.

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