The word is out: Despite numerous attempts over the years to rid the world of the King of Monsters, Godzilla will return in this month’s “Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters” No. 1, from IDW Publishing. As comic fans prepare to batten down the hatches, it’s also expected that Blue Oyster Cult downloads will hit record highs.

The Big G has a spotty record with comic books. There was the Marvel Comics series in the 1970s, which featured a more dinosaur-looking Godzilla battling everything from giant Yetis to the Avengers — maybe the less said about it the better. In the 1990s, Dark Horse secured the license from Toho Studios and produced a short-lived series that hewed closer to the Big G’s films, but that didn’t last long enough to warrant a blast of radioactive breath (one infamous issue featured Godzilla’s scales as the iceberg that struck and sunk Titanic). So, what is it about Godzilla translated into comics that just never seems to work well?

IDW appears to be heading down the right path: It has locked in permission to use other Toho giant monsters beyond Godzilla, such as Anguirus, Mothra and Rodan. That may seem simplistic, but fans of the films have come to embrace Godzilla’s entire world, not just the main monster; without his supporting cast, there’s no one to challenge him. Marvel had to cook up its own opponents for the Big G when readers just wanted him to throw down with, you know, King Ghidorah. Is that too much to ask for?

The initial news on “Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters” from IDW looks promising. The company has pulled in big-name talent for the book — Alex Ross, Eric Powell and Phil Hester — and reports that it understands what makes the source material, the films themselves, tick. It’s all about balancing the monster-mashing with the human element — there’ll be no super -heroes here, just regular people struggling to survive in a world that they share with Godzilla and his cronies.

Should be fun … “Go, go, Godzilla!”

Tags: Godzilla, IDW Publishing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 11:30 am and is filed under Comics.
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