The Dai Pool at Toho Studios has been demolished and an era has ended. You probably don’t recall this huge, shallow pool, but its pop culture rating is somewhere between 50 and 400 meters high for this was the frothing sea that birthed Godzilla, that ill-used avatar of nuclear apocalypse. The terrible “Whale-Gorilla” captured the popular imagination at a time when life had proven appallingly fragile on a massive scale.

In 2004, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first Godzilla film, Toho Studios released Godzilla: Final Wars and announced that it would be the last movie to feature the great and powerful Godz’. Even on the off chance that the monster would return at some future date, a man in a rubber suit would no longer portray the beast. Whether cinematic luddite or CGI geek, we should all mourn the day that an actor can’t make a decent day’s wages by sweating profusely and stomping his way to heaven.

‘Zilla (real name: Gojira) began busting blocks and taking names in 1954, when Steven Spielberg was less than knee-high to Mothra. American distributors fretted that domestic audiences would not appreciate such a film without sympathetic American characters, so Raymond Burr was hired for a day’s work and the character of American reporter, Steve Martin, was added to the U.S. version, turning a tragic horror story into a disturbed and fractured tale.

After showings at a smattering of West Coast monster movie festivals and little else in North America, the DVD for Godzilla: Final Wars is due on July 22. Many, many sequels were produced during the preceding fifty years. As Marcel Proust once said, “Everyone needs to eat madeleines and watch Godzilla at least once in their life.” The original Godzilla from 1954 is worth seeking out. Under no circumstances should the American-made Godzilla of 1998 be considered a reasonable substitute. Almost thirty sequels are available to the undiscerning viewer. Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla is representative. On the other hand, Godzilla vs. Bambi ends predictably, but has high entertainment value.

July, 2005

Ever since the halcyon days of the obese Hogg sisters (Ima and Ura), popular culture has had an affinity for good names. I’ve never been fond of the mononyms (Madonna, Topol), but admit that a word can certainly paint a picture. For that matter, we should never underestimate the power of a well-placed adjective (Andre the Giant, Frankie the Educator). Yet, a certain je ne sais quois can only come from a name that combines onomatopoeia with a word combination that feels as though it ought to mean something- ergo: Batton Lash. And yet, you ask, who is this Batton Lash?

For almost three decades, Lash has been creating cartoons about inadequate monsters and the lawyers who defend them. His strip, Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre, began in The Brooklyn Paper in 1979. The attorneys in your family may well remember the adventures of Alanna Wolf and Jeff Byrd from the pages of The National Law Journal (1983-97). In the early nineties, Wolff and Byrd began appearing in their own comic book, Supernatural Law, on a sporadic semi-annual basis.

Lash writes and draws his tales of vampires and other foul creatures under legal duress. Then an attorney friend checks the stories to ensure that validity which adds enough legalese to satisfy the most ardent fan of Scott Turow. The glee that Lash brings to his twisted little world puts the spark in his stories while his artwork follows that fine line required of magic realism.

Lash also contributes to the output of Bongo Comics, home of the Simpsons posse. Lastly, one of the more bizarre footnotes on any resume has to belong to Lash for writing Archie Meets The Punisher in 1994, provoking the dire déjà vu of Jimi Hendrix opening for The Monkees.

March, 2006

“Co-created by” is such an awkward phrase. It accurately describes that middle school science project on which your parents “absolutely, positively did not” provide any assistance. It correctly describes Captain America, who was co-created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Both wrote. Both drew. A few years later, the pair co-created the unbelievable genre of romance comics. Simon and Kirby went their separate ways in the early fifties. Kirby continued producing freelance art, ultimately hooking up with Marvel Comics.

In 1961, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee co-created the Fantastic Four. Having worked together for two years, the pair had developed a very pragmatic approach to producing comics. Lee would give cursory instructions about the next issue (something like “giant bug stomps LA”) and Kirby would go home and develop a story, illustrate it, and annotate the panels. After receiving the finished pages, Lee would add the dialog. The pair used this methodology throughout the genesis of the Marvel universe, institutionalizing it as the Marvel Method. Kirby was the artist/storyteller on the first appearances of the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Thor, the X-Men, and a host of others. Within a few years, the corporate cronies realized that Kirby had never signed over his rights to all those characters. Almost 20 years later, Kirby agreed that Marvel owned all rights to the characters forever and Marvel returned his artwork, which they had been holding hostage. A phenomenal worker, Kirby had regularly produced 15 pages of comic art per week. During the decades of legal posturing, Marvel had destroyed or lost all but 1900 pages.

Recently re-released, Essential Fantastic Four, Volumes 1-3 includes the first five years of Kirby’s work on the title. Volume three contains “This Man, This Monster” from Fantastic Four #51, which some have called the single best comic book ever published. For those people of a more obsessive stripe, issue 43 of the Jack Kirby Collector (Twomorrows Publishing) is scheduled to hit comic shops on July 20.

June, 2005