The Giant Kokju #3 // Review
A giant monster is attacking San Francisco. There’s one man who can defeat it. He’s got access to a ridiculously expensive piece of weaponry that was developed in an era of rampant military spending. Given the specific ecology of the creature in question, defeating it might take rather unorthodox tactics in The Giant Kokju #3. Writer Gerry Duggan concludes his screwball satire with artist Scott Koblish. Color splashes across the page under the power of Hi-Fi. What briefly looked to have brilliant flashes of cleverness ends in a predictably silly way. The premise alone was a good indicator of what to expect. The conclusion really doesn’t come as a surprise.
The piece of weaponry in question is a giant robot known as Vindicator Five. It’s going to engage the creature...the Giant Kokju…with some of the most menacing firepower imaginable. The monster possesses some very impressive power of its own. A decades-old mecha of massive power will meet its match in a massive monster that will satisfy itself in whatever way possible. Defeating the monster is going to take something other than firepower. It’s going to involve finding out what it needs one way or the other.
Duggan’s script is not without its more sophisticated moments. The narrative-heavy opening to the issue goes into detail on the backstory of the Vindicator Five. There’s some nearly clever humor that weaves into that opening narration, but there isn’t much beyond it that feels anything other than crude, silly, and painfully unfunny. By this stage in the three-part series, Duggan is merely wrapping things up. The joke has played its way out. Honestly, the series could have been edited down to a one-shot that would have had all of the intensity and sophistication and none of the gratuitously crude silliness about it.
Koblish is also wrapping up his work on the series as well. The action appears more or less as big as it needs to be as a mecha and a kaiju go at it. The skyline behind the battle isn’t all that immersive. There’s little to show that the fight is taking place in San Francisco, which could have allowed some personality to bleed onto the page. The artwork isn’t actually bad. It’s just uninspired. Giant robots and monsters have been fighting on the pages of comic books for decades. It’s very difficult to bring such a conflict to the page in a way that feels new or interesting. Koblish doesn’t even come close.
There is room for great brilliance in crude satire. Without some consistent level of sophisticated humor in and around the edges of something as crude as The Giant Kokju, it gets pretty weak a couple of pages after the opening and never really manages to redeem itself. There were moments in the first couple of issues that might have suggested something weird and wonderful. Instead, Duggan and Koblish allow the premise and the plot to become weak and disinteresting just as the series is reaching its...uh...climax.
