BOUGHT:
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I'm further confused by the fact that both projects would, after being successfully Kickstarter-ed, go on to be published in the direct market by publishers anyway; in the case of Thorn, it was Smith's own Cartoon Books, and in the case of Dracula, it is Dark Horse. Since Cartoon Books is basically just Smith and his partner/wife, I guess needing to secure a large amount of upfront funding makes a certain amount of sense, but why didn't Dark Horse handle that for Wagner and Jones, two artists they have worked with extensively—and, I believe, successfully—in the past? (Again: Matt Wagner + Kelley Jones + Dracula is about as perfect as a pitch for a comic book as one could want.)
Even more confusing than either of those examples is that of Boom Studio's Kickstarter campaign for the miniseries Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Return by writers Amy Jo Johnson (the original Pink Power Ranger and a crush of teenage Caleb's) and Matt Hoston and artist Nico Leon. It, of course, wasn't exclusive to Kickstarter patrons, but was later released in comic shops and then, eventually, wherever books are sold in its collected format. And again, it confuses me as to why they would need a Kickstarter; doesn't Boom regularly publish Power Ranger comics? Isn't one with Johnson's name attached more, rather than less, likely to sell a lot of copies...? (Despite my long-ago fondness for Johnson and the presence of variant covers by EDILW favorites Kevin Eastman and Jim Lawson, this is the one of these examples that I did not contribute to...maybe I'll borrow the collection from the library eventually...)
Like I said, I don't understand it, but it does fill me with a vague sense of worry, that big direct market publishers like Dark Horse and Boom need to rely on crowd-funding rather than handling all such expenses themselves.
Anyway, I got the Orlok Press, hardcover version of Dracula Book 1 directly from Wagner and Jones in August for $51 (including shipping). I guess if I would have just waited a bit, I could have pre-ordered the Dark Horse, trade paperback version, which will be released in late October, for just $29.99.
This makes me wonder how I should proceed for the next three books in the series; if they're also Kickstarter-ed, should I support them thusly, ensuring the books can indeed be made, or should I just assume Dark Horse will indeed be publishing them as they did the first book...?
I suppose that's a worry for another day, and not exactly why you're reading this column, which is ostensibly devoted to the reviews of the comics I've read in a given month (or, here, months), and not my babbling about how I am confused by the current comics marketplace. The pertinent question at the moment is, of course, is this comic good or not?
It will likely come as no surprise to you that I did indeed find it to be a good comic. In fact, a very good comic.
I obviously had rather high hopes for it, given that it was written by the great Matt Wagner (whose 1992 Legends of the Dark Knight arc "Faces" and 1993 Batman/Grendel were among my earliest and favorite Batman comics) and drawn by one of my favorite comics artists, Kelley Jones (whose work I often end up just scanning panels of and ranting about when I attempt to discuss it here on my blog).
These hopes weren't just met but exceeded.
The 94-page comic story, presented at a bigger-than-usual 8.5-by-11-inch format, opens with a huge, detailed moon, fanged teeth seemingly projected upon it, hanging over a tall castle. In the lower righthand corner of the splash page we see a right hand holding a pen above a book. This is, letterer Rob Leigh's narration boxes assure us, "the Son of the Dragon...DRACULA."
This, then, is Dracula telling his own story in his own words and, importantly, he is the protagonist and main character in a way he very much is not in most of the more famous versions of his story, including, as Wagner alludes to in his introduction to the book, the story that introduced him, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel (Although, by presenting the story as one that Dracula himself is writing, it does appear to be in keeping with the epistolary format of Stoker's novel, at least to the degree in which it's possible within the comics medium.)
The character will intermittently narrate throughout, when appropriate. When we first meet him, he is still Vlad Tepes, "The Voivode...Warlord of all Wallachia!", perhaps better known to history as Vlad the Impaler, a name which Jones quite vividly shows he deserves when a turn of the page confronts the reader with a double-page spread depicting a group of bloody corpses rotting on the stakes they were impaled upon, men, women and children.
I've read almost everything Jones has drawn before, and this book will include some of the more violent imagery I've seen from him, which I suppose is appropriate, given the subject matter. And there is also more nudity than I've seen him draw before. Compared to his work for DC Comics, which I suppose most of his readers are the most familiar with, this reads very much like Kelley Jones unleashed...which is kind of a weird thing to say, I know, given how incredibly over-the-top his presentation always is, almost regardless of what he's drawing.
(And it is over-the-top here, including some incredibly bizarre, sinister and, of course, clever architecture in the setting most of the book occurs in. I mean, there's no real reason that an artist has to interpret something from the script like, "The two characters walk down the stairs together" into a panel in which the characters descend a series of poles jutting from a smooth tower, each of which is tipped with a horrible, anguished-looking face carved into it, but Jones, to his credit, does so.)
In a pitched battle with the invading Turkish army, things go poorly for Vlad, forcing him to result to a contingency plan that allows him to escape the battlefield and, with one loyal servant, embark on a fairly bizarre journey. Seeking the guidance of a witch, Vlad eventually makes his way to the legendary "Scholomance," where he and nine other applicants embark on a seven-year study of black magic, under the tutelage of Satan himself.
The ever-ruthless, ever-ambitious Vlad excels, far surpassing the progress of his peers, to the point that they begin to think of him as Satan's own teacher's pet, and all but one of them plan to ally themselves against him. Getting wind of the plot through magical means, Vlad preempts them and kills them all, displaying their bodies in his preferred manner (The deed is prefaced by a scene of Vlad in the forest, selecting and chopping down trees to make pole-length stakes).
As the last student standing, he is selected for special honor by Satan, who usually appears to Vlad (and the reader) as a small child with black eyes wearing an ornate, trailing red robe (The other students see him in other forms, each matching their own beliefs about him). But Vlad doesn't wish to serve anyone, not even Satan himself, and he stabs Satan in the heart with a silver crucifix, having previously researched how to kill him.
It doesn't work, and Satan takes a new, scarier form, and delivers a punishment of sorts to Vlad, making him into what we would consider the first "real" vampire, one that must adhere to the several rules about vampires that Stoker's own Dracula and media that followed have taught us. (Satan makes a point of saying, "No mere mindless revenant, strigoi or wurdulac...you are the first of a new breed of undead." Indeed, quite early in the proceedings Vlad and his servant are menaced by the last of these, a wurdulac, which appears as a pointy-toothed, glowing-eyed walking corpse, a monster that they drive away from their camp with fire.)
This first book then, reads as a complete origin story, to use the parlance of super-comics, telling the tale of how Vlad became Dracula, going from the warlord of history to the monster of pop culture, a journey only hinted at and alluded to in Stoker's novel, but here made into a compelling narrative of its own (And, as far as I can remember—it having been quite a long time since I've read the novel—not contradicting those intimations made by Stoker. In fact, on the page facing the first page of the comic, there's a paragraph from Stoker that reads as if it were the source from which Wagner extrapolated this entire narrative for this volume.)
As satisfyingly constructed as it is, with a complete beginning, middle and end, with rising tension and drama throughout, this is but the first of a series of books. The next volume, The Brides, being teased on the last page (I suppose it will remain to be seen if that is Kickstarter-ed through Wagner and Jones' Orlok Press as well or published directly by Dark Horse.)
As much as I admire the work of Wagner, who has demonstrated a particular affinity for pulp characters and pop culture figures f the past, it was ultimately the presence of Jones that convinced me to drop $50 on this affair.
Jones is in rare form throughout, with Wagner feeding him plenty of opportunities to design scary, surreal statuary and architecture, plenty of corpses, ghosts and the faces of suffering souls and a sinister, forbidding nature, all subjects he's indulged upon in his most mainstream work featuring the likes of Deadman, Batman, Swamp Thing and various Vertigo outings for DC, but also supplying him with such figures as the aforementioned walking, predatory corpse, an ancient crone, packs of wolves, a bizarre guardian demon (the design of which, the back matter tells us, was left entirely up to Jones), a man whose own beard is transformed into attacking serpents, a leopard woman, a terrifying humanoid bat (who a flock of bats happens to appear behind at just the right moment for dramatic effect), and even a fucking dragon, which is not something I've ever seen drawn by Jones, nor expected to ever see.
If you're a fan of Jones', or of Wagner's, or of Dracula's, or of horror comics in general, The Impaler is a satisfying feast. And if you happen to be a fan of all four, then you should be in heaven reading this...as abhorrent as that metaphor may be to the star of this book.
In addition to the comic itself, the package includes a three-page introduction by Wagner in which he offers a sort of defense for presenting another Dracula story and discusses what makes this one unique, and, after the story ends, there are three examples of Wagner's original script facing a page of Jones' pencils and black-and-white inked art.
There were two choices for cover, one by Jones and one by Wagner (who, let's not forget, in addition to being a hell of a comics writer is also a great artist). I chose the Wagner one, as you can see above, in part because Jones' cover is just a close-up of Dracula's fanged mouth, framed by a bushy moustache and what looks like a goatee of blood, and in part because I knew the insides would be full of Jones' Dracula, and I also wanted to have Wagner's version of the character.
If you missed the Kickstarter, I would highly recommend picking up Dark Horse's version this fall.
Um...maybe. (If you read the book he's referring to, you likely did so when Marvel republished it stateside as X-Women #1 in 2010.)
How excited was I for it? Well, excited enough to visit a comic shop for the first time in...years, I guess it's been now. (As I explained previously, given the size of the one-shot, which is big enough to have its own spine, and the standalone nature of the book, it seemed unlikely DC would be publishing a later, more book market friendly version of it, so it didn't seem like I would be able to trade-wait it.)
Because the premise of the original Zero Hour involved the nigh-omnipotent, cosmic powered bad guy Parallax ending the universe by unleashing waves of reality-eating nothingness that began sweeping through the timestream from both its beginning and its end, and attendant time-travel related chaos happening throughout the publisher's line (Many of the tie-in books at the time revolved around the simple but fruitful premise of "time goes crazy"), it seemed easy enough to imagine Marz and Jurgens setting a story starring Kyle within the events of the original mini-series, something of a side-quest for the hero that would involve elements of the original series without changing its trajectory in any way.
As easy as it may be to imagine, however, that's not what we get here.
In fact, despite some call-backs and leftover plot points from the original series, the 30th Anniversary Special is not set during the events of the original Zero Hour miniseries, or during the point in DC continuity that occurred in the 1990s at all (although Kyle's music tastes do seem stuck in the '90s, with the character narrating at one point "Ears ringing... ...and not in the good Nine Inch Nails sort of way...").
Instead, this seems to be the modern-day Kyle, or perhaps some Kyle of the near future. I'm...out of things with the DCU of late, obviously, and a thin strip of a narration box preceding the first panels of the story presents us with the status quo, stating that Kyle is now part of the rebuilt Green Lantern Corps, "thousands of heroes strong," but, for "reasons not yet understood," he is prevented from entering Sector 2814, which, of course, includes his home planet of Earth. (Is this addressed in one of the current or recent Green Lantern books...? This Kyle seems to be a pretty modern one, at least, as when he's trying to explain the GL Corps to an alternate world where no one has ever heard of a Green Lantern, artist Jerry Ordway draws little constructs of Simon Baz, Jessica Cruz and Joe Mullein flying alongside those of Hal, John, Guy and Kyle himself).
Kyle is investigating a strange portal on an alien planet when out of it runs what appears to be an alternate version of The Flash Wally West (based on his costume and the fact that he doesn't recognize Kyle or know what a Green Lantern is); Kyle tries to pull him out of the portal but ends up getting dragged into it himself.
And thus begins Kyle's adventures on a familiar but strange world, one in which he sees plenty of familiar faces, but no one recognizes him.
Kyle visits a Kelley Jones-drawn Gotham City looking for Batman, only to find Batgirl Barbara Gordon, a time-lost version of whom played a fairly big role in the original Zero Hour, defending the city for a Bruce Wayne who never recovered from the broken back that Bane had dealt him (This being Jones' section, we see a bearded Bruce tooling around in a high-tech wheelchair with a typically Jones ornate, over-the-top design, complete with one giant wheel with deep treads like a construction vehicle, arcing bat-wings forming a sort of halo around the contraption, and a huge bat-head like that of the Golden Age Batmobile on its front.)
Kyle visits a Tom Grummett and Norm Rapmund-drawn Metropolis looking Superman and is there met by a black-clad version of Supergirl, who took over for Superman after he died at the hands of Doomsday...and, apparently, never came back to life. (Personally, I think it would have made more sense to use Superboy Conner Kent/Kon-El as the Superman replacement here, as that guy is just...so '90s, whereas Supergirl isn't really as associated with a particular decade of comics. Steel John Henry Irons might also have made sense, and, at least, would have put someone other than Connor in the narrative who isn't white. Both Superboy and Steel do appear briefly in the background of a panel during a montage in which Obsidian describes the waves of oblivion he's seen washing over the past and future.)
By the time Kyle's confronted by a Jerry Ordway-drawn Donna Troy, now wearing a new, blue version of her old red Wonder Girl costume and having assumed the lasso and code-name of her dead mentor Wonder Woman, Kyle finally accepts what will have been clear to readers for many pages now— that he must be in an alternate reality of some kind ("Time-travel, different realities, that kind of stuff isn't unknown to us," he says to this world's Donna).
Kyle spends much of the comic fighting, either members of The Fatal Five, who have retreated from the future they come from and are now working for Parallax Hal Jordan in the present, or alternate versions of '90s heroes, who, using superhero team-up logic, at first assume Kyle is responsible for the strange phenomenon and the white nothing-ness poised to wipe out their universe.
So, what is going on?
All is explained after the appearance of an unexpected guest-star (not shown on the cover, like most of the others), and that character's stumbling upon the deus ex machina of the story, Jurgens' own creation Waverider, who was introduced in an even earlier line-wide crossover story (1991's Armageddon 2001... although Waverider naturally played a part in Zero Hour, too).
Waverider explains that, during the climax of Zero Hour, just before Superman, Damage and company re-created the Big Bang and "time reconstructed itself," Parallax created a "splinter aspect" of himself, which went off to create "a splinterverse", a much smaller, more modest version of Hal's original goal of a recreated a perfect universe.
This alternate world is the result of that, "a place where the strongest wouldn't challenge him." (Thus there's no Superman, no Batman, no Wonder Woman...heck, not even an Oliver Queen). As to why it seems to be endangered in the exact same way the "real" DCU was during the events of Zero Hour, with unstoppable waves of blank-page white deleting history from both ends and meeting in the present, well, the explanation given, such that it is, is that this splinter Parallax has run out of the energy he needs to keep his splinterverse going.
Make sense...?
It...doesn't sit well with me, personally, although I kind of love the idea of Jurgens and Marz showing us at least a watered-down version of Hal/Parallax's ideal DC Universe might have looked like. Even if, somewhat unfortunately, it just ends up being a universe in which his peers weren't there to try and challenge him, and thus it doesn't really end up being what Parallax tempted his fellow heroes with in 1994...or what Hal himself would have seemed to have wanted.
That's mainly because of how it all ends, of course. Parallax wants to use Kyle's Green Lantern ring to super-charge himself and thus will the oncoming oblivion to Kyle's universe, the current DC multiverse, sparing the splinterverse but dooming the "real" DCU. Kyle explains it all as a numbers game, noting the multiverse contains billions more lives than that of the splinterverse, so in order to do the most good for the most people, the splinterverse heroes have to sacrifice themselves and their whole world...although surely there's some way both universes can survive (This, by the way, is the correct strategy; if presented with a scenario in which one of two universes must be destroyed, a true superhero like Superman, for example, would find a seemingly impossible third choice to save them both).
For his part Waverider, who seemingly has the power and authority to deal with these sorts of things, is just like Lol, fuck these guys, and time-surfs away with Kyle in tow, offering an aside about how he currently doesn't have the energy to save the splinterverse even if he wanted to.
It's not a very satisfactory ending, one that reveals a rather impotent Kyle unable to find that impossible solution that his JLA colleagues would have...but then, maybe we're meant to be left feeling disappointed, and that things didn't go the way they should have.
After all, the last lines of the book are spoken by the Parallax fear entity. As much as this may be a celebration of Zero Hour and the mid-'90s DCU, Jurgens and Marz honor Geoff Johns' retcon that a primal fear god named Parallax had possessed Hal Jordan, excusing his villainous behavior (For the record, I always liked Hal Jordan as a bad guy better than the victim of an alien parasite controlling his actions, despite how much work Johns did to try to rehabilitate the character and endear him to 21st century fans...hell, not even Grant Morrison himself was able to get me to like Hal Jordan better than Kyle Rayner...or any of the other human Green Lanterns).
"You might think you put reality in its proper place," the yellow bug monster says in the final panels, apparently addressing an unhearing Waverider and Kyle, "What you've really done, however... ...IS FREE ME!"
The final splash page ends with the words "ONLY THE BEGINNING!"
So there is apparently more to this story. (My guess? This splinter version of the Parallax entity either possesses Kyle, whose mourning for the lost world seems to be the sort of opening in the wall of a Lantern's willpower it would need to take him over, or perhaps Waverider, and then uses the powers of whichever one he gets to recreate the seemingly lost splinterverse).
I guess we'll see in some sequel somewhere, perhaps a new Kyle Rayner miniseries DC will announce soon...if they haven't already.
So I guess I perhaps could have waited for a trade after all, as surely this 80-page special will eventually get collected along with...whatever comic book story that this is apparently "ONLY THE BEGINNING!" of...
Not that I'm entirely disappointed with what we got here, of course.
It wase great seeing so many of these characters again, many of whom either haven't appeared in a while, or, at least, haven't appeared in quite so similar a form to that I remember as they do here. And it was especially great to see so many great artists working on DC heroes again.
Jones is, of course, a favorite artist of mine, and though he's been working pretty consistently for DC over the years—this comic isn't even the only new Kelley Jones comic I bought this month, after all—it was fun to see him in Gotham again, and to draw characters he's not as associated with as the Dark Knight (That is, Kyle Rayner and Batgirl...although his Two-Face also makes a brief appearance).
I haven't seen the work of Porter, Jurgens, Grummett or Pelletier for a while, so I was quite happy to see them cranking out new pages here, although it is perhaps Ordway who gets the most bravura sequence to draw, as in addition to Kyle and various heroes from the splinterverse, his sequence includes a mournful Obsidian explaining what he has seen in his own journey through time, and thus Ordway gets a montage that includes Viking Prince, The Shining Knight, Jonah Hex, Enemy Ace, the original Justice Society, what looked like three distinct versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes to me, the New Gods, Lobo, J'onn J'onnz and a half-dozen more-or-less random heroes (that last is the panel that Steel and Superboy appear in).
As much as it wasn't what I expected, it still gave me exactly what I wanted: A brand-new story starring Kyle Rayner and Parallax that echoed the Zero Hour event, drawn by some of my favorite living artists in DC Comics history.
Because the story isn't quite 80 pages long—I counted 76 pages—there are a couple of pin-ups, of Azrael and some Gotham villains by Denys Cowan, of a wheelchair-bound Bruce Wayne before a Superman statue by Jon Bogdanove, of Starman by Tony Harris, of Parallax by Rick Leonardi, of the Fatal Five (and the Legion founders) by Chris Sprouse and Karl Story and of this book's version of Supergirl, Batgirl and Wonder Woman by Nicola Scott.
There's also a "Zero Hour Roll Call" featuring ten characters of various degrees of import who appeared within the book on the inside back cover—which likely would have been more useful on the inside front cover—for anyone unfamiliar with the players.
I guess that would mean readers who haven't been reading DC Comics over the course of the last 30 years now, or who at least haven't caught up in trades and back issues (Most of these characters have either shown up a lot since the '90s, or else, like Starman Jack Knight, had their adventures collected in trade paperback form. I think only Waverider and The Ray, the latter of whom doesn't get featured in the "roll call", might be less-known to modern DC readers, as Armageddon 2001 and the excellent 1994-1996 The Ray have never been collected...even though the latter kicks off with a mini-series drawn by Joe Quesada, before leading to an ongoing written by Christopher Priest! The former is probably logistically difficult to collect and publish, as it took place in 1991's annuals, and thus has an astronomical page-count. There's no excuse not to publish the latter, though!).
As a middle-aged man who has been reading DC Comics since I was a teenager, though, I had no problem following along; your mileage may vary.
BORROWED:
And so it comes as no surprise that I was, indeed, quite disappointed with writer Brian Buccellato and artists Christian Duce and Tom Derenick's awkwardly titled Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong, a title that reminded me of the even more cumbersomely titled Superman and Batman Vs. Aliens and Predator or Superman and Batman Vs. Werewolves and Vampires.
I was, however, fairly surprised at just how poor a production it actually was though, given DC's status as a premiere comics publisher and the relatively good reputations of the creators (Derenick, who seems to have been a late, necessitated-by-deadlines addition and doesn't even get a byline on the cover, is the only one of the three I personally have much experience with).
Three things worth noting about the project that would inevitably doom it to not being the one I personally most wanted to read, all of which—or perhaps almost all of which—were completely beyond Buccellato's control.
First, this isn't the "real" Godzilla of Toho Studio's fame, the one with the 70-year career of battling humanity and other monsters across almost 40 films. This is the Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures Godzilla from the so-called "MonsterVerse", a Marvel Cinematic Universe-inspired shared-setting that first appeared in the 2014 American remake of Godzilla and then went on to host an extremely, sometimes surprisingly successful five-film series, a handful of comics and a few TV shows. (The front cover bears a Legendary Comics logo).
That means the giant monsters available aren't the famous Toho menagerie that regularly shows up in the pages of various IDW Godzilla comics, but the two title monsters and the usually-only-glimpsed Legendary stable of giant beasts. The back cover namechecks Behemoth, Scylla and Camazotz; I've seen all the MonsterVerse films, but I couldn't name most of the monsters, even those that appear in this comic, but I recognize two that Godzilla killed in the latest film, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (As for the Toho monsters who have appeared in the MonsterVerse—Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah—they are all MIA here.)
Second, this isn't the "real" Justice League, by which I don't simply mean the League I used to imagine fighting Godzilla (the Morrison/Porter/Dell League of the late-90's), or what one might think of as a "default" League line-up (that of the Satellite Era, for example, or that of Super Friends or the millennial Justice League cartoon). In fact, it's not any extant Justice League line-up—remember there is no Justice League in the current DCU, the team having disbanded—but an ad hoc team that Buccellato seems to have created specifically for this story. The official roll call seems to be Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash Barry Allen, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Hawkgirl, Cyborg and Green Arrow (So maybe it' s closest to the Geoff Johns' New 52 League...? Or Scott Snyder's short-lived team...?).
Very early on in the proceedings, however, once the MonsterVerse's Titans start invading ("Titans" being what they call their giant monsters, not to be confused with DC's superhero Titans), Cyborg says, "I've put calls out to all available heroes. Auxiliary Leaguers...associates...everyone." So, regardless of the specific make-up of the team in the title, this is basically the Legendary MonsterVerse Vs. the DCU, with Supergirl and Captain Marvel playing especially large roles, but heroes and villains from throughout the publisher's line making guest-appearances and cameos.
Third, and most surprising to me, this story isn't set in the "real" DC Universe (which might explain both why there is a Justice League there to meet Godzilla and friends, and why it's not an exact line-up we've seen before). This is established immediately in the very first pages, as Clark Kent proposes to Lois Lane, a would-be romantic moment spoiled by the arrival of Godzilla in Metropolis.
I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, as the plot revolves around the fact that Godzilla and the Titans are from an entirely different universe/dimension and are brought to the Justice League's universe/dimension to fight them (If this was to be the standalone story that it ended up being, Buccellato could have just created a shared world involving both universes' characters), but it does at least allow him to a free hand to kill off characters, as he does with (spoilers, I guess?) Atom-Smasher, Toyman and Guy Gardener, only the last of which is kinda sorta necessary to provide a big crossover "moment", one that you might already have been spoiled regarding if you've seen Christian Duce's final cover for the series.
So with all that preface out of the way, what have we got here...?
Well, the plot is a fairly simple one. After the big opening scene in which Godzilla confronts Superman in Metropolis within the first few pages and then introduces us to this version of the Justice League, we meet the League's opposite numbers, The Legion of Doom (This line-up seems to hew pretty closely to that used by Scott Snyder during his 2018-2020 Justice League run, with a few notable additions to the roster).
Luthor has a plan to take out Superman and the League once and for all, a plan that revolves around the fact that he finally pinpointed the exact location of Superman's Fortress of Solitude. There in the trophy room they will find the tools they need to trap the League in the Phantom Zone. These tools? A Mother Box and Orion's "sled". (Um, I would have just used the Phantom Zone Projector, myself, as that seems more direct.).
The plan is spoiled when Toyman sets off an alarm by smashing a case to get at a big red gemstone, and Supergirl and the Justice League—she's filling in for Superman, who took some time off to propose—arrive at the Fortress. During the scuffle, the Mother Box is set off, and the Legion is teleported to another world. Specifically, they land on Skull Island in the MonsterVerse, and find a Monarch outpost with Godzilla and the other Titans up on various surveillance screens.
While marveling at these new "toys" and being berated by his fellow Legionnaires, Toyman clutches the gemstone in his hand and makes a wish...which ends up being granted, given that this gemstone is actually Doctor Destiny's reality-altering Dreamstone.
Immediately, the Legion, all of Skull Island, Kong, Godzilla and the rest of the Titans are transported back to this version of the DCU, with the various monsters attacking various locales. Godzilla himself heads directly towards this world's "alpha," Superman. In a relatively short, silly-even-by-comics-standards fight (I'm not scientist, but I'm pretty sure that's not how heat actually works), the King of the Monster's seemingly kills Superman with his atomic breath.
This turn of events is mostly the result of Captain Marvel (here still called "Shazam" rather than the recently adopted codename "The Captain" or, you know, his actual name), doing something pretty dumb and Superman moving to save him. (This is the first of two demonstrably stupid decisions Captain Marvel makes, the latter in defiance of several people trying to talk him out of it. It's kind of weird, given that he is the only superhero in this book whose superpowers literally include super-wisdom.)
While Superman lies on his deathbed in the satellite Watchtower, the other heroes split into teams to tackle various Titans, the conflict coming to a head in a huge battle involving Godzilla, Kong, all the heroes, an army of super-villains and a few surprises, like a giant Batman mech, Luthor's reconstruction of Mechagodzilla, a Ra's al Ghul resurrected Skullcrawler king (and other skullcrawlers) and a five-Green Lantern construct of a giant robot (Lame; Kyle Rayner, who is not included among their number, coulda built that himself).
So what's wrong with all that? I mean, as a basic plot, nothing really.
The execution leaves a lot wanting, however.
The main problem, as far as I would diagnose it, lies with primary artist Christian Duce's rendering of the title monsters...and other Titans. While the "Justice League" art is all fine, allowing for a few nitpicky mistakes (Aquaman seemingly flying in group shots, Wally West appearing both in his adult Flash identity and his teenage Kid Flash identity...or is the latter meant to be Bart, just drawn really Wally-like...?), all of the giant monsters, especially Godzilla, don't look like they were drawn at all, but rather were imported directly from film stills and incorporated into the art.
They are highly photorealistic, and stand out if fairly sharp contrast to the superheroes they are meant to be interacting with, and the settings they are supposedly standing in.
A generous reading might be that they are literally creatures of another world, and "drawing" them thus emphasizes the gulf between the comics world of the Justice League and the filmic world of the Titans, but it just reads like an off-putting, awkward juxtaposition, a cheap shortcut in the artwork that spoils the fun of seeing these iconic characters sharing space together, which is, after all, the whole damn point of the crossover.
And so what should be cool moments, like Superman delivering a haymaker to Godzilla, or a gigantic Atom-Smasher wrestling with the King of the Monsters in downtown Metropolis don't sing but instead look weirdly bolted-together.
Contrast the appearance of Godzilla and Kong with that of Titano, a homegrown giant monster of DC Comics who appears briefly at the beginning of the story, and it's clear that Duce is treating the movie monsters differently in his art, importing them in and apparently hamstrung in how to depict them, rather than creating them organically as he does the "Justice League" side of the crossover equation.
It does occur to me, after reading this, that perhaps Duce didn't have much choice in the matter, but it was a stipulation of Legendary that the "likeness" of Godzilla, Kong and the monsters had to be so exact as to be film-perfect. In which case, we need not blame Duce for the awkward-looking art so much as the decision-makers instructing him. I don't know; I can only respond to what I'm reading in the finished product.
The covers, of which there are of course many, may be instructive here. They run a pretty wide gamut between looking like they were traced over film-stills to looking drawn from reference in the artist's own style. The Dan Mora cover that adorns this collection is a good example of Mora's version of Kong and Godzilla, looking, to use a musical term, more like cover versions than samples (Is it weird that Mora chose to draw his World's Finest Batman though, complete with yellow circle around his bat-symbol and a blue-tinted cape?).
I also really liked James Stokoe's cover; the artist has drawn Godzilla comics for IDW and covers for DC super-comics, so it was nice to see him get to do one for this; his Legendary Godzilla, like the tiny figures of a trio of superheroes confronting him in a demolished-looking Metropolis, are all clearly his.
(I do wish they would have commissioned one from Sophie Campbell, who has similarly worked for both IDW and DC in recent years and is a huge kaiju fan who has done some professional Godzilla work before. Also, no Arthur Adams, a one-time superhero artist who specializes in giant monsters, and somewhat recently drew covers for both a 2020 issue of Justice League and for Legendary Comics' 2014 Godzilla: Awakening graphic novel...? Surely DC has Arthur Adams-hiring money!)
Anyway, you can basically go page by page through the variant gallery at the end of the book and see different artists taking different approaches, between "covering" the monster designs and "sampling" them, and to various degrees. Aside from those previously mentioned, I thought Jim Lee's cover (the one featuring Kong; he contributed two) particularly interesting, given how incredibly off-model his version of Legendary's Kong is, looking more like a huge chimp).
Story-wise, I wasn't too terribly impressed either. It is, of course, difficult to focus too much attention on the giant monsters themselves (hence their films, be they American-made or Japanese, always focusing on human stars and their dramas over the monsters), but, given that this is a crossover, it feels oddly like it's just a DC Comic with some new, name-brand antagonists. Tellingly, it would be very easy to imagine this very story without Godzilla or Kong or the MonsterVerse's Titans, but any old generic giant monsters a super-comics writer and artist team could cook up (And certainly Superman and his peers have tackled plenty of off-brand, analogue versions of King Kong and Godzilla over the years, including the aforementioned Titano).
The Godzilla-est aspect of Godzilla is that he fights other threats to maintain a sense of order in the world, which here means he fights Superman and other superheroes, as his world doesn't have them, and they are thus seen as a threat to world balance, I guess.
Kong seems to get short shrift in the proceedings, as he's barely involved through much of the story, and doesn't seem to be given enough emphasis to have his name in the title (Contrast this with Godzilla Vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong, where the giant ape is clearly the more focused-on, "heroic" monster). And as for the other Titans, while they get more "on-screen" time here than they generally get in the movies, they are more or less character-less cyphers, big, scary obstacles for the heroes to confront and defeat.
Less importantly, there just seem to be a lot of little mistakes and question marks in the proceedings, things it seems like editorial should have caught.
Some of these I've already mentioned in passing, but others include a scene in which Robin Damian Wayne is sitting in the cockpit of a Batplane with his father in one panel and then, later in the scene, the plane explodes, and only Batman is drawn escaping in a parachute, and then striding away from the burning wreckage solo (Surely Robin didn't die uncommented upon there...? No, he shows up later piloting an admittedly very cool-looking Batplane that Cyborg and Flash apparently upgraded to sprout legs, arms and a giant gun, much like a Robotech space-plane in its half-transformed state).
Or Wonder Woman telling other characters that she was going to meet "Wonder Girl" and "Cassie" on Themyscrica, and then meeting Donna Troy instead (Who she does, at least, refer to correctly as "Donna").
There are, of course, some admittedly fun sequences (the various Leaguers all talking to Superman about his plans to marry, for example) and ideas at play, and plenty of potentially big superhero moments. It's just that too many of those moments don't land like they should, given the weird artwork, and the distracting number of mistakes.
A different artist—or a different approach to the monster art, perhaps I should say—would have gone a long way in improving the comic, as would a sharper editorial eye and, honestly, perhaps a more focused storyline (That is, for example, Godzilla Vs. The Justice League, rather than The Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong...plus some other Titans).
Rather than the final word on the two franchises temporarily mixing, or an ultimate comic book saga crossing them over like this, the sort of inter-IP adventure I personally prefer, this just makes me want to see the suits in charge try again at some point. Maybe going around Legendary and doing a DC/IDW crossover comic featuring DC's heroes, Toho's monsters and the more successful Godzilla publisher utilizing its stable of experienced monster artists...
This volume also includes a few chapters in which progress seems to be made in the budding relationship between former rival for Tadano's affection Manbagi and an awkward-with-girls soccer star, and a particularly tedious-to-read chapter in which the Riverside Dirty-Mag Hunters Club engages in a complicated game to win the prize of a dirty magazine. As much as I enjoy Oda's series, I'm not a fan of when he builds games into the narrative like this, as he (luckily only very) occasionally does.
REVIEWED:
