1.25.2012

I'm Glad KOM is Dying

Just in time for the series to be over, Kingdom of Monsters finally managed to piss off it's last semi-fan by KILLING Minette and Mallorie, the Battra Twins.

Fuck you, Ciaramella. Fuck you and your stupid fucking face. Those two were the best thing to happen to Godzilla since Biollante. You're a faggot, and I hope your family dies in a fire.

As if that wasn't bad enough, there's none too subtle hints that the series will end with Space Godzilla, the absolute worst thing about the entire franchise, just showing up out of fucking nowhere for no fucking reason. Which would be the worst thing ever. Worse than Hitler.

Yeah, I went there.

So, I'm done defending this piece of shit. They started off really strong, but with weird stuff that made you go like "...wtf?" thrown in, like Japan just up and deciding a nuclear weapon is the only reasonable course of action against Godzilla when the monster has only been around for a grand total of five fucking minutes. The political satire is magnificent and hilarious. It's on par with Godzilla vs. King Kong for sure... you know, for the first couple of issues. Then the Lady Gaga expy shows up... with almost no resemblance to the real life Lady Gaga, which turns something that should have been topical and funny into something mean-spirited and insulting. Fact is Lady Gaga isn't hard to parody, but she's also not hard to understand. Her motivations, interests, and art are all put out in public display, and she's obnoxiously famous. There's no reason to paint a caricature of her that's just fucking wrong. There's no god damned excuse for "Girly Yaya." That was just awful, and it took away from Minette and Mallorie pages.

THEN of course there's issue 4, where we meet the second worst thing to happen to the series: Sgt. Steven Woods. WHO THE FUCK IS THIS GUY? I hate this smug asshole who thinks he can look down on everyone and everything like HE'S got all the fucking answers. "Everyone who isn't me is stupid and hates America." Go fuck yourself, author tract insert mouthpiece, you don't belong here.

And then I would try to rationalize this horrible, jack ass of a character with utter disdain for all humanity for all of the most selfish reasons (making him a hippocrite, by the way) by drawing comparisons to GMK. But I can't do that anymore, because logic and emotional backlash are fighting back.

You see, in GMK, groups of rebelious teens are shown to be responsible for awakening Baragon and Mothra. Dialogue from old timers tells us that it's all the younger generations fault that monsters are destroying Japan, since they don't have any respect for their elders or something.

But let's take a closer look at that. First of all, Baragon and Mothra are the GOOD guys trying to SAVE Japan. Heck, in KOM Girly Yaya was trying to stop the military from attacking Battra's egg, which would have ALSO saved the world from Battra hatching, making Wood's nonsensical hatred of her even more... bad. Another thing we notice about these supposed wild rebels in GMK is that they are NOT harmless teenagers by any stretch of the imagination. These are horrible monsters in their own right that harass and terrify people at night on motorcycles weilding chains. These people are straight up BAD guys. The group who inadvertantly summons Mothra are trying to CRUSH A PUPPY UNDER A ROCK.

Say what you will about whiny kids who didn't get a phonepad for decemberween, at least they don't FUCKING MURDER PUPPIES.

The last point here is that while many of Wood's complaints about the general cultural nosedive the U.S. has been taking is legit, the stuff we see in GMK is an exaggerated way of dramatizing the generation gap in Japan that is a hell of a lot more complicated than just "kids are evil." It's not at all coincidental that the third guardian monster, King Ghidorah, is awakened by Yukijiro Hotaru commiting suicide in Aokigahara. GMK makes a hell of a lot of nods to problems affecting Japan that are usually ignored or blown out of proportion. Suicide and the generation gap are very real dimensions of Japanese society, as are the war crimes commited by Japan in WWII and earlier, which is, of course, the reason Godzilla appears in that movie in the first place.

So, comparing the two, we have GMK, which weaves in all these ideas but never takes a stance, although the combined might of the tortured souls from WWII war crimes seems to wipe the floor with the other crap, yet never comes off as too pretentious or heavy handed, and certainly doesn't presume to have any answers...

vs. Kingdom of Monsters, where Sgt. Steven Woods spends no less than 8 pages telling us why, because the U.S. has a very high standard of living, we're all a bunch of filthy maggots who, if given the chance, he would willingly let die in the radioactive flames of Godzilla's nuclear beam because we like phonepads... but HE'S not the bad guy, and I'm supposed to SYMPATHIZE with this piece of human trash?

nuh uh. It doesn't work like that.

And, of course, to top it all off, in issue #5 we get new "art" by an, I'm assuming mentally challenged individual who's indecipherable scribbles (and I'm being NICE here) wouldn't look out of place in Maddox's new book.

...who then continues to piss out the worst drawings by an adult I've ever seen for the REST of the 7 remaining issues...

Oh right, and then Kumonga shows up for all of one panel. Can't forget that bit of gold.

Point is, KOM took my seemingly endless faith in it and just ran it into the ground as hard as it could as many times as it could.

So where does IDW go from here? It's obvious what they're thinking if you've seen that incentive to "preorder," which, by the way, is not something you can do with comic books, Legends #4. But, let's just take a look at some of the options available to clear the air of that awful stench that was KOM.

1. Only hire ADULTS who are actually capable of drawing to, you know, DRAW the comic books. I don't know if "Santos" is one of the writer's kids or a hobo they found outside the building, but he's not a professional artist, that's for DAMN sure. Fire him and get a professional please. Here are some options:
 - Matt Frank
 - Frank Parr
 - Art Adams
 - Phil Hester (the guy's good, why did you replace him in the first place?)
 - Geoff Darrow (but have someone else colour it, enough with the green crap)
 - Literally ANYONE else. Shit, I could do better.

2. Biollante. The starting roster of 13 is ALMOST perfect, but Space Godzilla a.k.a. the worst big screen monster of all time just sticks out like a sore thumb. How much stupider can you get? To top it off, GvsSG is the WORST Godzilla... no, worst Toho Kaiju film of all time. At least Zilla was designed by Tatoupolis, you know? Space Godzilla is just something we need to all make a pact with each other to forget ever happened. The movie, the monster, everything. Let's just pretend that fucking thing never existed. PLEASE. More importantly, this is the slot Biollante was supposed to be in. I can't have been the only one who took it for granted that they would have gotten Biollante. Seriously, why don't they have Biollante? This needs to be fixed A.S.A.P..

3. Godzilla vs. Transformers. Duh.

4. Instead of these one shots that go nowhere, why no just make the damn series? Matt can clearly handle the concept of a one-shot the best, so just let him do all the ones where the story can be contained. Legends #2 was boring. Do a mini-series following Legends #3, since they are basically begging you for it with that ending. The team behind #4 seem to want to do the same, so why not do that too? Next time, rather than starting 5 independent stories with series potential at the same time, maybe just make sure the one-shots are actually contained stories? Then you can launch new series based off of the effectiveness of a creative team rather than which one had the largest sequel hook. Idunno, just seems like common sense to me.

5. Movie continuity. Kinda sick of starting off being dumped into the middle of a world who's rules I don't know with every single fucking issue. Please take some sort of effort to make the "legends" continuity, as it were, make sense. I never know when anything is supposed to be happening, or how I'm supposed to react to the introduction of a new character. I mean, since I know Miki from the Heisei timeline, her taking the time to visit some kid in the U.S. should be a HUUUUUUUGE fucking deal, but no one seems to know who the fuck she is. A little background goes a long way.

6. Specifically, someone needs to make a comic out of Godzilla X Biollante. You know what I'm talking about. At the coda of GMMG when they show us the huge vault of G-Cells (and presumably other monster tissue as well), and then in GXMG with that rose... and of course they manage to successfully clone Achelon in that same year, so... Biollante, plz?

All in all, I'm glad they're mixing it up after the first year. They've got so many oppurtunities available to them now, maybe after a year it's time they actually start USING them. I hate the idea of an "ongoing" series in the first place. You can't tell a story if it has no ending. Sequels are one thing, but in the middle of KOM I felt so lost and confused and there was just no direction at all. Dark Horse's stuff NEVER felt like that. They went from story arc to story arc, always with a clear sense of direction, never meandering around with characters you absolutely hated.

Because really, as a writer, one should understand that you actually can't go into a story expecting it to just go on forever. That's just not how it works.

Fucking hell I'm glad KOM is over.

R.I.P. Minette and Mallorie "The Battra Twins" 2011-2012

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous23/8/12 05:44

    I'm still hoping they will be resurrected in the new Godzilla ongoing series to battle the Mothra Faeries (If Battra is alive and well in this comic after the battle, why not them? You know the rules, no corpse, no death...)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ...but then they weren't. :c

      I like the new ongoing though. At least, I'm not offended by it because it became really monotonous, because it hasn't yet. It does illustrate this problem that IDW seems to be having where the ongoing is always going to be upstaged by the far superior mini-series released alongside it. It happened with G&G and Legends, and now it's happening with Half-Century War. Which is kind of unfortunate, because I'm getting into this alien invasion plot. Keizer Ghidorah and Hedorah show up, and that's always a plus.

      Delete