Marvel Godzilla Reprinted

[Aaron Smith]

[Xenorama]

Red Ronin showed up again in Avengers 197-199? maybe? somewhere in that area. ran amok until the Beast (a true Avenger) stopped him using his brain, not mutant angst.

worth a look because George Perez drew it!

David

[Garasharp K7]

I've seen him in a Wolverine special as well, but I can't remember which one. As for other appearances, I can't remember exactly when and where he's shown up, but I have seen him in other comics from time to time.
Those one shots are excellent! I'm really enjoying these, the best one so far has to be Fin Fang Four, with four classic monsters (lead by Foom himself) fighting another classic creature whose very name inspires sheer terror! (I'll leave you to guess who it is! )

[lhb412]

^I'm loving the new Marvel Monsters series. The format is great; new stories of old marvel monsters and then old Jack Kirby tales as back-up stories!

I just read the original Fin Fang Foom (back-up in "Fin Fang Four") and anyone who doubts the awesomeness of Jack Kirby should see that page of Fin destroying the Great Wall of China!

I would love for this to become an on-going series



Anyway, I suppose the cover of Essential Godzilla will be the cover of Godzilla issue #1, as it's the most famous image from that comic.

[ZoneFighter]

It shipped this week. I picked mine up last night. Hope they do a Essential Shogun Warriors collection one of these days...

[CousinOfGodzilla]

[mr.negativity]

[metal_bryan]

[mr.negativity]

[Mac]

[Pkmatrix]

[Benjamin Haines]

Marvel Godzilla full-color omnibus coming in October 2024!

https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/godzilla-omnibus-original-marvel-comic-series

I have almost everything that Dark Horse and IDW have published but Marvel's take is still a big gap in my Godzilla comics collection, so this is welcome news!

[lhb412]

Very happy to finally read the entire series in color!

[lhb412]

In addition to the hardcover, Marvel also released a facsimile edition of the original issue #1 with all the ads and editorial stuff intact. Pretty cool!

[lhb412]

Really recommend ordering either of the three covers from instocktrades.com - some of the sturdiest packaging I've ever seen a book packed in! I just received the version with the issue #1 cover. The actual cover underneath the dust jacket is super cool. Reproduction is really sharp, original colors are retained, and the whole thing just pops. Sadly, the letter columns aren't retained, but the editorial from issue #1 is.

[Benjamin Haines]

Damn, I already got this from Amazon just in case it sold out quickly. I'll definitely order future IDW Godzilla trade paperbacks from InStockTrades with prices that low.

I got the standard edition cover by Jung-Geun Yoon, which looks really cool, and I like the collage of covers from every issue on the back. Teenage me would have bitched about this version of Godzilla looking so much like a T-rex but now I'm really interested to check out this late-'70s Marvel Comics take on the character. I'll probably start reading this next after I finish Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong.

[lhb412]

[quote="Benjamin Haines"]Damn, I already got this from Amazon just in case it sold out quickly. I'll definitely order future IDW Godzilla trade paperbacks from InStockTrades with prices that low.
[/quote]

They've become my go-to for ordering comics online. Ordering from Amazon is a crapshoot in terms of getting your book in pristine condition.

[lhb412]

Just finished my Godzilla omnibus!

This series has kinda been there for me my entire life. I first grabbed a few back issues at age ten, and Marvel's b&w phone book reprint came out when I was in my late teens. The reputation this comic has is that of a campy curiosity - Godzilla fighting Marvel heroes, after all! - but, coming at it now with some experience and knowledge of comics and comic history I gotta say; it's a really solid little comic! They do a better job than I remember of attempting to capture the Japanese style in the book, albeit with the handicap of not being able to include other Toho monsters. We start out with a nuclear origin, and a vaguely Showa-esque backstory located in Japan before Godzilla makes landfall in America in issue #1. The first few issues are all about SHIELD countering the Godzilla threat, we gradually introduce enemy monsters for Godzilla to fight, we understand him more as a misunderstood anti hero, and then the comic's biggest stroke of genius: Red Ronin! Recognizing the Japanese super robot trend (I suppose via Shogun Warriors) and having a Godzilla loving kid (ala Gamera and '70s Godzilla) be the pilot? You can't say Doug Monech wasn't trying his damndest to capture the Japanese flare. Sure, the final arc of the comic where they chunk the whole Marvel Universe at Godzilla is the most famous because of the novelty, but this read really has my appreciating the earlier issues.

This reprint really has me appreciating Trimpe's art; clean, classic comic-booky stuff, and it flows, you know? You can tell how much he loves to draw machinery and whatnot; those Kirbyesque vehicles, uniforms, and especially Red Ronin! Too bad he rarely got to ink his own pencils. I think the inkers are a bit hit-and-miss at bringing out the best in his work. Speaking of inkers; I never ver noticed Klaus Janson's inking on one of those fill-in issues! It's amazing how much we think of as Frank Miller's style comes from Janson's inks. Those big, chunky brushstrokes are right here in this Godzilla issue.

As for complaints? The three issue Mega Monsters story is in many ways the highlight of the series. It's almost the finale of the first 2/3rd of the book and their attempt to do a version of the Astro-Monster/DAM/vs.Gigan style monster tag-team match alien invasion story, but I do feel it needs to be an issue longer. Trimpe's art and storytelling feels a bit cramped as it has to cover so much story. Compare thus to the two-issue cowboy story that immediately follows: not a whole lot of incident, so Trimpe luxuriates in wonderful splash pages and panels, lots of great desert backgrounds. Feels like Trimpe delights at drawing Western elements, and (the test of any cartoonist) he draws good horses!

[Benjamin Haines]

^ I look forward to discovering all of that. I've just read the first issue of the omnibus, having never read any of Marvel's Godzilla comics before. All I've known about this series up until now has been what I've read about it online over the past two decades, including here in this old MZ thread. I knew that it had its fans and its detractors but I always just defaulted to the generic millennial approach of not wanting to spend the time and money to seek out the old issues and also prejudging it as an inaccurate take on Godzilla because of his lime green skin, orange fire breath and T. rex-like head shape.

This comic is amazing! Maybe I'm an easy mark because I had so little exposure to comic books growing up but this strikes me as the most authentic kind of old-school Marvel Comics greatness, from the wild art with vivid colors to the blazing fast narrative crammed with action.

I know that new creatives respecting the source material has been a loaded subject in fandoms going back decades, with different generations of fans having different general ideas of what that means and what should be expected from adapted works. I don't know if Doug Moench approached writing this comic as a self-proclaimed Godzilla fan but, after reading this first issue, at the very least I'd say he must have seen the American cuts of both the original film and King Kong vs. Godzilla, because this take on Godzilla as an enraged destroyer and a specter of nuclear horror is in line with those early films. There are even some scenes that are directly lifted, like when Godzilla bursts free from an iceberg and when he peers his head over a hill ridge and roars down at a fleeing man. The narration even specifies that Godzilla's orange fire breath is indeed radioactive!

[Benjamin Haines]

One thing this series already does really well in these early issues is making the world feel huge. Issue #1 shows Godzilla wreaking havoc in Alaska, while it establishes that he previously attacked Japan for years before SHIELD ever encountered him, and then issue #2 has Godzilla emerging further south in Seattle. That sense that the narrative world is as huge as the real world is something that a lot of modern Hollywood blockbusters sacrifice by aiming for a fast-paced globetrotting adventure, including a lot of both the Monsterverse and Marvel Cinematic Universe flicks. It can make for fun movies to see characters repeatedly zip from one part of the world to another in a matter of just a few runtime minutes but it really makes those worlds feel small. The second issue of Marvel's Godzilla was published a month later and it opens with Gabe Jones finding Godzilla in Seattle after 14 hours of searching, and then the preview of issue #3 teases that Godzilla will encounter the Champions when he travels further south to San Francisco. Depicting Godzilla in one particular location for each issue as he gradually moves south along North America's Pacific coast, and then having him encounter localized heroes in specific locations, those are things that make this world feel huge.

Two issues in and I have to say, after reading some of the past comments about this series, I don't see why so many fans thought there was a lack of respect for Godzilla in how this comic portrays him. Between Dr. Takiguchi calling Godzilla the most dangerous creature on the planet, Tamara likening him to an elemental force and Robert outright hailing him as a hero, the perspectives offered by this trio of Japanese characters are true to the full spectrum of how Godzilla is portrayed throughout the Showa Series.

This thread was created way back in 2005 in the run-up to Marvel's previous reprint of the series as a black-and-white paperback. The first page of the thread includes several posts from Godzilla fans who were around when Marvel first published this comic, and their varying perspectives are fascinating. Most of the posts appear blank now on this relic of the board but we can still read them by using the quote buttons, so allow me to preserve those comments by quoting them here:


On Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005 at 7:10 pm, edgodzi wrote:
"This comic was thoroughly reviled when it came out originally, and deservedly so. At the time, everyone felt it was a huge insult to the name of Godzilla--like the 1998 film, the only similarity to the real thing was using the same name. Aside from making Godzilla green, having him breathe actual fire instead of having atomic breath, have no skin detail, and with the scale varying anywhere from 150 to 1000 feet tall from scene to scene (not to mention his mighty Mrraawww sound effect), it was exactly like the real Godzilla...

It's funny that they can sell reprints when people couldn't give the originals away over the years.

Ed G."

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On Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2005 at 7:40 pm, Gfan54 wrote:
"I'm betting this whole venture will blow up in Marvel's face, if most actual Godzilla fans seemingly aren't interested in the series (I just recently listed that I was selling my nearly complete collection of the original issues here on Monster Zero and never got a response from anybody) then why would they think people who aren't Godzilla fans would be interested? Personally, I thought the series was pretty cool when I was a kid, but eventually came to loathe it...Marvel should be embarrassed it ever even ran the series and should just let it stay dead!"

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On Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005 at 1:37 am, Xenorama wrote:
"sorry Ed, it was NOT universally reviled when it came out. it sold WELL, and was very popular. perhaps not with you ol fuddy duddy diehard fans (:lol: and i'm joking 'cause i know Ed can take it!) but the younger fans who loved GODZILLA VS MEGALON and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS. i loved the comic, and was happy to see Godzilla fight Marvel heroes. those issues are not easy to find now, nor have been for several years. Marvel wouldn't reprint them if they didn't think it would sell.
the book was cancelled because Toho wanted more money for the rights, not due to poor sales. i loved every issue, even the cattle rustling ones.

David"

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On Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005 at 7:48 am, aphvend wrote:
"i loved that series. some were ridiculous,but entertaining. i couldn't wait for the next comic book coming out. this was a time when you had to wait for a godzilla movie to show up on tv. and this usually was in the middle of the night."

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On Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005 at 7:57 am, edgodzi wrote:
"Well, to be fair, when this ran back in the 70s, there was one person out of about 50 or 60 who I knew, talked to, or heard from via Japanese Giants (which ran a review of the comic in #4) or JFFJ that did like it. So not everyone didn't like it (of course), but it still was not an exaggeration. Those who wrote in (yes, people actually wrote letters by hand at one time, and then even walked down to the mailbox and put them in!!!)...some were serious fans, some were casual fans, but the sentiment was always the same. It was not so much a matter of Godzilla fighting Marvel heroes, and none of us could really complain of Godzill anot fighting other Toho monsters because Toho would never go for that without commanding big money. What really bothered everyone was the lack of respect for the character in the way it was drawn/portrayed. It looked and acted almost nothing like Godzilla, much like the 1998 film character, and Marvel was completely unapologetic about it.

At least they must be a bit more palatable in black and white, not having to look at that awful lime green skin color.

And you still can hardly give away those things.

Ed G."

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On Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005 at 11:34 am, Xenorama wrote:
"all i know is that i was 12 when the comic came out, and all of my friends loved it. Godzilla acted similarly to what was being shown from the 70s, heroic and playful and had the Godzilla fighting spirit. sure he was green, but there was only the four color separation process at the time, rendering him grey would have been difficult. i know the writer and artist were not really fans (Herb's a great guy and one of his most popular requests is to draw fans "Godzilla vs the Hulk" to this day!).
i'm sure it's popularity was a generational thing. i was happy to get Godzilla on a monthly basis for two years and was very sad when it was cancelled.
while the books may not command top dollar (still, try finding one in a comic book store) Marvel would not be reprinting it if they didn't think it would sell.

David"

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On Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005 at 1:26 pm, GaryT wrote:
"I recall when the Godzilla comic came out being disappointed that the stories weren't more like Toho films, but I liked some of the artwork. And it was a heck of a lot better than the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series!"

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On Thursday, Oct. 20, 2005 at 10:38 am, Robert Saint John wrote:
"I'm about the same age as David, I think, and I clearly remember snatching up that first issue of Godzilla at that brand new store we called "7 Eleven".

But I also remember getting home and reading it and being disappointed. I'm sure I didn't really understand the nuances, but it just didn't seem at all like Godzilla to me, and I never bought another issue.

Of course, I was a little ass of a kid at the time, and I didn't want the Shogun Godzilla toy because "the fins weren't right". I played with my Aurora Godzilla instead. Looking back, I think I was weirdly anal about accuracy, and criticized STAR WARS model kits for getting little details wrong.

No wonder I ended up in therapy. "

[lhb412]

Now that's a blast from the past! Interesting to think of how views and opinions among fandoms (or even just general pop culture) calcified back in the day, while the 21st century has had much more reclaiming and reappraising little loved properties, sometimes pretty quickly. It only took a few years for Speed Racer to go from critical and box office bomb to cult classic to widely loved. Feels like that same process used to take decades.

[Benjamin Haines]

^ It really is interesting. Qualities that can prevent fans from appreciating a certain work upon release can be total non-issues to later generations, and vice versa. I think the sheer volume of historical content that's available nowadays and easier to find than ever before has had a somewhat freeing effect on fandoms in this century. People no longer need to look hard to find things that interest them, and there are more shows and movies available on demand than any person could ever watch in their lifetime, so we all have to be picky about what we spend our time watching. Of course there will always be fans of any franchise who expect things to reflect their own personal tastes and get upset when they don't but I think fans in this era generally feel more relaxed about just enjoying individual works for what they are than in the past.

When Marvel started publishing this comic, it had been only 21 years since the US release of the first Godzilla movie. There would have been just two generations of fans at that point who had been introduced to Godzilla as kids: the older boomers who might have seen the original film or King Kong vs. Godzilla in theaters, and the younger boomers and earliest gen-Xers who were kids during the '70s. There were no home video options back then aside from some short 8mm compilations for people who owned 8mm film projectors, and the '70s Godzilla movies had staggered releases in American theaters, so it must have been exciting for young fans back then to have Marvel publishing a new Godzilla issue every month for two years. At the same time, it's easy to see why the longtime fans who had been watching Godzilla movies for more than a decade would have been more picky about this first-ever American take on the character, because he looks very different than in any of the 15 movies that existed at that point. He has lime green skin, dark red eyes, orange fire breath and the elongated snout and teeth of a Tyrannosaurus rex in this comic. They're all the same appearance-based reasons why it was easy for millennials in the 2000s like me to just dismiss this comic and not even try to seek it out. I'm glad that I'm finally checking it out now and I hope this omnibus will motivate fans both younger and older than me to give it a shot.

I've read issue #3 and this comic is still firing on all cylinders! Godzilla comes ashore by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, with SHIELD's Godzilla Squad led by Dum Dum Dugan trying to catch up in the Helicarrier, as a Los Angeles-based team of superheroes called the Champions rushes to the scene. Dum Dum has no patience for the vigilante "longjohns" and they resent SHIELD encroaching on their West Coast turf, so the two teams end up getting in each other's way more than Godzilla's. It's crazy how much story this comic manages to cover in each issue. There are a few full-page images but most of the pages have multiple panels that are packed with action and dialogue. This issue features a brief aside in which Woo takes Dr. Takiguchi, Tamara and Robert to meet Tony Stark at a massive industrial facility in Detroit to commence work on their anti-Godzilla weapon, and that whole aside only takes up one page.

Like the first four Godzilla movies, this comic demonstrates that conventional weaponry is useless against Godzilla and that people must resort to extraordinary measures to try and stop him. After SHIELD's Stark-made laser cannon only managed to enrage Godzilla in the first issue, they carried out a very clever plan in the second issue involving beacon-lights and giant coil-spring projectile blocks. SHIELD's plan in the third issue is straight out of Mothra vs. Godzilla: dropping multiple electrified metal nets on him from the sky!

I wasn't familiar with the Champions as a team but their lineup in this issue consists of characters I know, including Black Widow of the Avengers, Iceman and Angel of the X-Men, and Hercules of Roman mythology. The dialogue indicates that Ghost Rider and Darkstar are also members and that Daredevil might have been a member before returning to New York, and even though those three don't appear here, it all adds to the impression that this Godzilla comic is part of an expansive world filled with living characters who exist across different titles. That was always the impression of the Marvel world that I got from the Spider-Man and X-Men animated shows in the '90s, and it's great to see the Marvel Cinematic Universe still bringing that approach to live-action film and TV, so it's really cool to get that classic approach from the outset in this comic. Iceman freezes Godzilla's head at one point. Hercules catches Godzilla's foot with all his might and briefly knocks the monster down. These kinds of interactions make the most of having Godzilla in Marvel's world.

[Benjamin Haines]

Issue #4 features Godzilla's first monstrous opponent of this comic, a giant bat-dragon called Batragon. Of course that name strikes me as a portmanteau of Battra and Atragon but this comic predates Battra by 15 years. I wonder, did Doug Moench come up with the name Batragon by combining the words bat and dragon, or did he take the name Atragon from the Toho film and add a letter B to it?

Batragon is a cool monster. Though he's not a physical match for Godzilla, their mutual ferocity makes for a lot of cool scenes. Godzilla interrupts Batragon's attack on a Liberian oil tanker in the Pacific and then pursues the flying monster back to its volcanic home on one of the Aleutian Islands off Alaska, revealing that Godzilla has ventured north again after traveling south in the first three issues. Dum Dum Dugan and Gabe Jones search for Godzilla in SHIELD helicopters after the Helicarrier's destruction, while Dr. Takiguchi, Tamara and Robert continue working on construction of their anti-Godzilla weapon at Tony Stark's facility in Detroit. This issue was published in November 1977 and there's a panel in which Jimmy Woo invites Tamara to go see Star Wars with him that night.

The oil tanker's cargo is stolen by the henchmen of a supervillain named Dr. Demonicus, and a quick Wikipedia check confirms that this Marvel villain I've never heard of was created for this comic. His henchmen are called Demons and their costumes look very similar to those of Shocker's goons in the original Kamen Rider series, although I guess that's inevitable with any white-on-black skeleton motif. Dr. Demonicus clearly doesn't have supervillain fashion down pat, because the only things he has to visually distinguish himself from his own henchmen are his blue cloak and the white horns on his head.

Batragon willingly returns to captivity inside the dormant volcano alongside giant moth, snake and pterosaur monsters on top of a glowing meteorite that energizes them. Dr. Demonicus refers to those monsters as his creations and his Demons have enslaved the island's native villagers to build a giant transportation vessel from the meteorite's ore. When Godzilla witnesses the Demons slaughtering several of the slaves, he shifts his attention from pursuing Batragon to this new priority. Interestingly, while the narration throughout the issue specifies that Godzilla's motivations are often unknowable, the narration makes it explicitly clear that Godzilla's rage in this instance is targeted at the Demons.

I'm still impressed with how much storytelling each of these issues manages to cover. This issue opens with one big full-page panel of Batragon attacking the tanker, and there are a few pages that have three panels, but most of the pages have four, five, six or seven panels. The narration text paints an even more detailed mental picture of the action depicted in each panel. It's really comprehensive.

This is the first issue to end on a cliffhanger! I'll have to read the next issue here in a little bit.

[Benjamin Haines]

Issue #5 is an action-packed resolution to #4's cliffhanger. Godzilla battles all three of the other monsters from the volcano as SHIELD's reinforcements arrive, the enslaved villagers revolt and Gabe Jones infiltrates the base to confront Dr. Demonicus, who shares his origin story.

It turns out the monster that I thought was a snake is actually a centipede named Centipor, and the pterosaur-looking monster is actually a komodo dragon named Ghilaron. The moth monster's name is Lepirax and it targets Dum Dum Dugan's helicopter.

The narration in this series is great. Virtually every panel that doesn't include character dialogue has narration text, and a lot of the panels with dialogue have narration too, so there's always a lot to read, a lot of information to glean on every page along with the visuals of the art. It's so refreshing to read an old-fashioned comic like this, since most of IDW's Godzilla comics are written and illustrated in the modern style where comics seem to emulate the visual language of films, including little or no narration. An abundance of narration in a movie would get old fast but I think the way this comic utilizes it works really well. It even provides insight into Godzilla's mindset while still leaving things just ambiguous enough, as he seemingly hesitates to attack Lepirax out of concern for Dum Dum's safety. Gabe takes it a step further and verbalizes what he perceives as Godzilla's good intentions.

Reflecting the social mores when this comic was published in 1977, Dr. Demonicus repeatedly calls Gabe "black man" as an intended insult. Yowza.

[lhb412]

^ I actually think Dr. Demonicus' comment isn't a reflection of the time this comic was written, but rather a deliberate choice to show the character as racist. Moench writes this comic about a multi-ethnic, international cast, and I noticed in my reread that he attempts to add details like prejudice and other frictions here and there instead of pretending it's a post-racial society.

I realize this is pretty much par for the course of classic Marvel, where a civil rights activist would be a common side cheacter in an issue of The Mighty Thor or something.