Everything is better when you add Godzilla to it 

Godzilla has been smashing buildings and blasting fools for more than 70 years now, but in my heart, I still consider him to be kind of a giant green goofball. 

Godzilla certainly can be used seriously – in the unbeatable stark Cold War paranoia of the 1954 original, or the Oscar-winning kaiju-as-art masterpiece of Godzilla Minus One, for instance. But the Godzilla mythos is at its heart a world of monsters and men and aliens, the weirder the better. 

The original Showa Era films through the ’60s and ’70s settled into a kid-friendly monster mash of Godzilla tossing buildings at King Kong, battling smog monsters and giant robot versions of himself. They were colourful pulp kaiju delights. Later Godzilla movies on into the 1990s and early 2000s would get slightly less silly, but for every too-serious take like the 2014 Godzilla reboot, there’s been a Godzilla Vs Kong with monsters punching each other out on aircraft carriers. 

Over in comic books, Godzilla has been taken to many strange new worlds and lately it’s gotten more bizarre than ever, with things like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tragic antihero Jay Gatsby bulking up and leading an anti-Godzilla task force. I’m here for it. 

Godzilla’s first extended stay in the comics was the very fun 1977 Godzilla, King of The Monsters which ran 24 issues with classic Hulk artist Herb Trimpe drawing the big dude bashing his way around the Marvel universe. As the series went on, Godzilla took on the Avengers and Fantastic Four, got sent back in time to meet Devil Dinosaur and, in quite possibly his finest hour, was shrunk down to mouse size by Pym Particles.

That storyline was capped by the unforgettable spectacle of a slowly growing man-sized Godzilla in a trenchcoat, hissing his way through New York City alleyways. It’s a darned fun series that might be my highlight from the mighty Marvel age of licensed comics. 

Another epic slice of kitsch was the 1990s one-shot Godzilla Vs Barkley, which yes, had Godzilla playing basketball against an embiggened Charles Barkley. Weird Godzilla comics went kind of dormant after that, but the success of the Monsterverse and Japanese Godzilla movies means new Godzilla comics have been flying out faster than Godzilla’s nuclear breath.  

I’ve usually been a bit bored by more traditional Godzilla comics. Watching two monsters bash each other on the printed page can’t be as explosive as seeing them on the screen, really. The best Godzilla comics for me have always been the ones that have taken our lizardy hero and thrown him into all kinds of silly hijinks. 

The newest Godzilla comics being published by Marvel aren’t quite masterpieces, but I’ve admired their all-in excess as Godzilla progressively smashes everyone in the Marvel Universe, then breaks out across the cosmos in a multiverse-spanning insane war for the fate of existence itself. I’m pretty sick of multiversal shenanigans like everyone else these days, but I forgave it all when I gazed upon the campy delight that was a Wolverine-Godzilla mash-up … who rather stupidly is called “Weapon’Zilla” when “Godzill-verine” is RIGHT THERE. 

The Justice League has also fought Godzilla, of course, and the Avengers, X-Men and Hulk have all taken on Godzilla and other monsters in the past few years. The quality of these stories is all over the place, but I generally admire their sense of play. In a comics ecosystem where I’ve gotten pretty tired of endless “dark” reinventions of Spider-Man and Batman and the like, I’m quite game for seeing King Kong battle Batman. 

I can’t even keep up with the flood of Godzilla comics these days, but I like sampling the particularly offbeat ones, like James Stokoe’s magnificently drawn eerie Godzilla In Hell. Godzilla Heist adds the monster to an Ocean’s 11-style romp, while Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons does a cool little riff on the monster’s appearance in the 1500s during the age of exploration. Not all of these are played for laughs, but they play with the concept of Godzilla in fun new ways – after all, the big guy might well have been around for centuries, eh?

The highlight for me is the delightfully insane Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre series spearheaded by quirky indie comics creator Tom Scioli, which has pushed Weirdzilla Lit as far as it can go – did you ever wonder how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby might change if you tossed in a kaiju to add to Nick Carraway’s poetic jazz age musings, and while you were at it, perhaps added in Sherlock Holmes and a cyborg version of Jules Verne to the mix? 

Other recent Monsterpiece crossovers have included Dracula, the Odyssey, the War of the Worlds and perhaps my favourite, Romeo and Juliet and Godzilla. Forsooth! What kaiiju through yonder window breaks?

It’s immensely silly to drop Godzilla into William Shakespeare, of course, but that’s kind of the point – the monster is the x-factor, sent to Dracula’s Transylvania or meeting Robin Hood and seeing what happens. 

The joke is dangerously close to being pushed further than it can bear, I guess – “Godzill-verine” might be a kaiju too far – but in a time when comics are constantly cannibalising themselves and their history anyway, having a little random giant lizard action in that churning content machine gives me back that sense of fun a lot of current comics lack.

The next Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theatre book is called “the Kaiju Of Oz.” You’d better believe I’ll be there, just to see what kind of havoc Godzilla wreaks on that old Yellow Brick Road.