Godzilla Vs. America: Godzilla Vs. Los Angeles // Review
Fresh from his trip to Chicago last month, the kind of all kaiju goes to a major tourist destination as he visits the second southern California in Godzilla Vs. America: Godzilla Vs. Los Angeles. The four-story anthology embraces the big irradiated lizard in a variety of fun stories that all embraces Godzilla and LA culture in equal parts with work by writer/illustrator Gabriel Harman, writer Jordan Morris, artist Nicole Goux, writer/artist Dave Baker and writer/artist J. Gonzo. It’s a fun spin through the city with one of the world’s single most famous giant monsters. Very cool.
Harman explores Godzilla close-up as a pair of video journalists in a helicopter get an extreme close-up of Godzilla in Harman’s story. A driver of a tour bus deals with problems of the giant lizard in Morris and Goux’s “Big Break.” Gonzo imagines Hollywood ingenuity confronting the big monster in “Godzil-LA.” The single best feature in the entire book has to be Baker’s cleverly complex pamphlet of a feature “How to Use the Los Angeles Metro to Survive a Godzilla Attack.” It’s strikingly clever on a whole bunch of different levels.
Baker’s work is...surprisingly informative...going into a complex and apparently comprehensive look at the history of mass transit in LA and all of the reasons for why it’s as awful as it is. Hardman’s close-up on Godzilla is an interesting perspective on a celebrity monster that has already been seen from so many angles...but it’s cool to see the monster treated as a simple disaster for a few pages. Morris and Gonzo’s stories are pretty fun too, but their art is far more impressive than the stories that they are delivering to page and panel.
Goux’s art for “The Big Break” is kind of breathtakingly gorgeous in its rubbery exaggeration of life in L.A. Granted: it doesn’t exactly embrace the reality-vs.-horror element of Morris’ story, but its a lot of fun. Gonzo’s art for “Godzil-LA” feels like classy, vintage indie action comics art from the 1980s. It’s a pleasant trip to the back cover with Gonzo. Baker’s layout for the informative pamphlet has a similarly appealing indie sort of a style about it that’s a great deal of fun to engage in on. Baker packs a lot into every page without making any of it feel at all cluttered. Quite an accomplishment.
Originally conceived as a simple one-shot that was part of the larger Godzilla Vs. America series, the issue gained additional prominence in light of the L.A. wild fires. And...y’know...since “history shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man,” they’ve decided that 100% of the proceeds from the issue is going to support wildfire relief through the Book Industry Charitable Foundation. Godzilla has been a cultural hero before in the past for so many. It’s cool that he can have something of a direct impact on the recovery from a major disaster in Los Angeles.
