The King Of Monsters Is Here!

Today is the last day of school for this year. I close out all accounts and then begin enjoying two full months of relative lassitude which I plan to fill with science fiction, comic books, and adventure and monster movies. I kick off the holiday right after work today by going to see the debut of the latest Godzilla epic. Godzilla, King of Monsters is the direct sequel to 2014's Godzilla and adds to the plate Kaiju favorites Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah. I'm agog to get to see this movie from the safety of my plush seat swilling coke and munching popcorn thrilling to get a good look at the havoc they monsters wreak on the world of man. 

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Godzilla - The Final Showdown!

Sending Godzilla through time did free (for a time) the 20th Century from his threatening tread. As it turned out Godzilla traveled to the distant past, to a time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, a time when Godzilla, still recovering his true size thanks to the application of Pym Particles, could himself become well and truly "King of Monsters".  But there was a rival.

Devil Dinosaur was the creation of Jack "King" Kirby, who had returned to the Mighty Marvel Bullpen after some years abroad at the Distinguished Competition. He returned with a flourish helming the titles Captain America and Black Panther, as well as creating new ones like The Eternals and Devil Dinosaur. Devil and his caveboy friend Moonboy proved to be a doughty team for nine issues which wrapped a few months before this crossover with Godzilla.

Big G and Devil do what you'd expect, they encounter each other and do ferocious battle, each gathering a smattering of respect for the power of the other.

Later that power is harnessed in tandem to battle the larger threat of the Lizard Warriors who menace the peace of the great valley which Devil and Moonboy protect.

Eventually Godzilla's battles in the deep recesses of the past come to an end as he continues to grow and is drawn back into the modern world of New York City, which must at last finally face the unleashed might of the King of Monsters.

Seeing as how this is the Marvel Universe, the superheroes are assembled to confront the threat of Godzilla and the Avengers take the lead.

Thor, Iron Man, Vision, Yellowjacked and Wasp work together to stem the threat posed by the giant monster which rumbles through the city.

Eventually they are able to turn him away from the center of the city if not defeat him, and Godzilla finally at last completes his tour of the great American continent as he steps into the harbor beyond New York City and for the last time in the Marvel Universe disappears beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

And so it ends, one of Marvel's most unusual partnerships. Bringing Godzilla to the comic book universe had taken much too long and trying to fit the giant monster into the Marvel mythology, even for a relatively short time was a challenge. The massive destruction caused by the monster and the countless people who suffer because of that damage make it incredibly difficult to have any empathy for the fate of the monster who for the most part exists apart from man, who lives by rules which are beyond our control and arguably our understanding. Godzilla is to be endured and like any great storm which finds landfall, the recovering is costly and long lasting.

But that's what makes for a great monster!

For the record Marvel revived Godzilla (sort of) in the pages of Iron Man when it is shown that Dr. Demonicus has gained control of the giant monster and mutated him, altering him sufficiently to stave off lawsuits. They needn't have bothered as the monster they made was too pitiful to sue over.

In the end there's only one "King of the Monsters"!

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Godzilla - Little Big Monster!

The Godzilla comic book series was likely a headache to write because the awesome might of the "King of Monsters" made finding him worthy adversaries rather difficult. Marvel had already resorted to giant robots, irradiated mutations, and bizzaro aliens, so next up was to make the great and powerful "G" less powerful so other things might better threaten him. Enter the elusive "Pym Particle" first introduced in Tales to Astonish #27 when Hank Pym made himself "The Man in the Ant Hill!".

Dum Dum Dugan and his agents of SHIELD had been pursuing Godzilla across the country and pretty much been merely witnessing one wave of destruction after another, mostly helpless to do much but alleviate the suffering of those who fell in Godzilla's path. So he sends his SHIELD partner Gabe Jones to meet up with Dr. Henry Pym, the famous Ant-Man/Giant-Man/Goliath/Yellowjacket and get from him some of the remarkable stuff which he'd invented so many years before. Applied liberally to a sleeping Godzilla, the monster is shrunk, captured and taken to the "Big Apple", the "City that Never Sleeps" --New York City.

Once there, thanks to incredible bungling, he is dropped into the water at the docks and ends up in the New York City's infamous sewage system. Reduced in stature but not reduced in might Godzilla battles the threats he finds in the underworld of New York's sewers, namely rats -- big fat rats.

Needless to say Godzilla wins the day, though it's a rough and tumble battle for the murky turf.

But Big G wasn't the first of the movie monsters to find himself reduced to fighting vermin as the Konga cover above testifies.

The Pym Particles begin to wear off and Godzilla emerges from the sewers and now aproximately man-size prowls the darkened streets of the city, in disguise no less thanks to his fan the young and exceedingly naive Bob Takiguchi. But SHIELD finds him and a brawl ensues amongst the agents and Godzilla before the monster is herded toward a museum of natural history. The race is on to get him contained since Godzilla continues to grow.

Finally the Fantastic Four are called in and they corral Godzilla who by the story's end is in a tank full of sharks in deadly battle. But his most deadly battle is yet to come.

More to come next time, when the Toho's "King of Monsters" meets Jack "King" Kirby's Devil Dinosaur!

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Godzilla - Invasion Of The Mega-Monsters!

One of the challenges faced by the Toho folks was what to do with Godzilla after his popularity made certain there would be an avalanche of movies. Making him the evil force in each seemed a bit static and undermined attempts to ingratiate the monster with the kiddies. How to make Godzilla, a symbol of the terrible atomic bomb a hero? That's a conundrum. The answer is aliens.

Aliens from space have proven to be a reliable baddie for decades, ever since H.G.Wells first told us were being watched from Mars. Toho had proven that aliens could be dangerous to Earth in their film The Mysterians in 1957.

So it was only logical that threat be moved directly into the Godzilla mythology.  That happened in the movie Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster in 1964. Venusians brings the mighty threat of the space dragon King Ghidorah to Earth and it's up to Godzilla and Rodan to save Earth. Godzilla regularly fought aliens after that.

Ghidorah has always been my favorite Kaiju

And so it continued in Marvel's adaptation from the late 70's We pick up the story where we left off last time.

Godzilla's trek across America is briefly interrupted when he is whisked off the Earth by aliens called Betans to become their agent in fending off the monstrous creations of their rivals.

He is tested by battling the "Beta-Beast" and being Godzilla he passes the test.

Then it's back to Earth where he and Red Ronin battle three weirdo "Mega-Monsters" concocted by the Megans of course.

 These three are some of the weirdest and most outlandish monsters ever seen in a Marvel comic book.

Eventually the alien threat is defeated, though Red Ronin is destroyed (for the time being) and Godzilla is able once again to rumble along his merry way into the America landscape. 

He ends up on the outskirts of a cattle ranch and finds himself a pawn in the machinations of rustlers who want to use Godzilla's predations to hide their crimes.

In a couple of issues cowboys wrangle with the King of Monsters who eventually trudges off into the sunset, but not before the villains are revealed and some justice is restored.

This two-part storyline made me think of The Valley of Gwangi, a Ray Harryhausen classic of the first order. 

Godzilla's odyssey continues next week.

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Godzilla - Rise Of Red Ronin!

The storytelling problem with a character like Godzilla is to find something or someone who can offer up a credible threat to the King of Monsters. In the movies we get King Kong, Hedorah, Megalon and the like.

Godzilla meets Mecha-Godzilla

 In later of the flicks the threats become more technological with the advent of Mecha-Godzilla.

Godzilla, Jet Jaguar and Friends

There is even a straight giant robot superhero type called "Jet Jaguar" in the tradition of Ultraman and suchlike. Red Ronin seems to be something of a blend of these two types of characters, a humanoid robot built much along the lines of the massive Mecha-Godzilla.

Marvel introduced such a character when they unleashed Red Ronin in the pages of  Godzilla. Red Ronin was a giant one-hundred foot robot built to the specifications of Dr. Tamara Hashioka and Dr. Yuriko Tagaguchi. Tagaguchi was a veteran scientist who had been on site when Godzilla first appeared many decades before.

He and Hashioka came to the United States along with Tagaguchi's grandson Rob who it turned out became the pilot for Red Ronin though that wasn't the plan. The young Rob often disagreed with the adults as he felt Godzilla was misunderstood.

But the Red Ronin programming forced him to confront Godzilla despite Rob's intentions and the two battled. 

Following the battle between these two, which proved inconclusive, Godzilla went into the great spaces of the American west, specifically Las Vegas where he proved devastating to the economy of the bustling desert resort and especially the hopes of one degenerate gambler in particular.Ironically most of what Godzilla demolished in his turn through Vegas no longer exists having been renovated out of existence as the city gets every larger and glitzier.

Following his rampage through the bright lights of Las Vegas Godzilla came into conflict with Yetrigar.

This latest opponent is actually a species of the American "Bigfoot" who by a series of complex coincidences was affected by radiation through the earth and became a giant able to go toe to toe with Big G.

The two battles furiously, and then were joined by Red Ronin and the match became a three-way dance with Godzilla as usual coming up the better monster.

These particular issues of Godzilla seemed most like the then recent movies from Toho which had featured big old fights between monsters, not unlike wrestling matches. In the spaces of the American frontier around the Grand Canyon are there was land enough to properly house such slug fests.

Red Ronin appeared went on to appear in some really dazzling issues of the Avengers where the great robot met his demise.

For the record Yetrigar too appeared in an issue of Avengers, specially the West Coast version. 

But Godzilla's tour of America was not over, not by a longshot. More to come next week when the "Mega-Monster" arrive.

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Godzilla - Coming To America!

It's startling to think that when Marvel finally unleashed its Godzilla comic book in 1977 that no other American comic to that time had done so. The remarkable success of the film series was at something of a nadir with the films having changed in tone many times over the decades and after 1975's lackluster release of Terror of Mechagodilla was on something of a hiatus (this movie was released in the U.S. in 1978). So it's curious just how serious certain aspects of this series were considering how wacky some of the movies could be. No hint here of the gleeful Godzilla, no glimmer of the comedic shenanigans which sometimes leavened the big screen battles. In some ways this series pointed to the much later 1984 reboot of the movie franchise which sought to revitalize the monster by making him more of a powerhouse and much less of a playmate.

At about this same time Godzilla would be licensed for an above average cartoon 1978 show, though even there under the rigorous scrutiny of Doug Wildey, the humor emerged, especially in the woeful form of the mascot like "Godzooky".

The Godzilla imagined by writer Doug Moench and artist Herb Trimpe in 1977 is utterly inscrutable and his eyes are rendered as those of an animal not a sentient being. There is a ferociousness to this Godzilla which hearkens back to the heyday of the great monster. That doesn't mean there wasn't wonkiness in the stories as we'll see as we rampage alongside the great beast as he takes his brazen tour of the American continent.

The story begins in Alaska as the monster eventually identified as Godzilla arrives in all his green destructive glory. He tears into the then infamous Alaskan pipeline, snapping it like a whip. The people of Alaska don't seem to aware of Godzilla when he first appears, only that a mighty monster has arrived among them. What, if anything he did in Japan before coming to America, is unspoken and seemingly unknown by most.

Relatively quickly Godzilla heads to the lower forty-eight and arrives in Seattle. The second issue features a classic cover with the "King of Monsters" dramatically framed in the spotlights below him as he chews up the Space Needle.

Heading down the coast Godzilla is confronted by the Champions, the short-lived superteam who set up shop briefly in Los Angeles, but head to San Francisco to take on the menace of the King of Monsters. Their impact on Godzilla is minimal to be honest, even given the enormous strength of the Olympian Hercules.

Godzilla then battles monsters of his own kind, created by Doctor Demonicus thanks to the radiation of a meteor dubbed the "Lifestone" which lies buried in a volcano. Herb Trimpe steps away from the series for two issues while Tom Sutton steps in and does a great job imagining such monstrous types as Batragon, Centripoor, and Ghilaron.

Demonicus plan is to create his own monsters and he unleash them on the world in an effort to control it. Godzilla unknowingly becomes the target of these beasts, but is able to repel them with his ferocious might.

Following these tremendous bouts, Godzilla finally is brought to heel by SHIELD agent Dum Dum Dugan who has been chasing the monster relentlessly since he first landed. Along with others he is able to capture Godzilla at long last and bring him aboard a specially designed heli-carrier dubbed "The Behemoth".

A number of times reading these stories I was put in mind of the recent Godzilla movie which showcased the King of Monsters coming to the American west coast. But that's hardly the end of the "King of Monsters" and his tour of America.

More to come next week.

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