Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons #1 // Review
It’s 1556. The Caribbean. A pirate is set to be put to death by the British for...being a pirate. He wants to make a deal with his captors. Evidently, he knows something that might spare his life. It’s a tale from 1357. See: in his exploration, Sir Francis Drake had found his way to...the Monster Island. Thus begins a rather bizarre pirate/monster mash-up called Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons. Writer Frank Tieri opens the first issue with artist Inaki Miranda. Color comes to the page courtesy of Eva de la Cruz. As strange and gimmicky as it sounds, the overall premise is quite strong.
The pirate in question has a lot of guts in trying to get himself free, but it’s not like he has much of a choice. And so he tells a story that would have been ancient even in the sixteenth century. Someone had told Drake the story of an island of monsters on which was found a massive treasure that had been left there by pirates. Drake’s expedition had been said to circumnavigate the globe. What he was really looking for...was Monster Island. Of course--getting to the island is one thing. Surviving the island would be another thing altogether.
The opening issue nestles stories within stories in a pretty valiant attempt to secure a suitably piratey sort of feel for the story. It actually works pretty well. It would have been more interesting to see any one of the individual tales taken as the central story. The reveal of Godzilla might have been a bit more strong had it not been for the fact that Tieri seemed to want to deliver as much of the ancient nautical feel as he could with all of the weird convoluted backstory.
To his credit, the author DOES give artist Inaki Miranda plenty of time to be nautical. There aren’t many artists who could nail the feel of ancient seagoing adventure quite like Miranda. There’s an immersive power in his sea battles that gives the adventure more than enough grounding to establish the novelty of another era. Eva de la Cruz casts the right ambiance of everything in a variety of different environments, including fair weather over Monster Island, nightfall at a 14th-century European village, and lots and lots and lots of images in the rain and sun on the high seas.
The decision to hammer in the ancient seafaring atmosphere of the series with multiple stories might actually be a rather clever one. It’s all well and good to set a monster story in the golden age of piracy, but once Godzilla shows up, he pretty much takes over the book. Winding a few different narratives into a single story allows the creative team much more time to establish the ancient nautical end of the story before everything gets coated in kaiju. If you’re really going to fuse kaiju and piracy, you’re going to need to focus on the piracy first.
