[Guest reviewer extraordinaire Zach King writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]
It will probably come as little surprise that there is a lot of stuff in Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong. Indeed, “make it more and mash it up” seems to be the order of the day. I write this after weeks of digging into Planet of the Apes crossover comics, at a time when Deadpool & Wolverine is set to bring mutants into the MCU and only a few weeks before Aliens vs. Avengers will pit Earth’s Mightiest Heroes against the Xenomorphs. Our IPs are all mashing together, and if we believe Grant Morrison’s claim that we’ve been living in a Prismatic Age of comics, seeing our icons morphed and multiplied, what happens when the prisms start colliding? (Prisms lived, prisms died, etc.?)
IP abounds in an overfull hardcover, busting at the seams with no fewer than three corporate logos on the cover (DC Comics, Legendary Comics, and MonsterVerse). And while the hardcover doesn’t roar when you open it — as did two fun variant covers for the first issue — that’s just about the only thing that isn’t covered. (That, and Mothra.)
In fact, given just how much happens in the space of seven issues, perhaps a better title might have been Justice League vs. Legion of Doom vs. Godzilla vs. Kong vs. Monarch1, only the League of Assassins is also involved, as is the entire Bat-family and not one but three giant robots. If you’re starting to get overwhelmed, you’re not alone; I was in full sensory overload halfway through the hardcover, wondering what to make of a forest with so many trees.
On the one hand, I came out of JLGK feeling like it was overfull beyond its grasp. The first issue alone begins with Superman’s introduction to Godzilla, a very effective three pages that set the table quite nicely for a clash of the titans. Before long, however, we’re flashing back to a battle with Titano, a break-in at the Fortress of Solitude, and a crash landing on Skull Island. By the time Toyman uses Doctor Destiny’s ruby Dreamstone to wish Godzilla and Kong into existence — an abjectly clunky way to bring the franchises together, even as Toyman likens them to “the ultimate toys” — I had fairly lost the plot. In the subsequent six issues, writer Brian Buccellato dials up the octane again and again, subconsciously telling the reader, “Just go with it, it’ll be awesome.”
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
On the other hand, then, I had the acute sense that I was beginning to ask too much of JLGK, that I couldn’t justly criticize a book like this for including too much. No one comes to a mash-up seeking restraint; we would feel cheated if we missed out on hordes of aquatic kaiju assaulting Atlantis, even as Batman and Lex Luthor construct their own disparate mechsuits. (Lex gets to wield the Mechagodzilla proper, while Batman’s is more akin to Giant Robo or Ultraman. The Green Lanterns form their own Voltron, naturally.)
It’s the sort of book that is difficult to spoil, because its full-page splashes and double-page spreads are the sort of thing that might have appeared in a movie trailer. And Buccellato gives Christian Duce (and later Tom Derenick) ample room to let those cheer-worthy moments breathe; when Shazam and Supergirl knock Godzilla out with a double-punch, he topples into the skyscrapers of Metropolis across the next two pages. Scott McCloud, eat your heart out; there’s an enviable mastery of time and space on display in these pages, somehow feeling as expansive as treasury edition pages.
Put another way, every selling point you can imagine is in the book, structured like an improvisatory game of “Yes, and …” For this reader, the plotting is a little thin, but I concede that it’s just as readily a criticism of myself as a reader, looking for a toehold in the narrative rather than in the very spectacle. There’s not, for example, the hook of Hypertime (as in Planet of the Apes/Green Lantern) or a hidden retcon (as when, for example, Cyborg Superman was “revealed” to be a progenitor of Skynet in Superman vs. The Terminator: Death to the Future). Our title characters are all together not for any plot reason or for any character growth, but rather because the Toyman — a stand-in for the audience, no doubt — demanded it.
The Toyman ends up being one of the fascinating dropped threads in the book, ironically enough. I won’t spoil quite what becomes of him, but as the heroes discover the missing Dreamstone in the Fortress of Solitude, one background subplot necessarily becomes a search for the Toyman. Yet Buccellato’s resolution is so brusque and so cavalier, three pages before the book concludes, that I found myself flipping back for the panels I’d missed. Even the Flash seems disappointed: “This may be the weirdest week we’ve ever had,” he squints, as Batman stonily concurs, “Yeah.” And in a book that tries to be weightless and breezy, the sudden and permanent death of a major DC character lands with an astonishing thud — or rather, a “WHUMP” and a “KaKRAK” courtesy of letterers Richard Starkings and Tyler Smith.
Tom Taylor seems to have become the master — or at least the archetype — for blending quippy dialogue with weighty alternative continuity, and I was reminded of books like Injustice and DCeased throughout JLGK, and often not for the best. In Injustice, for example, Taylor struck a razor-fine balance between Plastic Man’s slapstick comedy and the tragedy of fallen heroes, often using one to accent the other. Buccellato is trying to juggle the banter, the pathos, and the fist-pumps, but whenever one’s not working in harmony, the answer is simply to pump more, more, more into the book.
The one place that pulls back is both the strongest and the weakest element of the book. Curiously, even as Batwoman and Signal Duke Thomas are loitering around the Batcave, while Jessica Cruz and Simon Baz are forming a “Green Lantern Robo,” the book is set at a time when Superman is only just proposing marriage to Lois Lane.
It adds tension to the fact that Superman is, by narrative necessity, off the board for much of the book, disabled by Godzilla’s radioactive breath so that he doesn’t resolve the big kaiju fights with ease. Yet every time I saw Damian Wayne, I wondered why Jon Kent wasn’t around. All of this, again, probably says so much more about me than it does about Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong, but what’s left unsaid is exactly why this continuity rolls the clock back for only Metropolis.
Readers who adored Pacific Rim or the recent MonsterVerse movies will feel right at home. But as someone firmly on the Justice League side of the divide — and having seen the crossover game played so much more to my proclivities — I found Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong a bit too close to watching a young nephew merrily crashing his toys together. With equal glee, the book concludes with a veritable smorgasbord of variant covers, and as with Planet of the Apes/Green Lantern it’s a standout bonus feature, featuring a murderer’s row of creators tackling the titans. Now bring on Mothra and Gamera!
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