reviewed by Cord Scott, UMGC Okinawa
Churnow, Bobby (series ed.) and Alonzo Simon (collection ed.) et al. Godzilla Library Collection, Vol. 6. Sherman Oaks, CA: IDW Press. ISBN 979-8-88724-385-6. $29.99. https://idwpublishing.com/products/godzilla-library-collection-vol-6
Godzilla is one of the most resilient characters in popular culture. He premiered in a 1954 film, and continued in a variety of other media, from toys, to cartoons, to comic books. This addition to the Godzilla-verse is a compilation of comics. This volume compiles three stories: Cataclysm, Godzilla in Hell, and Oblivion.
The first story arc, Godzilla: Cataclysm, centers on a few people living in a post-kaiju apocalypse. The setting is clearly downtown Tokyo, with the Tokyo Tower in Roppongi as a reference. The main character of this arc is Hiroshi, a man who has lived long enough to see grandchildren, but one who is clearly haunted by the presence of the kaiju. Life is now a hardscrabble of finding anything to use to live. As his grandson Araha and his female friend Shiori go out, Hiroshi is haunted by dreams of the kaiju and his interaction with them.
After an attack by kaiju on a grizzly bear, and a seemingly exponential growth of plants (later determined to be the kaiju Biollante), Hiroshi laments the fact that the villagers are going back towards their old ways of human sacrifice to appease the kaiju, whom they see as gods. Hiroshi is also haunted by the guilt that he was a part of a kaiju mind-control project aimed at Destoroyah (another enemy kaiju of Godzilla) which subsequentially sparked the wrath of the kaiju. While the story arc ends with the idea that the kaiju are going to always be here, regardless of the success or failure of some kaiju over others, the arc ends with a blast that sends Godzilla into a hole towards the center of the Earth. One of the more interesting aspects of this story arc was that it is presented in muted colors, symbolizing the pall over the earth in the aftermath of the kaiju fights.
Book two, Godzilla in Hell is told from the perspective of Godzilla as he falls into the middle of the earth. The story is a comparison to Dante’s Inferno. The protagonist, in this case Godzilla, is sent to successively lower levels of the underworld, where he continues to fight a series of monsters. The story is told with minimal expository dialogue. Mostly, it is what we have always valued most in Godzilla movies: a fight between two (or sometimes more) monsters battling for dominance. One level of hell involves the spiritual manifestations of people attacking Godzilla, while another features the monster Anguirus as the two fight on a frozen plane of existence. As a sidenote, one nice artistic touch in the frozen wasteland was a ship with Valdez written on the prow, a clear reference to the environmental disaster of the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1989.
The various fights make for interesting visualizations, especially a battle with red, bat-like creatures who act like piranhas, stripping Godzilla’s skeleton to may make a new, more violent and vindictive monster. The book ends with a quote from the Buddha: “Better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken away from you…not by angels or demons…heaven or hell.” (p. 225-226).
In Godzilla: Oblivion, scientists are working on a machine to teleport physical items through a temporal port. The idea here is that a “school in Cambridge, Massachusetts” is working on a machine to propel humanity to a different time or place. The Japanese backer, Ms. Yamada and her chief scientist Dr. Eli Talbert, at one point realize that the search for scientific truth may mean unethical decisions or horrific outcomes (p. 280). As with many science fiction outcomes, playing God does open a dangerous hole, through which kaiju like King Ghidorah come into our world.
There is a series of issues about the ethical dilemmas of achieving unwarranted outcomes. To that end, there is a discussion of whether to close the portal in favor of putting all the kaiju in one world, while abandoning the other. There is also a discussion of whether there will be repercussions for using a nuclear weapon against any of the kaiju. This sort of irony is part of the story arc and how humans might ruin their home area, to move to another world. In the end, the monsters who have invaded Earth 2, invade Earth 1 and proceed to destroy it. The story ends with a cliff hanger: have humans really abandoned the Earth to the kaiju?
The stories are all
inter-connections of the Godzilla universe.
The setting of the opening arc in Tokyo brings the series back to the
Japanese starting point. The idea of
Godzilla having to face his own personal demons in variations of hell is also
an interesting take. Finally, the
continual aspects of science and the concept of “can we” versus “should we” is
important and timely in this era of AI.
In all, the book is another important addition to the Godzilla comics
canon.
