BHOC: GODZILLA #24

I wasn’t used to Marvel titles wrapping up their runs cleanly. In my experience, when a Marvel book would come to an end–such as CHAMPIONS or NOVA–the series would be left in a cliffhanger state with outstanding business left to be wrapped up. That business would generally get tied off in some other Marvel book a bit down the line, a bit of housekeeping. So GODZILLA was the first such title that I experienced in which its last issue contained a definitive finale to the series. It’s clear that the creative team knew that this would be the final issue in advance and plotted it that way.

I’d really only been reading GODZILLA for the past couple of issues due to how steeped in the mainstream Marvel Universe it had become. In specific, it was a guest-starring role for the Fantastic Four that got me to jump in, and since that point the story had continued forward from issue to issue with those characters never completely vanishing from the scene. Had we gotten to some point where they did, I likely would have fallen off as a reader. But that never quite came to pass. And so a myriad of Marvel super heroes are on hand for this, Godzilla’s last stand in the Marvel Universe (at least until the recently-released crossovers.)

The set-up for the story is pretty simple: after a series of misadventures in the past, Godzilla has rematerialized in the present in the middle of New York City. It’s likely that he’ll cause tremendous damage and loss of life as he makes his way through Manhattan, so in response to this threat, the Fantastic four and the Avengers have responded. Also present is S.H.I.E.L.D. in the person of Dum Dum Dugan, who throughout the series has been pursuing Godzilla in a scaled-down Helicarrier designed for that purpose. Most of this issue is dedicated to guiding Godzilla to the water and preventing him from knocking over any buildings along the way.

Godzilla’s attention is pulled by the tallest structure in the area, the Empire State Building and he makes a beeline for it despite the efforts of an assortment of super heroes to prevent him from getting there. As Godzilla doesn’t have a whole lot of personality of his own, it’s up to the assorted heroes, supporting cast members and bystanders to provide context and human interest to what is going on. Thor races in, determined to provide a counter-force to the weight and pressure of the gigantic lizard and so prevent the building from toppling, but it seems like only a matter of time before the whole structure becomes unstable from the twin forces being pitted against it.

Artist Herb Trimpe goes to town in a massive double-page spread dedicated to depicting all of the assorted forces attempting to put down Godzilla. Trimpe is a bit of an underappreciated artist and something of an acquired taste. As a younger fan, I didn’t always love his blocky characters and stylized figures. But the one thing he could do exceptionally well is to tell a story visually, and even when he was put to work on licensed properties that weren’t considered as valuable to Marvel as its own characters, he always delivered the goods. He’d been the regular artist on GODZILLA since the beginning some two years earlier.

In the end, of course, it’s young Rob Takiguchi who wins the day. He’s got an established friendship and rapport with Godzilla, and he races onto the deck of the Helicarrier in an attempt to calm the great monster down. As the heroes look on, Rob tearfully asks Godzilla to leave the city peacefully, and the King of the Monsters does as he’s bade.

And that’s the end of Godzilla’s brief career as a Marvel Comics superstar. Of course, he made a couple of appearances beyond this: an inventory issue was reworked into a new character in the pages of MARVEL SPOTLIGHT, and Denny O’Neil in IRON MAN brought back Dr. Demonicus and revealed that the villain had transformed Godzilla into a new creature who battled it out with James Rhodes and the West Coast Avengers. Because in the 1980s, there wasn’t any obscure plot thread that some creator wasn’t willing to reference or pull on to generate a new story.