Godzilla: Awakening and The Pro

The Pro
by Garth Ennis and Amanda Conner

I bought this on impulse at Comixology a while ago. It was cheap enough, $3.99 for 59 pages so I took the bait.

It's a short graphic novel, maybe published as those half-comic book half-paperback kinds of deals. If you're familiar with Garth Ennis, you'll see plenty of him in the story. If not, this is a good introduction. He's that weird kind of person who very clearly hates superheroes, yet loves them enough to write this story.

The "Viewer," in a cosmic wage against his robot, bets that even the most depraved of human beings are capable of great things. ENTER: The Pro, a single mom who works as a waitress by day, and walks the night by. . . night. She's a prostitute and the "League of Honor," an obvious pastiche of the Justice League take her under their fold. A good, short read. I got a kick out of it.

Godzilla: Awakening
By the Borenstein brothers and Eric Battle

Here's another short graphic novel. It's 80 pages long and. . . can you believe it retails for $19.99???

I downloaded this thing online and was pretty surprised how much I like it. I think it's the length. That sub-100 page length is a great length to deliver a focused, concise story without drawing it out for too long. I've never read a Godzilla comic, but I would expect this to be par for the course. It frames the story from the point of view of one man and his struggle with a world with "Gojira" in it. More than Godzilla, it's about the awakening of the radioactive moth monster, "Shinomura" and its struggle against Godzilla. If I google this guy, he's already taking over deviantart!

 There's the small real-world commentary on our experiments with the A-bomb. Always welcome in a Godzilla story. I'm particularly fond of Eric Battle's layouts, so I wanted to show off some of them. The human crew dive undersea to search for Godzilla, and after hours of searching they give up to re-surface. . . only to show us a huge Godzilla staring behind them as they depart! The trade includes sketch art, so I thought I'd pair the two together:

Another splash page. In this continuity, Godzilla was a monster that lay dormant in the Earth for millions of years, until the Atomic bomb woke it up from its slumber:

How sick is that??

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