Graphic novel review - Godzilla Library Collection, Vol. 6

 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. 

Graphic Novel Review: Queen Kodiak by Christopher Greenslate and Riccardo Faccina

 Reviewed by Cord Scott, UMGC Okinawa 

Queen Kodiak by Christopher Greenslate (w) and Riccardo Faccina (a). Maverick Publishing, 2025.  ISBN 9781545821015.  $14.99 US/18.99 CAD. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Queen-Kodiak/Christopher-Greenslate/9781545821015      

    Graphic novels have evolved to serve as a way for authors to pay homage to art which has inspired them, as well as providing readers with coping skills suggestions.  These themes are front and center in Queen Kodiak as the creators show their influences, but also expand the comic to incorporate their own interests. 

    The story starts with Joey Fox, a seventeen-year-old living at home with her single mom.  Early on, we are given the information that her dad Doug is not in the picture, having left ten years ago.  Joey shows an interest in photography, as well as exploration, while her mother runs a cleaning company.  As they plan a trip north of Seattle, her mother comments on feeling ill. She soon dies of a virus, which makes her immediate burial impossible, a clear reference to the COVID outbreak in 2020.  This death reintroduces Joey’s father, a law enforcement officer on Kodiak Island in Alaska. He is also a member of one of the indigenous tribes of Alaska, but is not noted which specific clan.  The two travel by ferry up to Kodiak, where Doug hopes to reconnect with Joey and help her cope with the loss of her mother. 

    While investigating a report of a finding of bones (a fear to fuel local myths), Joey and her dad run across Queen Kodiak, an abnormally large grizzly bear, hearkening to the legend of Nanurluk, a spirit bear the size of an iceberg.  They leave the bear alone, but Joey is obsessed with seeing it, and takes her dad’s boat back to the island, where she is lost in a storm.  This gives her the chance to bond with a young “Little Bear” she finds - which turns out to be the offspring of the large immortal Queen Kodiak. Hunters come across Little Bear and kill him; Joey, hurt by this (to her) senseless killing, somehow steals the corpse, and heads back to Seattle. 

    At this point, the story turns to the supernatural. Characters are illustrated with their auras shown. The enormous mother of Little Bear follows her and begins doing damage to Seattle.  Any weapons against this kaiju-sized bear are useless.  But as a genre reader expects, in the end, the mother and cub are reunited while Joey and her dad come to recognize that they need to connect with each other and cope with the death of Joey’s mother. 

    A theme of grieving and loss comes from both from the humans as well as the bears.  While Joey mourns the seemingly senseless killing of Little Bear, her dad notes the hunters may be rich and insensitive, but it was permitted and legal.  A variety of attitudes are towards hunting, fishing, and environmentalism, which may not be for everyone, but if law and culture allow it, so be it. 

    In the interview at the back of the book, Greenslate fully acknowledges his love of kaiju movies and how they have influenced him.  He also noted how he put a lot of Easter eggs into the story, from influential bands to the local myths of the natives in Alaska. Overall, the graphic novel was an engagingly fast read although it doesn’t clearly fit into a genre. Is it a kaiju story, a ghost story, or something else?  Greenslate wrote this in such a way that it could be continued, which may in turn change how this book is perceived.