REVIEW: Godzilla: Skate Or Die #2

Shread#!

Godzilla: Skate Or Die #2 is one energetic ride that captures both the titanic presence of the towering cast of the monsters from Godzilla and the youthful, rebellious vitality of skateboarding culture. The colours reflect a real sense of motion and power despite being told through still panels. The scenes of the kids tearing through the streets atop their decks, leaving spiked swerves of sparking skids, convey effective movement for skateboarding; this kind of artwork works so well for skateboarding I’d love to see artist and writer Louie Joyce be given a chance to bring this style to other iconic comic icons who have unique movement as a signature of their world like The Flash or Spider-Man.

Punk & Grafitti

Other than the astounding movement, the art also conveys the tone with its wonderful colouring and style to perfect the punk look the book strives to display. Even the lettering in the speech bubbles has a type of thrown-together and stencilled graffitied look. The colourful explosions from blastic missiles against a roaring kaiju or a skater cracking an ollie to pass a gap while fleeing from destruction just bring the comic a sense of life that I haven’t seen in a story in a while. The character designs drip with style, utilizing harsh angles and sketchy lines to give the world a rough, unfinished look that really lends itself to the rebellious tone the story is going for, seeing as half the book is about the skaters spent fleeing from authority.

King Of Monsters

Godzilla himself is scarcely in this book, following a similar plot structure to movies that use the King Of Monsters himself as a plot point rather than an actual character with goals and motivations. With Godzilla and the other monsters as a force of nature, it frees up the plot to focus on the skater’s story and how they intertwine with the forces at play against Godzilla. There’s a picture on the desk of the woman running the operation with one of the skaters taken at the entrance to Luna Park in Sydney, linking one of our young skaters to a high-ranking official responsible for the Godzilla situation. This sets up steaks for later in the book, where a possible stand-off or dangerous situation will influence the guardian’s decisions with their young charge at risk. The plot itself, while there, is paper thin, much like the floppy it’s printed in. Once again, the biweekly floppy is the kryptonite of pacing and story structure, making diving in at random points unfriendly to newer readers who are drawn in by the otherwise wonderful and ambitious crossover work on display here echoed throughout the pages and various variant covers. The advanced comic book enjoyer may be savvy to the woes of this formula, but newer readers are at the mercy of the thirty-page limit and will be starving for more the moment they close the book, which works out for IDW but isn’t very kind to your wallet.

FINAL SCORE

3/5 STARS

PUBLISHER: IDW
WRITER: Louie Joyce
ART: Louie Joyce