Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre is a fun and fantastical romp in a unique setting with familiar faces.

There is a lot of interesting fun to be had with this title. Tom Scioli writes and illustrates it, providing a consistent sense of vision across all three issues. His writing style is evocative of bygone eras but certainly not as verbose, while his line work and colors place it firmly in the pulpy newsstand releases of the early 20th century. The consistency of the presentation is key to capturing the vibe that Monsterpiece Theatre is trying to elicit. The muted color palette, flat rendering, measured layouts, and oddly proportioned figures all harken to a different era of comics. This places the reader in a strange period alongside Godzilla, both audience and protagonist displaced from their usual temporal confines.

If nothing else, I doubt you've ever seen a Godzilla story that looks quite like this one.

The actual tale itself is a mish-mash of fresh ideas and nostalgic tropes. Godzilla is doing his typical Godzilla-ing of course: if there's a skyline within eyesight, then he's tramping through it. These chonky reptilian feet were made for walkin'. New York, Paris, Transylvania - nowhere is safe from the globetrotting goliath, and that's certainly in keeping with his past antics. The G-Force is not unlike other specialized Godzilla-hunting teams assembled over the years. If I had a nickel for every time a supernatural or extraterrestrial creature featured in a Godzilla tale… I'd have a bunch of nickels. A show of Showa proportions, as it were.

The key differentiator here is the setting and particulars. Much like Godzilla Minus One, Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre provides a relatively standard tale but injects new life through a novel time period slightly before our assumed starting point of 1954. This makes it feel quite unlike many other Godzilla stories, which were contemporary tales and thus function as time capsules for what was once modern - Monsterpiece Theatre explicitly turns the hands of the clock further back to imagine a ridiculous past that never was, on or off the page.

The cast is perhaps the most jarring element of all. Jay “Great” Gatsby leading a team of adventurers, including a time traveller, Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula, to fight the rampages of Godzilla is a madcap madlib storytelling that is usually reserved for epic mashup jokes rather than officially published works. This League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by way of the public domain, are the real stars of the show, functioning as both absurd eye-catching novelty and the main sources of conflict, drama, and stakes. While plenty of other anti-Godzilla squads throughout the years have been comprised of an interchangeable gaggle of soldiers, scientists, and journalists, this team of pseudo-superheroes is as outrageous as the beast they chase. And the size of the team swells to far beyond those mentioned here, as I wouldn't want to give the whole game away.

For the most part, it all comes together to create a bombastic good time. Careful staging of the combats makes them pop without overstaying their welcome, and the characters zip around the world from one strange locale to another. It's always in motion and never boring, with Jay Gatsby being a protagonist you can root for beyond the fact that he opposes the monstrous Godzilla. I never could tell what was going to happen from page to page or panel to panel, and I felt compelled to keep reading to find out what absurdity happened next. This is pulp comic writing at its finest.

But it's not all a smashing success. The early pacing is brilliant, but the latter parts of this story become a bit overwhelmed by the sheer absurdity of what is going on. It feels like new concepts and characters are being introduced for their own sake and expanding the breadth of what is happening without any clear rhyme or reason. Similarly, the amount of wacky happenings makes it almost impossible to tell what is going to happen after a certain point. The early events are much simpler and clearer: Godzilla is going to attack a city, and we must try to prepare a weapon or tool to stop him. Oh, no! It failed, let's try and protect the next city. By the end, however, it feels like things are simply happening because “wouldn't it be crazy if THIS happened?!” or “wouldn't it be hilarious if THIS person was a part of the superteam?” After a while, the absurd becomes mundane, and it loses a lot of its impact.

Despite these sometimes-too-outrageous elements, Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre sticks the landing and provides a unique experience in the process. It is unlike any other Godzilla story I've seen in print or in film and further proves that the big G is always surprising us with new ways to shock and awe after all these years.