Godzilla #1 - Featured

Godzilla #1 Review

Godzilla #1Worst comic read ever! Not that this was a surprise though, given that one of my rules for deciding if I should buy a new comic title is to see how many/how ‘big’ it’s variant covers are going to be. The more variant covers linked to an issue, the worse the read usually is. And IDW’s Godzilla variant campaign was epically huge!

Someone at IDW had a stroke of marketing genius when – probably looking at a production mock-up of the book and realizing they should burn it and never look back – they decided to do a variant cover for every shop that ordered 500 copies of the book. This being 495 more than any store would have ordered normally. IDW’s offer – if you order 500 copies of Godzilla #1, they would do a cover with your store being crushed, and the shop’s logo, launching out from amongst the rubble. And looking at the back of the comic, where these covers are all listed, it is kinda neat. That, sadly, is the best part of the book.

The comic itself features badly drawn art by Phil Hester, and an equally weak and thin storyline from Eric Powell and Tracy Marsh. In a nutshell, Godzilla rises from the ocean, starts stomping around, and when the military suddenly jumps from using rockets to nukes, this only endows Godzilla with the power to breathe fire. The plot line is that and everyone standing around swearing. A lot. I would say spoiler alert, but President Obama’s appearance at the end might be the only reason to buy the book, as it is at least, marginally funny.

I am not going to bother to discuss the bad timing of Japan’s tsunami and nuclear plant woes, in relation to a character that is a reflection of 1950s atomic fears. The book was in print long ago, and frankly, offers so little in terms of art, plot, characters… heck, even a good Godzilla stomp-fest, that it can’t really be considered in ‘bad taste’. Godzilla #1 is just bad.

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This comic is going from the new release rack to the 25 cent bins faster than any other title in history. And the absolute cherry is, with its giant print run because of the variant cover market scheme, it doesn’t even have that ‘small publisher/small print run’ collectability factor that has made The Walking Dead or Chew #1 such hot commodities these days.

UysFaber Indie Comics Publisher



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