Publisher: IDW Publishing
Writer: Chris Mowry
Artists: Jeff Zornow and Matt Frank
Release Date: 22nd October 2014

This week Godzilla Rulers of Earth #17 attempts to introduce a new big bad, while still keeping the old one around, and while the issue is still filled with great moments it has become a little hard to figure out what is happening around the kaiju fights.

The story kicks into high gear quite quickly, with the stakes raised to ‘Cyrog warship near Earth’s moon’ in just a few pages. Our villain, back to his tendrily, purple self, is on a war-footing, but without much left to actually wage it with. As Space-Godzilla (rather unexpectedly, and without much build-up) arrives into the story, we see that this is less a continuation of the previous storyline, and more a successor, as Space-Godzilla tries to dispatch our previous villain, proving his might before attempting to reach our ‘hero’ on Earth.

Space-Godzilla’s fight with Gigan (working for purple dude) utilises Gigan’s unique and beautiful design to the fullest, bringing a sense of grace and matador-style fighting to what are usually drag-down fights. Some of these panels seem to suggest that the fighting is taking place on terra firma, even though the fight is taking place in the vacuum of space. However, the larger panels bring back the sense of end-over-end tumbling and spinning that makes Gigan’s fight feel so balletic.

All of this is surrounded by fragments of the previous storyline, which are becoming somewhat harder to follow. The Cyrog villain is being attacked by Space-Godzilla, but we do not yet know for what, if any, reason. And while his increasingly determined and foolhardy decisions are almost hilarious to watch, his motivations to stay in this story are difficult to determine. The human storyline has a few new kinks added as well, but is mostly just filler around the fighting. The human characters are all unique people rather than generic scientists, but I care less about them and more what they represent in the story, as a chance to explore how society would try and make positive progress in a world of kaiju.

Ultimately this issue is exciting, especially whenever Gigan is on the page, but it suffers from introducing Space-Godzilla without context and with no apparent connection to the previous villain.

Rating: 3/5.

The Writer of this piece was: Andrew Stevens
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