Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong 2 #2 // Review
Earth’s greatest heroes don’t want to have to fight a giant gorilla. (It was only a little while ago that they had to deal with Gorilla Grodd. They’d like to avoid further simian aggression if possible.) So they show submission. In response, Kong...is pounding. He’s not pouncing at them, though. He’s pouncing at a giant, kaiju-sized Killer Croc. Things get complicated in Justice League Vs. Godzilla Vs. Kong 2 #2. Writer Brian Buccellato continues the sequel to his original mega-mini-series with artist Christian Duce and colorist Luis Guerrero. Pacing continues to be enjoyable in an issue entirely bereft of Godzilla.
The obvious question for the Justice League is...how the hell did Killer Croc get to be the size of a small mountain? More importantly...shouldn’t the Justice League be intervening in the fight? Batman is in a huge Bat-mecha robot so he’s better capable of helping powerhouses like Wonder Woman and Superman, but when the two giant monsters get pried apart, it’s Supergirl who is going to have to do her Fay Wray act with King Kong to get him to calm down and THAT isn’t exactly a safe place for ANYBODY to have to be.
Throw the Suicide Squad into the mix and SOMEBODY is going to get knocked-out of the book, but it really should not be one of the characters whose name is in the title. (I mean...he HAS been showing-up in a lot of comics lately, but this IS the lead-in to the 70th anniversary of his big U.S. debut.) Killer Croc does his best to stand-in for the beloved lizard, but the dynamic between the two title monsters really should be more of a central conflict in a book with a title like this. It really feels like Buccellato is trying to do a bit too much for one series by the time he reaches the second issue of this one.
Once again Duce has a solid handle on comparative sizes in an issue that features quite a bit of different action between characters of drastically different statures. What’s more--there’s an intrinsic understanding of the nuances between the different parts of the different conflicts between Kong, the JLA and Supergirl. The moment between Kong and Kara is particularly nuanced in a very sharp and clever dramatic rendering. Guereero’s colors add just the right amount of depth and luminosity to everything to add to the atmosphere of the issue.
It’s still only the second issue of the short mini-series, so there’s plenty of opportunity for Godzilla to return to the page and hang out for a bit before the final panel, but managing the balance in a series like this can be very, very difficult and Buccellato hasn’t been doing a terribly good job of it. This is felt with particular intensity regarding the JLA’s approach to Croc and Kong. Typically it would be really easy for Diana to subdue just about anything with the lasso, but she’s not using it here because it wouldn’t fit into Buccellato’s pacing for the series. She’s no stranger to fighting big creatures. More so than any of the rest of the JLA...that’s kind of her thing. Buccellato’s script clearly begins to fall into the same issues that all big team books do; any one of these characters could handle the threats involved if it was their name alone in the title. Buccellato hasn’t done a terribly good job of making the threat seem big enough that they ALL have difficulty dealing with it.
