Godzilla’s Monsterpiece Theater #1– Mini Review
An idea in search of a story.
How many issues is this going to be?
Jay Gatsby’s life was built around his love for a woman. It was a careless love that pulled other people into its orbit to chew them up and spit them out. Maybe you’ve read the book or seen one of the movies starring Robert or Leo. And maybe you thought that there was something missing from Gatsby’s story. Maybe something like a fire-breathing kaiju.
Tom Scioli has made a career of taking established characters and properties and turning them into his toys, playing with them for a bit, and then putting them back into the toybox. This time, he gets out his Godzilla toys and his set of The Great Gatsby action figures, smashing their stories together as Godzilla attacks Long Islands. He does this without any real purpose other than to see how far he can take it.
A mashup for the sake of a mashup isn’t a story. It’s just an idea thrown out into the world. And Scioli’s idea seems to be what if Jay Gatsby’s formed the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to fight Godzilla. There are things you could do with that but in this first issue, Scioli doesn’t take it any further than that. Scioli has done this kind of thing before, whether it’s Fantastic Four: Grand Design or American Barbarian where he remixes stories and concepts but he has a point of view that adds something to those stories. In this issue, there’s no evidence of depth or insight beyond a surface-level thought of “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” It’s a fun idea but a thin concept for however many issues of this that we’re going to get.
