This review is going to be slightly different, since I own an actual comic and won’t be using the black & white “Essentials” book for this review.
“Oh, it’s ‘pick on the robot’ day, huh?”
Godzilla #11
Marvel (June, 1979)
“Arena For Three!” WRITER: Doug Moench ARTIST: Herb Trimpe INKER: Fred Kida COLORIST: Mary Titus LETTERER: Irv Wantanabe EDITOR: Archie GoodwinGodzilla and Yetrigar fall into the Grand Canyon, with Red Ronin following after. Meanwhile, four whitewater rafters, the two men being injured, try to get past their battle–a battle where after all parties have been beaten to the point of weakness Rob realizes that Yetrigar, innocent as he might be, has become to dangerous to stop in the robot’s current condition without killing the monster. As Dum Dum and Gabe rescue the rafters Rob decides it’s best to fly off and keep flying, upset about being forced to kill Yetrigar.
What they got right: Maybe I missed something when reading the last issue, or maybe it was the lack of color, but now we get an explanation for Yetrigar being frozen in ice. The explosion ripped a “subterranean pipeline” from the overpowered test to where he was…in Canada. We’ll come back to that. The rafters subplot worked much better in a Godzilla story than the gambler two issues ago. And I can FINALLY judge the color work and it’s rather good. Godzilla is greener than he should be but that’s nothing new in a US comic (the same for every poster and the Hanna-Barbera cartoon). Red Ronin has a nice balance of colors and I like how she does the effect for the robot’s laser blade.
What they got wrong: Godzilla’s radioactive breath should be blue but that’s a fan nitpick. What isn’t is that Yetrigar was in Canada. And the radioactivity that mutated him came from a bomb test. In Arizona. That’s one dangerous “pipeline”. I wonder if it affected anything else along the path?
Recommendation: This is a darn good Godzilla comic that fans should track down.
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