Spider-Man Vs. Godzilla #1 // Review
It’s 1984. Peter Parker has juust returned from a weird adventure on the other side of everywhere. He got kidnapped by The Beyonder along with a whole bunch of other heroes and well...it’s a long story (12 issues long to be precise.) Now he’s back with. brand new symbiote costume that he’s absolutely positive won’t be any kind of problem for him at all at any point in the future. And he’s dealing with the sudden appearance of a giant lizard who had showed-up in the Marvel Universe in the not too distant past. He’s going to have to deal with a big problem in Spider-Man Vs. Godzilla #1. The one-shot showdown is written by Joe Kelly with art by Nick Bradshaw and Rachelle Rosenberg.
Spidey is dealing with a return of the villain known as The Shocker. He’s not exactly a pushover, but when it becomes appaent that there’s amuch bigger monster that has loomed into view, things are going to get conssiderably more complicated. Suddenly Spidey has to deal with Godzilla in Manhattan. It’s not going to be pretty. He’s just one, little guy. It would take a team the size of the avengers of the Fatastic Four to bring this guy down. How can Spider-Man deal with a threat large enough to crush the Word trade Center in his way through lower Manhattan?
Kelly takes a few pages at the opening of the issue to establish what’s going on for Spide-Man in the spring of 1984 without SPECIFICALLY mentioning that it IS the Spring of 1984. Kelly place it a little fast and loose with the continuity. Although it's pretty remarkable just how much he's able to cram into a single issue. Quite a lot of the lore surrounding the mid-1980s Jim Shooter-era Spider-Man comes into play. And it reads like a very enjoyable issue of What if? from the late 1980s or so. Fun stuff to get into.
Bradshaw is using a style that's not entirely unlike the type of thing that would have been on the comic book rack back in 1984. The visual style looks a bit like a nation of different artist who would've been working on the various spider titles back in that era. The color is a little bit more vivid than would have been available to comic books back then. Rosenberg does a really good job of makin reminiscent of that era without compromising and level of depth and detail that would not have been common in mainstream Marvel comics back then.
The mashup between Spider-Man and Godzilla actually works pretty well circa 1984. It's a fun combination of different elements that probably would've been a little bit more comfortable and felt a little bit more authentic to the era if it had been allowed to play out over the course of a tour or three issue mini series. That being said, it's just a lot of fun. Even for people who wouldn't necessarily have been interested in anything that happened to the character over the course of the past 40 years or so.. It's more than a little bit goofy. But it's a lot of fun.
