Luke Owen reviews issue #10 of IDW’s Godzilla…
Earth is ravaged by the Space Monsters! With Earth’s kaiju trapped on Monster Island, the planet is seemingly doomed. Until Boxer decides to undo all of his hard work and stage the biggest prison break of all time!
I feel like a stuck record now with my reviews of Swierczynski’s Godzilla series. It seems like an eternity since anything really happened with month after month of teases and build and no payoff. Well, finally, Godzilla #10 does have some actual action and serious build. Only problem? It’s not all that great.
Godzilla hasn’t been seen for days as the Space Monsters (Spacegodzilla, Hedorah, Gigan and Kaiser Ghidorah) are destroying the Earth. Meanwhile Boxer and Hikari have finally made it to Monster Island in an effort to release the monsters Boxers was once paid to capture in order to fight back. And Boxer’s son Harrison has found the storage container that could contain the one thing that can stop some of the monsters in Godzilla’s absence – Mechagodzilla.
That above paragraph sounds like this could be quite an exciting issue, but for some reason it just feels like its lacking something. The Mechagodzilla and Hedorah showdown is limited to a few panels and it doesn’t extend out any further when Godzilla shows up. We’re given some cool glimpses of the destruction caused by the Cosmic Monsters (as seen in the last couple of issues) and battles between Gigan and Rodan as well as Mothra and Kaiser Ghidorah, but nothing in huge detail. Everything that should be played up is down played as background action. It once again becomes nothing more than just scenes of exposition to build to the next issue. You’d like to think that now that Anguirus, Kumonga and Titanosaurus are now free (at long last) that the next issue should be a better event.
What bothers me is that I’ve been saying this for the last few issues. This series has now been stagnant for the last four or five issues and I’m really losing patience. Swierczynski shows signs of greatness and the Space Monsters do look genuinely threatening (what little we see of them) but it now feels like he wrote a story that could only fill 5 issues and it was stretched out over 10. This run needs an injection of life and it needs it sooner rather than later.
Godzilla #10 does have some good moments and genuinely funny dialogue, but it’s just not enough to carry the plodding story. After all this build, the final battle had better be worth it.
Originally published February 19, 2013. Updated November 6, 2019.
