Godzilla in Hell #1

Story and art by James Stokoe, Jeff Zornow, Sara Richard.

Godzilla/Gojira created by Tomoyuki Tanaka, Ishirō Honda, Shigeru Kayama, Eiji Tsubaraya.

Whether acting as an agent of destruction or as a defender of humanity from other kaiju, Godzilla is more a force of nature than an individual creature whose behavior can be characterized as exhibiting clearly recognizable motives. So does the concept of eternal damnation even apply to such an entity? How'd you go about punishing him? Wouldn't the mercurial monster be perfectly at home settling into such a horrific place? The 5-part miniseries Godzilla in Hell takes a stab at answering these questions with the creative teams changing for each issue. For the opening chapter, the writer/artist is James Stokoe, whose excellent Godzilla: The Half-Century War was a clever commentary on Godzilla's ever-changing film career. So he's a pretty good choice to start the series.

Like Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole, Godzilla enters Hell by falling down his own very large, very dark, deep pit. I like how Stokoe's large vertical panels seem to suggest that he was cast out from a higher realm like another fallen angel. After finally crashing and pulling out of the resulting impact crater, Godzilla encounters the famous epitaph "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here" carved out as a gigantic stone relief many times his size. Hell is built on a suitably massive scale to say the least. But an unimpressed Godzilla simply burns the sign down with his radioactive breath. Does our angry protagonist even feel "hope" or "despair"?

This Hell is fantastically surreal. A desolate landscape as far as the sky can see that glows faint red, dotted by deformed structures. Stokoe's art is very lush with textures rendered by delicate cross hatching. The overall effect is that the setting isn't just grandiose, but vaguely threatening and extremely claustrophobic. This looks like a separate Hell designed for kaiju, as it's largely bereft of human or demonic presence with one notable example I'll discuss shortly. A smoke plume created by the destruction of the epitaph implies that Godzilla has skipped Limbo and entered the Circle of Lust. Indeed, the comic's most impressive visual, which is a reference to Dante Alighieri, is a violent superstorm composed not of clouds but of countless human forms that engulfs and even manages to push the mighty Godzilla around.

Otherwise, this part of Hell just feeds into his appetite for stomping on other kaiju. And my final impression is that Godzilla hasn't so much been punished as been tested and came out on top. But there are still 4 issues left before his journey through the underworld is over. So it's a little hard to predict if events will always play in Godzilla's favor. But I'm hoping he gets to bump into his many kaiju rivals before the story's over.

Godzilla: The Half-Century War #1

By James Stokoe, Heather Breckel, Frank Teran

Godzilla created by Tomoyuki Tanaka, Shigeru Kayama, Ishirō Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya

For those of you not familiar with the kaiju genre, the fifty year movie career of its most famous star Gojira (Godzilla) is divided by fans into three eras, each with its own distinctive approach. But what has remained the touchstone for every one of them is the 1954 movie that began the franchise. This grim and oftentimes heavy-handed story was a thinly-veiled protest of American underwater tests of the Hydrogen Bomb in the Pacific at the time. And it captured the recent and still sharply felt trauma of a country recovering from the devastation of WWII. It still embodies the nation's strong anti-nuclear sentiments. Needless to say, it's something of a revered object in Japan. Not that this stopped Hollywood in 1956 from heavily editing it by inserting Raymond Burr into some key scenes.

The first issue of Godzilla: The Half-Century War is another insertion into the original narrative. But one that's more self-conscious. The film's main plot is kept at arm's length, and the comic instead focuses on the street-level POV of Japanese soldier Lieutenant Ota Murakami. He gets to experience first-hand Godzilla's initial rampage on Tokyo as one of the tank operators sent in to stop the beast. And he later bears witness to it's destruction at the hands of the Oxygen Destroyer from Tokyo Bay.

That none of the film characters appear allows the comic to tell a very different story. It could even be said that writer/artist James Stokoe has found the action movie hidden within the original narrative. All that serious philosophizing about humanity's capacity for self-destruction or the folly of messing with nature is conveniently shoved aside, remaining only as subtext for the informed Godzilla fan. In place of introspection is a cool set piece. Much of this issue revolves around Ota's attempts to keep Godzilla distracted while the civilians are evacuated. It's gorgeously drawn and colored destruction-porn, captured mostly in wide-angle and from below as Ota stares up at the behemoth as it wrecks the city. The Hollywood-style attention to detail makes for a remarkable contrast to the dark and menacing silhouette stomping Tokyo in the 1954 movie. Unfortunately, Ota himself is a somewhat uninteresting character, coming mostly out of central casting. The stoic hero-act turns him into a typical Hollywood movie protagonist.

So this is a dumb comic, but one that nicely exhibits Stokoe's virtuosity as an artist. I'm a little curious to see if he's using this as a launching point for a completely different take on Godzilla, or whether he'll be touching on the various movie incarnations produced during its iconic half-century career.