Old Godzilla Con Sketch, With Essay

This was based on an issue of the Herb Trimpe-drawn Marvel Comics series. Don't ask me which one. I think I called the bad guy the "Evil Pancake Monster" while working on the sketch. I remember having a fun conversation with the person who commissioned this, about how bonkers the monster was -- as well as the comic. As far as I could remember, I had never actually seen the insides of a Godzilla comic before looking through the one he gave me for reference. It all seemed so strange, so wrong -- especially the newly-created monsters he was showing me in the stack of comics he was carrying (theme sketch material). Especially in contrast to modern licensed comics, which not only allow publishers and creators to play with the entire IP toybox, but often design them as canon. The old Godzilla comic was nothing like more recent ones which featured Mothra, Ghidorah, Anguiles, et al. The fans didn't get anything else out of the Toho playbook. They got Evil Pancake Monster.

I was one of those fans. I was a huge Godzilla fan from early childhood, and I was a Marvel Comics fanatic, but I never bought the Godzilla comic. Not a single issue. I don't think I even leafed through one at the Te-amo Cigars newsstand on King's Highway in Brooklyn when these came out. Which is just super-weird. It should have been right up my alley, especially since it tied into Marvel continuity with appearances by the Avengers and other superheroes, and S.H.I.E.L.D. chasing Godzilla around during the run (a smart idea, too). And I wouldn't have paid for any of these comics. At least the early part of the run came out while my father bought comics for me and my sister every Sunday. It was usually the only bright spot during an otherwise dreary visit.

This may come as a surprise, but like many comic book fans, I was super-uptight about my purchasing decisions. I liked Marvel superheroes, and pretty much only superheroes. I bought very few licensed comics, The Micronauts, Rom and Star Wars are the only ones I can think of that I followed like a "real" series. The Micronauts and Rom were set in the Marvel universe, and were very superhero-like in appearance and execution. Star Wars...was Star Wars. I was thirteen or fourteen. Gotta have my Star Wars, at least back then.

But I skipped Battlestar Galactica and Planet of the Apes, both of which I was a fan of. And I skipped Shogun Warriors, even though I desperately wanted the toys (I never got them). And I skipped Godzilla, even though I had the Aurora model, watched the movies every time I could, and had the all-Godzilla issue of The Monster Times. And drew Godzilla all the time (badly). This was no temporary crush, either, I'm typing this surrounded by vinyl Godzilla crap all over my studio collected mostly in the 90's, when I had a promising career going, pre-wig out. I'm going to wave to a Godzilla toy as soon as I finish this sentence, in fact. Hold on.

(Waves at little Godzilla sofubi bought at Heroes Con about seven years ago, discounted to $20, frowns that he can recall the price when he can't remember his own phone number.)

Of course I waved at the toy. 

Anyway, something was plain wrong about the Godzilla comic that threw little misfit Evan Dorkin off the scent of a free comic. Godzilla joined the small pile of Marvel comics that I wouldn't pick up, even for free. Conan (eww!), Doctor Strange (I got it only if there was a guest star I liked, but the guy didn't hit anyone! He had no sense of humor! He was okay in Defenders, though), Son of Satan (ditto X 10, otherwise, fuck that guy and his father), no Deathlok (eww) or Brother Voodoo (another boring magic guy) or Killraven (wtf?), Ka-Zar (fuck that Tarzan bullshit -- Zabu is ace, though), any war or horror or western comics that might have been around at the time, and the aforementioned licensed titles. I bought 2001 because it was Kirby, but didn't buy Devil Dinosaur even though it was Kirby. I loved dinosaurs, but I didn't love cave people. Never had an Aurora caveman model, all my Prehistoric Scenes kits were dinosaurs. And a mammoth. Man, I loved that mammoth...). I can't think of other "DO NOT CALL" titles from back then, I'm sure there are a few more on that list. (Note to little me if time travel is ever possible: "Schmuck! Get 'em all! They're FREE! Martin Dorkin can afford plenty of crap, the rat bastard! It's not like he'll talk to you, or play with you, so squeeze a few more comics out of the Sunday ordeal! And try for those Shogun Warriors while you're at it!").

A bunch of boxes got ticked off in my little fanboy head, banishing Godzilla - King of the Monsters from my reading pile. It wasn't "real" Godzilla. They didn't have the other monsters. The monsters they do have on the covers look "fake" and stupid. On the one hand, it's cool that Marvel characters are in there, on the other hand, I don't know if I like those two worlds mixing for some nebulous reason. S.H.I.E.L.D. was okay if they showed up in Captain America or The Avengers, on their one they were too much like the boring Howling Commandos war jazz. I liked Herb Trimpe on Hulk and Iron Man, but he didn't seem right for Godzilla (I probably thought Godzilla should have been a Kirby book, the two Kings together. So why didn't I buy Devil Dinosaur? Oh, right. Fucking Moon Boy). I wish I kept a diary as a kid that detailed these kinds of dopey thoughts about the pop culture I was consuming, it would have been a goddamned riot. And it would help me write the childhood memoir I think about doing (but probably never will).

I still have never read any of those Godzilla comics. I don't think I've ever read a Godzilla comic all the way through, actually, the Dark Horse or IDW ones that have decent art and have all the monsters and are "real". Licensed books are often hard to pull off, and I don't have a ton of interest in any of them on the whole, and straightforward Kaiju stuff doesn't transfer well to still pages and pages of drawings, in my opinion. They're hard enough to make as movies, your main characters don't speak or really do much of anything except fight and stomp. If you lean heavily on the human drama, people get fidgety waiting for the stomping and explosions. Even if the human drama is decent (which it almost never is). And if you lean heavily on the rubber suited destruction porn, it gets monotonous (most kaiju aren't exactly Jet Li). Transfer those storytelling hurdles to the static image, where you lose the monsters in motion and the collapsing cities, and you're left with...human drama and static images of monsters knocking shit down. Which gets really monotonous. The only real reason for showing up to a monster movie is seeing monster shit happen. Once you get the small thrill of seeing your favorite kaiju show up nicely drawn  in a comic ("Oooh, Baragon!"), things go downhill from there.

For me, it's too much of a mug's game. The kaiju movie has a lot of limitations baked into it. Most of them are pretty unsatisfying as movies, many are even unsatisfying as monster romps. They pretty much boil down to how cool the new monster is, how many monsters are we getting, how cool the new device designed to kill Godzilla is, and do they smash enough stuff while going through the motions. Post-90's you can throw in the nostalgia angles: how cool is the new design of a 30-yr old rubber suit with a dehydrating man inside it, how cool does the old IP look with modern SFX, what older kaiju movie actors are doing cameos, what's the rebooted stuff like (and should I write an angry post on Twitter about everything that's wrong with everything). At their heart they're still slow, expensive wrestling matches that have way too many promos by dull scientists, military authorities and annoying kids. Can the limitations of the IP, further hobbled by licensing issues -- and a transfer to a static medium -- be overcome? I'm sure it can. In theory, anything can be good. People seem to love the James Stokoe Godzilla series, and I like his art a lot, but...there's a lot of books out there I'd gravitate to first in a comic shop. Giant monster movies might be limited and repetitive, but they have all that sound and fury. And sometimes a score by Akira Ifukube. 

Sound is so, so important to that wonderful malarkey. Licensed comics can suffer by losing the sounds we know so well from the original text -- the light sabre activating, the soundtrack swelling, the inflection an actor gives a line -- whereas a "regular" comic never really invokes that loss. A Godzilla comic has an especially uphill battle to capture what makes it enticing on the screen -- that score, the sound of stomping feet, the sounds of destruction, Ghidorah's energy blasts, Mothra's silk shooting out, all those monster roars burned into us from childhood. For most fans, just hearing a Godzilla roar in and of itself is going to be more thrilling and invoke more nostalgic feeling than the best Godzilla comics ever made. I'm not arguing that no one should make, or read, those comics. The pull is very real on both counts, I've felt it myself -- I pitched  a mini-series to IDW when they first got the license (a friend there asked me to pitch, it was turned down as a debut story, my contact left and I was too scared to talk to anyone else about it, and then I found out my basic idea was a lot like the movie Cloverfield). People love Godzilla enough to want to keep trying, and for a few issues, people love him enough to do some buying. Like the movies themselves, maybe publishers need to stagger them so they're singular, special events that come out every year or two. Then again, licensing terms would make that problematic, and even without that, comics isn't known for its patience. Our patron kaiju could very well be Glut, King of the Comics.

I'll leave you with this. 

Close your eyes. 

Think of Godzilla's roar. 

Good night.