“It’s Road Warrior … with
giant monsters!”
In 2010 and 2011, my co-writer, Tracy Marsh, and I had the
pleasure of working with the awesome folks at IDW and amazing artists Phil
Hester and Victor Santos on Godzilla:
Kingdom of Monsters. As a lifelong fan, it was a thrill to do anything Godzilla-related.
Unfortunately, as often happens in creative fields, differences of opinion came
up when developing stories. Toho, the Japanese company that owns the rights to
Godzilla and his universe of kaiju, wasn’t comfortable with the direction we
wanted to take, and since Tracy and I didn’t feel we could execute our concept
as well as we planned, we stepped away from the book after eight issues. I tend
to stick to creator-owned books, and when I venture out of that, it’s only
because I’m inspired by the subject matter and feel like I can execute it
really well. Toho obviously has a great responsibility to the characters they
own, and they’re rightfully protective of them. While I wish they would have
let us tell our Godzilla story as we envisioned it, I completely understand
their reservations and hold no animosity. It was a work-for-hire job, and our
ideas weren’t making the client happy.
However, I thought it would be fun to share with you readers
who followed the book exactly what we intended to portray. Here’s our initial
pitch for the series, originally entitled Godzilla:
Monster World:
GODZILLA: MONSTER WORLD
by Eric Powell with Tracy Marsh
Godzilla,
Mothra, Rodan and the rest of the Toho library of monsters have defined the
genre for a generation of giant monster film fans. Now adults, these monster
enthusiasts are hungry for a contemporary take on these characters. And that is
the objective of Godzilla: Monster World.
The monsters function as an allegory for modern-day society’s inability to
effectively cope with disaster. Like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill,
the monsters come, and the incompetence of the government and the public in
dealing with them leads to mankind’s ultimate undoing.
With the obvious
exceptions of the mechanical and space-oriented breeds, the origin of the
monsters is never explained. Foregoing cliché science fiction explanations like
genetic mutation and alien races allows readers to draw their own conclusions
while reconnecting with the unnervingly raw and bleak nature of the original
1954 Godzilla film. Introduced one or two at a time, starting with Godzilla,
the monsters are simply a force of nature whose attacks can be no more
predicted or rationalized than a lightning strike. The mysterious nature of the
events plays just as large a role in advancing the plot as the monsters
themselves.
This book will
entertain fans looking for all-out monster action as well as those seeking
stories with intelligent, thought-provoking themes. Satirical elements like the
monster rights organization M.E.A.L.S. (Monster Equality and Living Standards)
provide a few light moments in an otherwise black comedy of errors, but our intent
is to engage the reader by lending a sense of realism to the fantastic idea of
giant monsters.
Just as they would with any other natural disaster, the book’s
human characters face realistic consequences of the attacks. As the destruction
of cities gives way to crumbling infrastructure—fresh water, food, shelter,
electricity, sanitation, transportation, communication, etc.—the humans are
driven to commit unspeakable acts against one another in a race for resources.
It’s survival of the fittest. But for the humans in Godzilla: Monster World, it’s only a matter of time until you die.
A full-scale
apocalypse is brewing. There will be no clean-cut heroes with perfectly
chiseled chins and capes billowing in the wind. Only ordinary human beings
struggling desperately to survive in a world gone mad.
Confronted with the concept of doing a serial Godzilla comic,
I quickly came to the realization that the continually repeated film format of “monster
comes, monster attacks, monster fights, monster returns to the ocean” wouldn’t
work in an ongoing series. Seeing our society’s ineptitude when dealing with disasters
like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill made me wonder what would happen to
our infrastructure if indestructible, city-sized monsters attacked. It would
crumble, of course. In the face of unrelenting monster attacks, there would be
no way to keep up with rebuilding efforts. So our idea was that—through an epic
storyline—we would show the decline of civilization into a post-apocalyptic
monster wasteland.
I’m more than a little bummed that Tracy and I never got to fully
execute our idea. It was bittersweet for me to see this kind of concept being
done in Pacific Rim last year. That
movie featured several elements that we wanted to incorporate in our book …
right down to the massive walls constructed to protect citizens from the
monsters. (Obviously, our wall was a satirical take on the physical barrier between
the U.S. and Mexico built by immigration extremists.)
When Tracy and I left the project, we had just scratched the
surface. The book we put out lacked all the grit we’d originally aimed to
include. I really wanted to make an epic story that was also a social commentary
like the 1954 Gojira film. We tried
very hard to do so. If you read Godzilla:
Kingdom of Monsters, Volumes 1 and 2, which comprise the eight issues we
wrote, you can see they’re dripping with social satire. Unfortunately, those
volumes also contain a lot of setup with no payoff.
So for the record, this is what we were going to do …
While the introduction and death of characters was going to
be a constant in this apocalyptic book, the ever conflicted patriot, Sergeant Woods,
was going to be our Mad Max. He was our shaky moral compass, clawing his way to
keep himself and Allie, the little girl whose parents were killed right before
Woods finds her, alive.
And then there was the red herring of the Shobijin twins. Tracy
and I had a lot of twists and turns planned for these characters, and we wanted
to use the readers’ expectations against them in a couple of ways. We wanted
readers to think: one, that Minette and Mallorie, the telepathic French twins
we introduced, were Mothra’s fairies; and two, that like most reboots, we were
taking familiar characters and making them edgy and dark. Well, Minette and
Mallorie weren’t Mothra’s twins at all. Instead, they were a couple of evil Village of the Damned–style psychics who
had the ability to control the monsters. This realization began to unfold for
readers in Issue #3, when the egg that everyone expected to contain Mothra hatched
to reveal the evil Battra instead.
The actual Shobijin twins were shown in the final panel of
Issue #3 with their caretaker—an old man watching the monster madness unfold
from a dilapidated shack. Tracy and I planned to set up what would appear to be
an approaching conflict between the evil twins and the Shobijin. However, it
was eventually going to be revealed that the tiny girls the old man was talking
to were actually just wooden dolls and he was, in fact, completely out of his
mind. The old man’s madness, though, had some method to it, and he would have later
supplied Sergeant Woods with much information about the evil twins’ power and
purpose.
As society collapsed, the twins were going to start
collecting the monsters they brainwashed, building an army. They would use this
colossal force of beasts to help them reach their goal of ruling the remains of
the ruined world. The one monster they could not control, however, was the king
of them all, Godzilla! The spoiled twins would unleash their monsters on
Godzilla to destroy the one being that had defied them, setting into motion an
epic monster battle. Piloting Mechagodzilla, the monster deterrent gone haywire,
Sergeant Woods would come to the aid of Godzilla, saving him from certain
defeat. After the twins were killed in the battle, and the monsters had regained
free will, Godzilla would turn on his mechanical partner and destroy Mechagodzilla,
with Sergeant Woods still inside. Allie would be left alone in the wasteland, Sergeant
Woods having sacrificed himself to keep the maniacal twins from ruling the
earth.
From that point, there would be only more death and destruction
as clans of men and warrior tribes vied for survival and reign among a world of
monsters. New threats would relentlessly pummel man and monster alike in the
forms of SpaceGodzilla, Destoroyah, Titanosaurus, Hedorah and more.
Tracy and I started writing in the fall of 2010. We laid out
several issues really quickly. One thing we immediately knew we wanted to do was
foreshadow the arrival of certain monsters using unexplained natural phenomena.
In the opening panel of Issue #1, dead fish litter the Japanese beach that
Godzilla soon explodes from. In Issue #2, dead birds fall from the sky in
Russia, and hundreds of cow carcasses are discovered in Mexico.
Here’s the weird part. One to two months after we finalized
and submitted each script, this stuff actually happened. In December of 2010, tens
of thousands of dead fish washed up along the banks of the Arkansas River.
Weeks later, thousands of birds mysteriously died in Louisiana, Arkansas,
California and Italy. In mid-January 2011, 200 cows keeled over in Wisconsin.
We thought we were really onto something. That, or we were
predicting the future through funny books.
But no matter how on board the universe was with our
storyline, Toho wasn’t down with our grittier take on all out monster destruction.
Like I said before, I understand, but I was really looking forward to the opportunity to give fellow Godzilla fans a new and
different kind of Big G story that paid homage to the social commentary of the original movie. Not being
able to execute it the way we wanted to was disappointing, but hopefully you will enjoy hearing our plans and picturing what the book might have been like.
